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AN ERA OF ACTIVISM
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Publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
The New Yorker started serializing Silent Spring in June 1962, and it was published in book form (with illustrations by Lois and Louis Darling) by Houghton Mifflin later that year. When the book Silent Spring was published, Rachel Carson was already a well-known writer on natural history, but had not previously been a social critic. The book was widely read—especially after its selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the New York Times best-seller list—and inspired widespread public concerns -
Publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique
In 1957, Friedan was asked to conduct a survey of her former Smith College classmates for their 15th anniversary reunion; the results, in which she found that many of them were unhappy with their lives as housewives, prompted her to begin research for The Feminine Mystique, conducting interviews with other suburban housewives, as well as researching psychology, media, and advertising. She originally intended to publish an article on the topic, not a book, but no magazine would publish her articl -
Publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed
While a student at Princeton University in the early 1950s, Nader protested the spraying of campus trees with DDT. His interest in automobile safety began while he was attending Harvard Law School. In 1964, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, hired Nader as a consultant on the issue of automobile safety regulations. The government report Nader wrote developed into a book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, published the next year. -
NOW is founded
In 1966, a group of 28 professional women, including Betty Friedan, established the National Organization for Women (NOW). These women were frustrated that existing women's groups were unwilling to pressure the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to take women's grievances more seriously. The goal of NOW was “to take action to bring American women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now.” -
UFW’s Nationwide Boycott of grapes picked on nonunion farms
The UFW's first target was the grape growers of California. Chávez, like Martin Luther King, Jr., believed in nonviolent action. In 1967, when growers refused to grant more pay, better working conditions, and union recognition, Chávez organized a successful nationwide consumer boycott of grapes picked on nonunion farms. Later boycotts of lettuce and other crops also won consumer support across the country -
Woodstock
was a music festival, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" -
Congress passes the Clean Air Act
This act dealt with reducing air pollution by setting emissions standards for stationary sources such as power plants and steel mills. It did not take into account mobile sources of air pollution which had become the largest source of many dangerous pollutants. Once these standards were set, the government also needed to determine deadlines for companies to comply with them. Amendments to the Clean Air Act were passed in 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1969. -
The First Earth Day Celebration
Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. While this first Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. -
The EPA is established
When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formed many years ago, America had just awakened to the seriousness of its environmental pollution problem. Creation of EPA was part of the response to growing public concern and a grass roots movement to "do something" about the deteriorating conditions of water, air, and land. -
Supreme Court rules to legalize abortion in the Roe v. Wade case
Roe v. Wade, was a landmark, controversial decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests for regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting the mother's health. -
Protesters from the AIM take over the reservation at Wounded Knee
Just three months after AIM made national press in their takeover of the BIA headquarters in Washington they made the headlines once again when they seized the village for a seventy-one day takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. When AIM was originally asked to come out to the reservation AIM people claimed they wanted to stay out of local politics of the Sioux nation. But when the fight became the Sioux people versus the US Government, they were willing to help.
