Scheda di revisione: Social Movements and Backlash

📋 Course Outline

1. Vietnam War and American social upheaval
2. Anti-war movement and draft resistance
3. Civil rights struggle and desegregation
4. Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Bill
5. Urban riots and Civil Rights movement split
6. Beur movement against racism in France
7. Second-wave feminism in the United States
8. Second-wave feminism in France
9. Abortion rights and Roe v Wade
10. Stonewall and modern Gay liberation movement
11. LGBTQIA+ legal advances in France
12. Rise of conservatism and backlash

📖 1. Vietnam War and American social upheaval

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Domino theory : A foreign-policy idea that treats the fall of one country to communism as likely to trigger further communist takeovers nearby.
• Gulf of Tonkin incident : A 1964 event that led the United States to present itself as the victim and to justify escalation against North Vietnam.
• Operation Rolling Thunder : A 1965 U.S. bombing campaign aimed at weakening North Vietnam’s morale.
• Strategic hamlet program : A U.S.-backed program meant to control rural areas in South Vietnam by relocating peasants to fortified settlements.
• Vietnamization : A Nixon-era policy shifting combat responsibility to South Vietnamese forces while the U.S. reduced its troop presence.

📝 Essential Points

• Vietnam was divided after 1954 along the 17th parallel, with a communist North led by Hô Chi Minh and a U.S.-backed South led by Diem.
• U.S. advisors supported Diem from 1955 and helped organize counter-guerrilla forces against the Viet Cong.
• Strategic hamlets failed because many South Vietnamese peasants increasingly supported the Viet Cong against the dictatorship.
• U.S. ground forces expanded after March 1965, reaching up to about 550,000 Americans from 1965 to 1969, with many conscripts.
• Conventional training clashed with Viet Cong guerrilla tactics, including booby traps and “bouncing Betty” explosions that had a strong psychological impact.
• The My Lai massacre (March 1968) involved the killing of 109 civilians by U.S. troops, reinforcing fears that civilians were treated as enemies by default.

💡 Memory Hook

Domino theory → Gulf of Tonkin → Rolling Thunder: escalation, then guerrilla + My Lai + Tet make the war feel unwinnable.

📖 2. Anti-war movement and draft resistance

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Draft resistance : Draft resistance is opposition to compulsory military conscription, often expressed through refusal or symbolic acts targeting the draft system.
• Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) : Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a leftist student organization that organized anti-war activism, including teach-ins and marches.
• Teach-in : A teach-in is a public educational forum on a current political issue, designed to be practical and participatory rather than purely lecture-based.
• Beat Generation : The Beat Generation is a youth movement that rejected 1950s consumer society through nonconformist lifestyles and anti-materialist attitudes.
• Vietnam Veterans Against the War : Vietnam Veterans Against the War is an anti-war organization of veterans whose public rejection of their medals helped persuade wider audiences.

📝 Essential Points

• US troop levels fell from 350,000 in December 1970 to 40,000 by September 1972, before a major North Vietnamese offensive in 1973.
• The US war cost peaked at about $1 billion per day and involved 8.7 million American soldiers, with about 58,000 dead and 300,000 injured.
• The anti-war movement was strongest on college campuses and expanded nationally after bombing began in 1965.
• Teach-ins were used to oppose the conduct of the war and the draft, with an early example at the University of Michigan in March 1965.
• Draft cards became a target because conscription was mandatory and college status created unequal chances to avoid service.
• In October 1967, about 500,000 demonstrators surrounded the Pentagon, confronted police, and burned draft cards while placing flowers in soldiers’ guns.

💡 Memory Hook

Draft = “cards burned” because college deferments felt unfair, so students who were safe led the loudest protests.

📖 3. Civil rights struggle and desegregation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Civil Rights Movement : A coordinated effort in the 1950s and 1960s to secure greater political, social, and economic equality for African Americans.
• Segregation : A racial system that separates African Americans from whites in public life and institutions, enforced through law and practice.
• Literacy tests : A legal obstacle used in the South to block African Americans from voting by requiring proof of reading ability.
• Poll tax : A fee used in the South as a voting barrier that made voting harder for African Americans.

📝 Essential Points

• In the mid-1950s, African Americans began challenging segregation, marking the start of the Civil Rights Movement.
• Southern states saw lynching, police brutality, and other forms of racial terror that shaped the movement’s urgency.
• Voting rights were denied in the South through legal barriers such as literacy tests and the poll tax.
• Segregation was enforced not only socially but also through institutions that restricted political participation.
• The Civil Rights struggle intersected with other anti-war and youth movements during the Vietnam War era, turning it into a shared rally topic.

💡 Memory Hook

Segregation blocks votes: literacy tests + poll tax → equality fight begins (mid-1950s).

📖 4. Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Bill

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Civil Rights Movement : A coordinated effort in the 1950s and 1960s to secure greater political, social, and economic equality for African Americans.
• Segregation : A legal and social system separating Black and white people, producing unequal access to rights, services, and opportunities.
• NAACP : A U.S. civil rights organization founded in 1909 that used legal action and public advocacy to challenge segregation.
• Separate but equal doctrine : A segregation justification claiming separate facilities can be equal, which courts later rejected as producing real inequality.
• Jim Crow schools : Segregated public schools in the South that kept Black students separated and limited their educational opportunities.

📝 Essential Points

• In the mid-1950s, African Americans began challenging segregation, marking the start of the Civil Rights Movement.
• Southern states used lynching and police brutality, while voting rights were blocked by literacy tests and poll taxes.
• African Americans faced discrimination in the armed forces and were often limited to low-wage, unskilled employment.
• Health inequality was extreme: one white doctor served 750 white patients versus one Black doctor for 3,377 Black patients.
• A 1947 report ordered by President Truman (“To Secure These Rights”) urged ending segregation, ensuring real voting rights, and making lynching a federal offense.
• Truman issued Executive Orders in 1948 banning segregation in the armed forces and requiring fair employment practices in the civil service.

💡 Memory Hook

“Truman → rights report → federal action; courts + buses → voting and school equality.”

📖 5. Urban riots and Civil Rights movement split

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Urban riots : Urban riots are violent uprisings in cities driven by frustration with persistent segregation and inequality.
• Harlem riot (1964) : The Harlem riot in 1964 was an urban uprising linked to ongoing racial discrimination and economic hardship.
• Nation of Islam : Nation of Islam is a Black religious-political movement advocating Black identity, self-improvement, and separation from Whites.
• SNCC radicalization : SNCC radicalization is the shift within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee toward rejecting King’s nonviolence and excluding White members.

📝 Essential Points

• Segregation persisted through daily-life inequalities such as poverty, unemployment, and discrimination in both the South and the North.
• The Harlem riot occurred in 1964 and the Los Angeles riot followed in 1965, with the LA episode described as 34 dead, 1,000 injured, 1,000 buildings destroyed, and 4,000 arrests.
• Rioters were typically young (under 20), and many had jobs and regular education, showing frustration rather than lack of schooling.
• A Johnson-commissioned report attributed the riots to “two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal” plus police bias and brutality.
• The civil rights coalition fractured by 1968 due to economic inequalities, the dominance of anti–Vietnam War protests, and student movements.
• Two major anti–Martin Luther King currents emerged: Nation of Islam and a more radical SNCC that rejected nonviolence and expelled White members.

💡 Memory Hook

Riots = “two societies” + police brutality; split = Nation of Islam vs radical SNCC (nonviolence rejected).

📖 6. Beur movement against racism in France

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Beur movement : A youth-led movement in France that denounced racism and demanded public policies better suited to immigrants and their children.
• ONI National Immigration Office : A French state office created after WWII to organize recruiting and transporting the workforce needed for reconstruction.
• Priority education zones ZEP : French education areas created in 1981 to target schooling in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Vingt Glorieuses : A period of strong postwar growth followed by later economic slowdown, after which unemployment and social tensions rose.
• National Front : A far-right French party that gained support by linking immigration with insecurity and spreading those themes in the 1980s.

📝 Essential Points

• After WWII, de Gaulle set up a selective immigration policy and created ONI to manage recruitment and transport of needed workers.
• Professional immigration peaked in the 1950s–1960s, with many arrivals from Maghreb (Algeria) and the West Indies (Guadeloupe).
• From 1959 to the mid-1970s, workers’ hostels were created, signaling that migrants were expected to return despite being integrated.
• In the 1970s, immigration stabilized at about four million people, roughly 7.5% of France’s total population.
• Immigrants were often segregated, with poorer groups concentrated in large suburban housing projects while better-off groups lived in city centers.
• In the 1980s, far-right ideas circulated widely, including the National Front’s message that immigration drives insecurity, helped by press and political trends in that decade.

💡 Memory Hook

ONI→hostels→segregation→far-right→ZEP→Beur demands (chain of causes from policy to backlash to response).

📖 7. Second-wave feminism in the United States

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• 19th Amendment : The 19th Amendment is a constitutional change in 1920 that granted women the right to vote in the United States.
• Feminine Mystique : Feminine Mystique is Betty Friedan’s 1963 book that exposes how suburban domestic life traps women and names the “problem” behind their frustration.
• National Organization for Women (NOW) : The National Organization for Women is a major feminist organization founded in 1966 that focused on achieving legal equality, especially equal pay.
• Women’s Liberation Movement : The Women’s Liberation Movement is a radical wing of second-wave feminism that sought to dismantle male supremacy and challenged conventional gender norms.
• Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) : The Equal Rights Amendment is a proposed constitutional amendment intended to eliminate legal distinctions between men and women in areas like divorce, property, and employment.

📝 Essential Points

• Second-wave feminism built on earlier progress, including women’s suffrage via the 19th Amendment in 1920.
• Despite rising employment (29% of the workforce in 1950 to 50% in 1960), fewer women attended college or professional schools than in the 1920s.
• Women were often steered into stereotyped jobs like nursing and teaching, with very low shares in law (4%) and medicine (7%).
• For the same job, women earned about 50–60% of men’s wages, while TV and magazines promoted the husband-breadwinner/wife-homemaker model.
• By the end of the 1950s, the average marriage age for women fell to 20 and continued dropping into the teens.
• By the mid-1960s, about 60M women left college to marry, reinforcing the suburban housewife ideal and limiting work outside the home.

💡 Memory Hook

“Mystique → NOW → ERA”: Friedan exposes the trap, NOW pushes equal pay, and ERA targets legal sex distinctions.

📖 8. Second-wave feminism in France

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• MLF (Movement de Libération de la femme) : A French feminist movement that pushed activism into private and sexual life, using the slogan that the personal is political.
• Le privé est politique : A feminist motto meaning that private and intimate experiences are political issues shaped by power and social norms.
• Simone de Beauvoir : A French intellectual whose work argued that femininity is produced by society rather than determined by biology.
• Françoise Giroud : A French public figure who became Secretary of State for the Status of Woman in 1974.
• Yvette Roudy : A French politician who led the Ministry of Women’s Rights (1981–1986) and promoted women’s rights, including March 8th as a day of action.

📝 Essential Points

• French feminism had an earlier “first wave” in the 19th–early 20th century, with voting rights finally obtained in 1944 after WW2.
• Women’s voting in France began in municipal elections in 1945, with very high participation compared with men.
• In the Fifth Republic, feminization of the National Assembly and Senate fell below 2%.
• The 1965 civil code reform let women open a bank account or take a job without their husband’s permission, while the head-of-family powers lasted until 1970.
• The Second Sex (1949) popularized the idea that women are made by social conditioning rather than born with a fixed feminine destiny.
• The MLF’s activism emphasized intimate and sexual questions and drew inspiration from contemporaneous US feminist actions and symbolism.

💡 Memory Hook

MLF = “private becomes political”: sex and intimacy move to the center of public feminist struggle.

📖 9. Abortion rights and Roe v Wade

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Roe v. Wade : A U.S. Supreme Court decision that limited states’ power to ban or regulate abortion during early pregnancy.
• Trimester framework : A pregnancy timing approach used in Roe to decide when states could restrict abortion and when they could not.
• Pro-choice movement : A political movement supporting legal access to abortion, especially in earlier pregnancy stages with medical guidance.
• Pro-life movement : A political movement opposing abortion and organizing to restrict or overturn abortion access.
• Hyde amendment : A federal funding restriction passed in 1978 that barred federal money from paying for abortions for poor women.

📝 Essential Points

• The state law in the case banned abortion except when needed to save the mother’s life.
• Roe held states could not outlaw or regulate abortion performed during the first trimester.
• Roe allowed states to regulate abortion in the second and third trimesters only if rules were reasonably related to maternal health.
• Roe allowed states to protect fetal life only in the third trimester when the mother’s life was not in danger.
• Roe framed abortion access as a choice between a woman and her doctor early in pregnancy, with later restrictions.
• The decision was immediately controversial and continued to divide the nation politically and culturally.

💡 Memory Hook

Roe = “First trimester free, later trimesters regulated”: states’ power grows only as pregnancy advances.

📖 10. Stonewall and modern Gay liberation movement

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Stonewall Riots : A 1969 uprising in New York City that helped spark the modern Gay liberation movement.
• Stonewall Inn raid : A police raid on a Greenwich Village bar in 1969 that triggered resistance from patrons and patrons’ civil disobedience.
• Gay Liberation Front : An activist organization that turned sexual orientation into a political issue and challenged laws and norms defining homosexuality as sinful, criminal, or pathological.
• AIDES : A French non-profit organization created in 1984 to inform about prevention and support medical research during the AIDS crisis.
• ACT UP : An activist group created in 1987 that used highly visible actions, including art, to demand stronger public responses to AIDS.

📝 Essential Points

• In 1969, New York City police staged a raid on the Stonewall Inn, where patrons included transvestites, gay men, and lesbians.
• State law threatened bars with losing liquor licenses if they tolerated same-sex dancing or employed/served men wearing women’s clothing.
• Patrons fought back during the raid using bricks, bottles, and broken glass instead of complying.
• Three days of civil disobedience followed, and hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians publicly “came out” and organized politically.
• After Stonewall, Pride and protest marches began around the first anniversary in 1970 and became annual and international.
• By the end of the 1970s, half of American states had repealed sodomy statutes, and in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychopathologies.

💡 Memory Hook

Stonewall = “raid → resistance → mass coming out → annual Pride.”

📖 11. LGBTQIA+ legal advances in France

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• AIDS prevention campaigns : Public health campaigns focused on stopping HIV transmission through prevention rather than relying on a cure.
• Free and anonymous screening : A medical testing option that allows people to get checked without providing identity details.
• Condom advertising authorization : Government permission for public condom advertisements as part of national HIV prevention efforts.
• AZT anti-retroviral drug : An early anti-retroviral medicine discovered in 1987 that slows HIV replication without eliminating the virus.
• Act Up : An AIDS activist organization created in 1987 that used public art and spectacle to demand stronger government action.

📝 Essential Points

• In France in 1987, the State oversaw the first national HIV prevention campaign and authorized condom ads.
• In 1988, France enabled free and anonymous medical screening for HIV.
• AZT was discovered in 1987 and slows the virus without curing it, so prevention efforts became central.
• Act Up (created in 1987) used artistic actions to raise awareness of AIDS harms and pressure authorities to do more.
• In the AIDS context, activists and artists helped build community symbols and visibility, supporting broader social change in France.

💡 Memory Hook

AZT (1987) slows, so France pivots to prevention: 1987 condom ads + 1988 free anonymous screening.

📖 12. Rise of conservatism and backlash

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Kent State shootings : A campus backlash event in May 1970 where National Guard troops killed four students and wounded eleven during violent riots.
• Silent majority : A conservative middle-class idea that portrays mainstream Americans as disciplined and morally traditional against disruptive protest culture.
• New Right : A late-20th-century conservative movement combining social conservatism with free-market ideas and political mobilization.
• Moral Majority : A 1979 conservative organization led by Jerry Falwell that promoted traditional family values and the “American way of life”.
• Stop ERA campaign : A conservative campaign led by Phyllis Schlafly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment by arguing it would remove gender-based protections.

📝 Essential Points

• In May 1970 at Kent State University, Ohio, National Guard forces killed 4 students and wounded 11 during violent disturbances.
• Nixon showed little sympathy for demonstrators, calling them “bums,” signaling political support for the backlash against protests.
• Conservatives criticized student protests and the “New Left” as going too far, linking them to disorder, sexual permissiveness, and threats to authority.
• The “silent majority” was associated with white middle-class values such as large families, religious affiliation, and suburban life tied to belief in an unregulated market.
• Conservative activism targeted changes in traditions, including abortion and divorce trends and public visibility of gay communities, to defend “traditional family values.”
• The Moral Majority (1979) was founded by Jerry Falwell to promote preservation of the “American way of life.”

💡 Memory Hook

Kent State = “4 dead, 11 wounded” + Nixon’s “bums” = protest backlash becomes political.

📅 Key Dates

Date	Event
1954	Vietnam divided along the 17th parallel into a communist North led by Hô Chi Minh and a U.S.-backed South led by Diem
1964	Gulf of Tonkin incident used by the USA to justify escalation against North Vietnam
1965	Operation Rolling Thunder begins (first systematic bombing) and U.S. troop landing in March 1965
mai 1968	My Lai massacre (March 1968) and wider escalation context; also Paris peace talks begin in May 1968
1969	Stonewall Riots (1969) and Nixon agrees to reduce American troops via Vietnamization
1973	January 1973 ceasefire; effective end of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia announced
1978	Hyde amendment passed, barring federal money from paying for abortions for poor women
1979	Moral Majority founded (1979)
1987	AZT discovered (1987) and Act Up created (1987)
1988	France enables free and anonymous medical screening for HIV

📊 Synthesis Tables

Civil Rights movement: non-violent vs radicalization

Phase	Main approach	Key examples
1950s-early 1960s	Non-violent activism and legal action	Montgomery bus boycott; NAACP legal strategy; Freedom Riders (1961)
Mid-1960s-1968	Radicalization and split within the movement	Urban riots (Harlem 1964; LA 1965); Nation of Islam; SNCC rejecting King’s non-violence

⚠️ Common Pitfalls & Confusions

1. Confusing the Gulf of Tonkin incident (1964) with Operation Rolling Thunder (begins February 1965) and therefore misplacing the escalation timeline.
2. Thinking strategic hamlets succeeded because they were “fortified,” when the source stresses they failed and peasants increasingly supported the Viet Cong.
3. Assuming the anti-war movement was only about Vietnam, rather than also including draft resistance and campus teach-ins tied to the draft system’s perceived unfairness.
4. Mixing up civil rights legal milestones: Brown v. Board is described as 1954, while the Civil Rights Act is 1964 and the Voting Rights Bill is 1965.
5. Believing the Civil Rights coalition stayed unified after 1968; the source explicitly says it fractured due to economic inequalities, anti–Vietnam War dominance, and student movements.
6. Treating French and U.S. feminism as identical: the source contrasts U.S. NOW/ERA focus with France’s MLF motto “Le privé est politique” and later abortion mobilizations.
7. Assuming LGBTQIA+ progress was only legal: the source links Stonewall (1969) to political organization and, later, AIDS activism (AIDES/Act Up) to prevention and public pressure.

✅ Exam Checklist

1. Explain how Vietnam’s division after 1954 and the domino theory context led the USA to support Diem and escalate after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
2. Describe the shift from conventional training to guerrilla warfare impacts in Vietnam, including booby traps/bouncing bettys and the psychological effect on conscripts.
3. Account for why My Lai (March 1968) mattered in the war’s credibility and public perception, as described in the course.
4. Outline the bombing strategy (Operation Rolling Thunder) and the Tet Offensive’s role as a psychological victory even without decisive military results.
5. Trace the withdrawal logic from Johnson’s bombing halt and progressive withdrawal to Vietnamization under Nixon, including the troop numbers given and the January 1973 ceasefire.
6. State the war’s stated costs and scale for the USA (peak cost per day, number of soldiers, dead and injured, and bomb tonnage) as presented in the source.
7. Explain how the anti-war movement grew from college campuses, including SDS teach-ins (first at the University of Michigan in March 1965) and the draft-card protest logic.
8. Describe the Pentagon demonstration in October 1967 (surrounding the Pentagon, flowers in guns, burning draft cards) and connect it to perceived draft injustice.
9. Summarize the mid-1950s origins of the Civil Rights Movement, including the obstacles to voting (literacy tests, poll tax) and the violence described (lynching, police brutality).
10. Explain the NAACP legal strategy and key milestones: Sweatt v. Painter (1950), Brown v. Board (1954), and the limits of desegregation due to massive resistance.
11. Describe how non-violent activism worked in the bus boycott (Montgomery) and how Freedom Riders (starting 1961) led to federal enforcement and national attention.
12. Explain the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Bill (Selma campaign, banning literacy tests, federal monitoring) and the reported change in registration.
13. Account for the radicalization and split by 1968: urban riots (Harlem 1964; LA 1965), the “two societies” explanation, and the contrast between Nation of Islam and SNCC rejecting non-violence.
14. Compare the France immigrant-rights response with the USA backlash logic: ONI selective immigration (post-1945), worker hostels (from 1959), stabilization around four million (1970s), and ZEP creation in 1981 plus Beur “