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Liberation

As well as revolutions on a national scale, there were movements by oppressed peoples of all kinds, from women to ethnic minorities, especially after 1945. The following are the most important of these.

Women's liberation or feminism

Perhaps the greatest revolution of the century was the change in the status of women. At the start of the century, even democratic states such as Britain and the United States did not allow women to vote. So the early feminist movement – the demand by women for political and social equality with men – also involved campaigns for equal suffrage (the right to vote in public elections). In Britain, for example, the Suffragettes, founded in 1903, used militant tactics and direct action – such as chaining themselves to railings and pelting politicians – to achieve their aim. The successful struggle for the vote was also intense in the United States and Scandinavia.

A woman's right to control her own body meant that advocating birth control was an important part of feminist campaigns. In the United States, nurse and writer Margaret Sanger was jailed in 1916 for opening a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. In Britain, Marie Stopes published the influential Married Love (1918) and opened a clinic in north London in 1921. By the 1930s, falling birth rates in Europe and the US showed the success of such campaigns.

In 1933, Sweden became the first country to make sex education for girls compulsory. From the 1950s, the gradual availability of the contraceptive pill began a revolution in sexual behaviour that changed society radically in the second half of the century. Abortion was legalised in Britain in 1968, in the US in 1973 and in France in 1975. But it remained extremely controversial and protests against it led to violence, especially in the US.

Women gained great independence during the two world wars, when they worked in vital war industries and benefited from the absence of their menfolk by becoming more self-reliant. Even though they were forced back into the home on the ex-soldiers' return, the memory of the freedom they had enjoyed did not disappear.

Women's emancipation could sometimes be imposed from above. In the Soviet Union, all women were promised equality in law and equal pay in 1918. In Turkey in 1925-28, Atatürk's government freed women from Islamic restraints. In other places, emancipation was fought for by women themselves. For example, French women got the vote in 1946, and British women got equality in 1975, when the Sex Discrimination Act was passed.

After the achievement of suffrage in the first wave of feminism, a second wave emerged from women's participation in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and the growth of the New Left, which stressed liberation from oppression. The slogan 'The personal is political' and books such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch helped release women's pent-up anger at old-fashioned patriarchal attitudes. One common 'induction' method was the consciousness-raising group.

In 1966, Freidan helped found the National Organization for Women in the United States. And starting in about 1969, the women's liberation movement – a loose network of women's groups – criticised male-dominated society and condemned sexism. It achieved many goals through direct action and pressure-group lobbying mainly in the English-speaking world and in Europe. Issues included not only equal pay and equal legal rights, but campaigns against rape and violence against women, pornography, and other cultural attitudes – for example, sexist language – that exploit women.

Despite conservative counterattacks – and the failure of American campaigners to get the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution passed by enough states – the feminist second wave has succeeded in changing the role of women and their public perception. The sheer range and diversity of feminism was demonstrated at the United Nations Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995.

See also Feminists and Flour Bombs

Peace movement

The movement – which had the aim of eliminating nuclear weapons and the worldwide fear they engendered and reducing defence spending – officially started in Britain at Easter 1956 with a demonstration outside the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. Almost two years later, on 17 February 1958, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was launched in Britain by philosopher Bertrand Russell and Canon L John Collins.

Regular Easter marches to Aldermaston and rallies in London's Trafalgar Square attracted wide support from 1958 to 1964. One CND demonstration held during the crisis over the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 led to more than 1,300 arrests. At its peak in 1960-61, CND had more active supporters than any other 20th-century mass movement in Britain.

Sitting down for peace, London: September 1961

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In 1962, a more militant British group emerged – the Committee of 100 – which favoured civil disobedience. There were also secret groups such as Spies for Peace, which carried out direct actions such as infiltrating regional centres of government, top-secret bases that the UK government had created for use during a nuclear war.

Anti-nuclear protest movements also appeared all over the United States and Europe and in countries such as Australia and Japan. Although peace demonstrations lost momentum in the late 1960s and 1970s, they revived during the intensification of the Cold War in the early 1980s. Particularly notable were the protests carried out by the Greenham Common women's camp against the deployment of cruise missiles in Britain, which went on for years.

Civil rights movement

Soon after World War II, a movement developed in the southern United States with the aim of securing equal rights for black Americans, who were often discriminated against and segregated from mainstream white society. The movement was much influenced by the non-violent direct action that had been practised in India by Mahatma Gandhi.

A unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court in the case of Brown v Topeka in 1954 ruled that segregation was illegal. This, and the stand taken by Rosa Parks in 1955, provoked a black boycott of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, which successfully ended the practice of having separate seats for blacks and whites. In September 1957, federal troops had to enforce school desegregation at Little Rock, Arkansas.

In the same year, Baptist minister Martin Luther King, based in Atlanta, Georgia, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This and other groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League, led the struggle against segregation. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, founded in 1960 at a black university, led young people on sit-ins in segregated venues (lunch counters, cinemas, supermarkets and libraries) and on 'freedom rides' – busloads of black and white activists from the north who came south to encourage black people to register to vote. In the mid-1960s, in Selma, Alabama, and elsewhere, there were further drives to register black voters. As a result, there were about 3,600 arrests, much intimidation of protesters and some murders.

In August 1963, about 250,000 people marched on Washington DC, where Dr King delivered his 'I have a dream' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A series of legislation was enacted by the US Congress that guaranteed black people the rights they should have already had. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited discrimination in public accommodation, schools, employment and voting for reasons of colour, race, religion or national origin.

As the 1960s passed, the American movement gradually fragmented, with more militant activists departing from its non-violent stand (see Black Power). However, its success influenced other civil rights movements, most notably the one in Northern Ireland, which in 1968 demanded equal rights for Catholics, who were discriminated against by the Protestant majority.

Student revolt

On 3 May 1968, the French authorities closed the university campus at Nanterre in Paris, following disturbances by students protesting against the Vietnam War, poor accommodation and an unreformed educational system. Police brutality in attacking fresh demonstrations resulted in the protest escalating dramatically as students were joined by the population of the Latin Quarter in Paris, and then by workers and youths all over the country.

A general strike brought the country to a standstill. At Nantes, a strike committee ruled the city for a week. Student demonstrators held seminars in which they discussed Marxist theory and how it could be applied to all aspects of everyday life. Surreal slogans and imaginative posters were a distinctive feature of a revolt that tried to show that radical politics could be fun.

At first, President Charles de Gaulle fled the country. Persuaded to return, he delivered a television broadcast on 30 May that turned public opinion against the student revolutionaries. In the subsequent general election, the Gaullists won an overwhelming majority.

However, the 'spirit of 68' lived on. It inspired liberation movements all over the developed world – for example, the Italian 'Hot Autumn' of 1969 and the birth of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in Germany. It also made connections with the more cultural revolt of the hippie counterculture of music and drugs.

Black Power

This emerged from both the American civil rights movement and the student revolts of May 1968. At first influenced by Muslim militants such as Malcolm X, its ideology, summarised by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their book Black Power (1969), called on African-Americans to take pride in their culture and to create a distinctive black economy and political power base.

As the civil rights movement succeeded in its aim of integrating blacks into white society, militant groups such as the Black Panthers – led by Huey Newton – used more provocative language and paraded with arms. This attracted the attention of the authorities, who arrested, framed and killed many Black Panther leaders. In response, there were Black Power-based riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark and Chicago in 1968.

By the early 1970s, police and FBI repression had driven many Black Power activists into the arms of those protesting against the Vietnam War. However, the Black Power movement had a cultural impact – in terms of music and fashions – far in excess of its political achievements.

Gay liberation

Just as women and black people formed liberation movements in the 1960s, gay men and lesbians also discovered pride in their identities after centuries of oppression.

On 28 June 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay nightclub in New York's Greenwich Village, began a week-long revolt: the Stonewall Riots. For the first time, lesbians and gays fought back against police harassment. Soon after, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed by 37 women and men who marched to demand an immediate end to homosexual persecution.

The GLF was dedicated to the social ideals of the 1960s: peace, equality and economic justice. Between 1969 and 1971, it emerged as a powerful force, expanding to more than 80 chapters across the US and abroad. Using the feminist tactic of consciousness-raising groups, gay liberation made a large impact on homosexuals.

Their freedoms, especially sexual freedom, were threatened in the 1980s with the emergence of Aids, but their cultural presence was consolidated in the 1990s in popular films and television shows. In the late 1990s, annual celebratory Mardi Gras festivals replaced the more militant Gay Pride marches of the 1970s and 1980s.

Green movement

In the 1970s, concern about the degradation of the environment led to the formation of various protest groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, both founded in 1971. In addition, ideas about the importance of ecology filtered into other youth protest movements, with concerns about environmental crises, nuclear proliferation and radiation.

Some Green political parties were also established, the most significant of which was the German Green Party, founded in 1980. Under the leadership of Petra Kelly and others, the Green movement in Germany developed a platform of participatory and grass-roots democracy, non-violent resistance to corporate and government policies, and environmental defence.

The term 'green' came to include environmental politics, ecological living, Green businesses and sustainable economics, holistic medicine, peace, feminism, social justice, therapy and personal politics. Those engaging in Green politics ranged from dedicated Green party members and political activists worldwide to many businesses that try to create sustainable production practices.

In December 1997, 2,000 delegates representing over 150 nations met at Kyoto, Japan, at a UN-sponsored global climate conference. They tried to forge a treaty that would mandate reductions in the emission of 'greenhouse gases' such as carbon dioxide. Internationally, since this Kyoto Agreement there has been a general consensus about the need to combat the effects of global warming. However, although the participation of the US (which emits a quarter of all greenhouse gases) was deemed critical, the US Senate refused to ratify the treaty.

The Green movement was most successful in Europe, Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s. It did not make much of an impression in the US or in developing countries.

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