HST 202 Module #12
1970s/1980s
Welcome to HST 202! This is the twelfth learning module looking at the 1970s and 1980s in the United States.
Welcome to HST 202! This is the twelfth learning module looking at the 1970s and 1980s in the United States.
HIGHLIGHTS
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READING
Carnes, Chapter 30: Running on Empty: 1975-1991
“The American Übermensch: History of Superheroes” by Ryan Lancaster
My classes utilize both Howard Zinn's Patriot's History of the United States and Larry Schweikart's Patriot's History of the United States, mostly in excerpts posted to the modules. You can access the full text of People's History or Patriot's History by clicking on the links.
Carnes, Chapter 30: Running on Empty: 1975-1991
“The American Übermensch: History of Superheroes” by Ryan Lancaster
My classes utilize both Howard Zinn's Patriot's History of the United States and Larry Schweikart's Patriot's History of the United States, mostly in excerpts posted to the modules. You can access the full text of People's History or Patriot's History by clicking on the links.
Schweikart, Chapter 20: “Retreat and Resurrection, 1974–88”
By the mid-1970s, women's entry into the workforce was being championed by the twentieth-century feminist movement. Armed with the Pill, feminists targeted the seeming lack of fairness in the job market, which punished women for dropping out of the need for several years to have children. But where their rhetoric failed to change corporations, the Pill changed women. The Pill allowed women to enter professional schools in rapidly growing numbers by delaying childbirth.
Paradoxically, the Pill placed more pressure on women to protect themselves during sex. And rather than liberating women for a career in place of a family, feminism heaped a career on top of a family. Women's workloads only grew, and the moral burden on women to resist the advances of males expanded geometrically. Equally ironic, as women entered the workforce in more significant numbers, increasing the expectation that young married women would work, couples' "expectations index" soared. Newlyweds saw larger houses with bigger mortgages and more upscale cars as the norm because, after all, they had two incomes. This created a feedback loop that forced women to remain in the labor force after childbearing and, in many cases, after they wished to leave their jobs outside the home.
With all biological consequences removed from engaging in pre-or extramarital sex, the only barrier remaining was religion. But the church had seen much of its moral authority shattered in the 1960s when on the one hand, large numbers of white Christians had remained mute during the civil rights struggles, and on the other, liberal-leftist elements in the church had associated themselves with communist dictators. In either case, the church (as many saw it) had allied itself with oppression against liberty.
When it came to sex, traditional Christianity had appeared hypocritical. Wives who dutifully served their families dealt with alcoholic husbands and domestic abuse. (It is crucial to understand that perception is reality. While most husbands loved and did their wives, any domestic abuse that occurred without comment from the local pulpit or a visit from the pastor or priest was unacceptable.) The more traditional and fundamentalist churches that preached against divorce and railed against premarital sex said little to nothing about a spouse or child abuse in their congregations. At the other extreme, churches attempting to reach out to women and portray themselves as modern opened their pulpits to female ministers but ignored the moral necessity of demanding chastity and commitment from Christians in sexual matters. The former group preached piety and practiced unacceptable toleration of sin, while the latter celebrated its tolerance but ignored holiness...
... In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court, hearing a pair of cases (generally referred to by the first case's name, Roe v. Wade), concluded that Texas antiabortion laws violated a constitutional "right to privacy." Of course, no such phrase can be found in the Constitution. That, however, did not stop the Court from establishing—with no law's ever being passed and no constitutional amendment's ever being ratified—the premise that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Later, sympathetic doctors would expand the context of health risk to the mother to permit abortions almost on demand. Instantly the feminist movement leaped into action, portraying unborn babies as fetuses, then as "blobs of tissue." A battle with pro-life forces led to an odd media acceptance of each side's terminology of itself: the labels that the media used were "pro-choice" (not "pro-abortion") and "pro-life," not "anti-choice." What was not so odd was the stunning explosion of abortions in the United States, which totaled at least 35 million over the first twenty-five years after Roe. Claims that without safe and legal abortions, women would die in abortion mills seemed to pale beside the stack of fetal bodies that resulted from the change in abortion laws.
For those who had championed the Pill as liberating women from the natural results of sex— babies—this proved nettlesome. More than 82 percent of the women who chose abortion in 1990 were unmarried. Had not the Pill protected them? Had it not liberated them from having sex without consequences? The bitter fact was that with the restraints of the church removed, the Pill and feminism had only exposed women to higher risks of pregnancy and, thus, "eligibility" for an abortion. It also exempted men almost totally from their role as fathers, leaving them the easy escape of pointing out to the female that abortion was an alternative to having an illegitimate child.
Fatherhood, and the role of men, were already under assault by feminist groups. By the 1970s, fathers had become a central target for the media, especially entertainment. On prime-time television, fathers were increasingly portrayed as buffoons, even as evil. According to one study of thirty years of network television, Comedies presented blue-collar or middle-class fathers as foolish, although less so than the portrayals of upper-class fathers.
Feminists had unwittingly given men a remarkable gift, pushing as they had for no-fault divorce. Divorce laws began changing at the state level in the early 1970s, at which time a full court hearing and proof of cause were no longer required. Instead, if both parties agreed that they had irreconcilable differences, they obtained an inexpensive no-fault divorce. This proved a boon for men because it turned the social world into an "arena of sexual competition [making] men and women view each other as prey and their sex as competitors to the degree that corrodes civility." Divorce rates skyrocketed, with more than 1.1 million divorces occurring in 1979. The number of children under the age of eighteen who lived in one-parent families rose during the 1970s from 11 percent to 19 percent. Although it took about twenty years for sociologists to study the phenomena, scholars almost universally agreed by the 1990s that children of one-parent families suffered from more pathologies, more criminal behavior, worse grades, and lower self-esteem than kids from traditional families...
By the mid-1970s, women's entry into the workforce was being championed by the twentieth-century feminist movement. Armed with the Pill, feminists targeted the seeming lack of fairness in the job market, which punished women for dropping out of the need for several years to have children. But where their rhetoric failed to change corporations, the Pill changed women. The Pill allowed women to enter professional schools in rapidly growing numbers by delaying childbirth.
Paradoxically, the Pill placed more pressure on women to protect themselves during sex. And rather than liberating women for a career in place of a family, feminism heaped a career on top of a family. Women's workloads only grew, and the moral burden on women to resist the advances of males expanded geometrically. Equally ironic, as women entered the workforce in more significant numbers, increasing the expectation that young married women would work, couples' "expectations index" soared. Newlyweds saw larger houses with bigger mortgages and more upscale cars as the norm because, after all, they had two incomes. This created a feedback loop that forced women to remain in the labor force after childbearing and, in many cases, after they wished to leave their jobs outside the home.
With all biological consequences removed from engaging in pre-or extramarital sex, the only barrier remaining was religion. But the church had seen much of its moral authority shattered in the 1960s when on the one hand, large numbers of white Christians had remained mute during the civil rights struggles, and on the other, liberal-leftist elements in the church had associated themselves with communist dictators. In either case, the church (as many saw it) had allied itself with oppression against liberty.
When it came to sex, traditional Christianity had appeared hypocritical. Wives who dutifully served their families dealt with alcoholic husbands and domestic abuse. (It is crucial to understand that perception is reality. While most husbands loved and did their wives, any domestic abuse that occurred without comment from the local pulpit or a visit from the pastor or priest was unacceptable.) The more traditional and fundamentalist churches that preached against divorce and railed against premarital sex said little to nothing about a spouse or child abuse in their congregations. At the other extreme, churches attempting to reach out to women and portray themselves as modern opened their pulpits to female ministers but ignored the moral necessity of demanding chastity and commitment from Christians in sexual matters. The former group preached piety and practiced unacceptable toleration of sin, while the latter celebrated its tolerance but ignored holiness...
... In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court, hearing a pair of cases (generally referred to by the first case's name, Roe v. Wade), concluded that Texas antiabortion laws violated a constitutional "right to privacy." Of course, no such phrase can be found in the Constitution. That, however, did not stop the Court from establishing—with no law's ever being passed and no constitutional amendment's ever being ratified—the premise that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Later, sympathetic doctors would expand the context of health risk to the mother to permit abortions almost on demand. Instantly the feminist movement leaped into action, portraying unborn babies as fetuses, then as "blobs of tissue." A battle with pro-life forces led to an odd media acceptance of each side's terminology of itself: the labels that the media used were "pro-choice" (not "pro-abortion") and "pro-life," not "anti-choice." What was not so odd was the stunning explosion of abortions in the United States, which totaled at least 35 million over the first twenty-five years after Roe. Claims that without safe and legal abortions, women would die in abortion mills seemed to pale beside the stack of fetal bodies that resulted from the change in abortion laws.
For those who had championed the Pill as liberating women from the natural results of sex— babies—this proved nettlesome. More than 82 percent of the women who chose abortion in 1990 were unmarried. Had not the Pill protected them? Had it not liberated them from having sex without consequences? The bitter fact was that with the restraints of the church removed, the Pill and feminism had only exposed women to higher risks of pregnancy and, thus, "eligibility" for an abortion. It also exempted men almost totally from their role as fathers, leaving them the easy escape of pointing out to the female that abortion was an alternative to having an illegitimate child.
Fatherhood, and the role of men, were already under assault by feminist groups. By the 1970s, fathers had become a central target for the media, especially entertainment. On prime-time television, fathers were increasingly portrayed as buffoons, even as evil. According to one study of thirty years of network television, Comedies presented blue-collar or middle-class fathers as foolish, although less so than the portrayals of upper-class fathers.
Feminists had unwittingly given men a remarkable gift, pushing as they had for no-fault divorce. Divorce laws began changing at the state level in the early 1970s, at which time a full court hearing and proof of cause were no longer required. Instead, if both parties agreed that they had irreconcilable differences, they obtained an inexpensive no-fault divorce. This proved a boon for men because it turned the social world into an "arena of sexual competition [making] men and women view each other as prey and their sex as competitors to the degree that corrodes civility." Divorce rates skyrocketed, with more than 1.1 million divorces occurring in 1979. The number of children under the age of eighteen who lived in one-parent families rose during the 1970s from 11 percent to 19 percent. Although it took about twenty years for sociologists to study the phenomena, scholars almost universally agreed by the 1990s that children of one-parent families suffered from more pathologies, more criminal behavior, worse grades, and lower self-esteem than kids from traditional families...
WATCH
ASSIGNMENTS
Forum Discussion #13
- Forum Discussion #13
- QUIZ #4
Forum Discussion #13
After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975, few Cambodians were able to escape but it was not until after the regime was overthrown in 1979 did large waves of Cambodians begin immigrating to the US as refugees. Between 1975 and 1994, nearly 158,000 Cambodians were admitted. About 149,000 of them entered the country as refugees, and 6,000 entered as immigrants and 2,500 as humanitarian and public interest parolees. To encourage rapid cultural assimilation and to spread the economic impact, the US government dispersed the refugees into various cities and states throughout the country. Watch this anecdotal story of one such family and answer the following:
US history is riddled with xenophobia toward immigrants. Why is that? What were the reasons that Cambodians “chose” America?
Need help? Remember the Discussion Board Rubric.
US history is riddled with xenophobia toward immigrants. Why is that? What were the reasons that Cambodians “chose” America?
Need help? Remember the Discussion Board Rubric.