Historical Context

Political Upheaval Leads to Generation Gap

The early 1970s followed a time of great social upheaval in the United States. In the 1960s, the country was divided over issues that affected nearly everyone in some capacity: civil rights, the Vietnam War and the women’s movement were among the most important. The broad-based civil rights movement of the early 1960s gave way, in the wake of the deaths of Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X in 1965 and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, to the more radical politics of a younger generation of activists epitomized by the Black Power movement associated with Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and others. Likewise, protests over the United States’s role in Vietnam (Paley was arrested in several antiwar demonstrations) became more acrimonious as the war continued. In 1970, four students were killed by the National Guard on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio during a peaceful protest. During this period of protest, many women assumed public roles of leadership. As a consequence, the women’s movement revived a century-long attempt to gain an Equal Rights Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Consciousness-raising groups, the legalization of birth control and abortion, and affirmative action laws fueled their progress, though the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress, eventually failed to be ratified.

In many ways, these conflicts were played out within families as a struggle between generations. Children fought with their more conservative, Depression-era parents over issues of race, politics, and morality. Throughout this period, college campuses became centers of protest and spawned what Paley and others called “youth culture.” In “A Conversation with My Father,” the mother and son become addicted to drugs and their kitchen becomes a center for “intellectual addicts,” many of whom follow the teachings of Timothy Leary, a psychology professor who advocated the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD. The mother and son in the daughter’s story reflect the widespread experimentation with drugs during the 1960s and 1970s, which was often seen as part of a social revolution involving the development of a new consciousness and freedom from the constraints of tradition.

Compare & Contrast

• 1970s: The Equal Rights Amendment, a proposal to change the constitution to guarantee women’s rights, particularly equal pay for equal work, becomes a central issue of political debate.
  1990s: Although efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment failed in 1982, women have earned greater political, social and cultural authority in the United States. In 1988, more than 56 percent of women held jobs. On the other hand, government guarantees of equal access and treatment to public and private occupations have increasingly been challenged in an era of shrinking government. For instance, in 1996, the largest university system in the country, the University of California, ended an affirmative action program for student admissions and faculty hiring.
• 1970s: The broadly based civil rights movement of the early 1960s gives way to the more radical politics of a younger generation of activists. The militant Black Power organizations fade from prominence when it is revealed that government agencies infiltrated and pursued the leaders of these groups.
  1990s: The Nation of Islam claims millions of followers, and its leader, Louis Farrakhan, despite his controversial views, speaks to a gathering of hundreds of thousands of men at the Million Man March in Washington, DC, in 1995.
• 1970s: A full range of government guaranteed services to the poor, known as entitlements, are instituted to guarantee a minimum standard of living for all U. S. citizens, continuing reforms of the 1960s.
  1996: President Clinton signs the Welfare Reform Bill, limiting recipients to five years of benefits and ending a federal guarantee of a sustainable income through the use of food stamps, medical assistance and cash grants.
• 1970s: Judges begin interpreting Civil Rights legislation as requiring full racial integration of public school systems. Many efforts to integrate schools result in violence.
  1990s: Debates over the quality and equity of education continue. Many school districts remain segregated, despite twenty years of efforts at integration. New proposals for education reform include school choice, school vouchers, home schooling, charter schools, and a federal guarantee of access to higher education.