Student Question
What are the key points in Chapter 19: Surprises in A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn?
Quick answer:
The major points considered in Chapter 19 of A People's History of the United States are the movements for women's equality, the prison rights movement, and the American Indian Movement. These three movements illustrate the expansion of the claims on freedom and equality made by African Americans in the civil rights movement.
Chapter 19 of A People's History of the United States is entitled "Surprises." Essentially, the chapter covers the multiple movements that followed, and intersected with, the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.
His first major point is to examine the development of "second wave feminism." First, women in the postwar era, despite having won the right to vote and having worked in wartime industries, continued to face second-class citizenship and seemed condemned by cultural expectations to boring, unfulfilling lives. "Their subordinate condition," Zinn claims, "had hardly changed" as a result of political equality.
This disconnect, Zinn writes, motivated feminists like Betty Friedan, whose seminal 1964 work The Feminine Mystique described a sense that women felt in being denied the right to fully develop as humans. The burgeoning feminist movement drove many women to push for full equality in the workplace, in education, and elsewhere. The second major point...
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is that many women, motivated by the civil rights movement and the counterculture, took second-wave feminism in new, radical directions. Zinn especially notes the intersection of race, class, and gender within the civil rights movement, giving the example of male SNCC field workers who expected their female counterparts to cook and clean for them. He goes on to emphasize several other key points in the tumultuous "rights revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s.
He discusses the American Indian Movement, discussing several important moments of civil disobedience including the occupation of Alcatraz and the liberation of Wounded Knee by several hundred Oglala Sioux activists. These events were connected to a broader movement to gain equality and reenergize Native American culture, which centuries of settler colonialism had sought to extinguish. Zinn writes that "as the civil rights and antiwar movements developed...Indians were already gathering their energy for resistance."
He also examines the multiple prison uprisings, especially the violent Attica revolt in 1971. In Attica, brutal, dehumanizing conditions made a mockery of the supposed "rehabilitation" approach to prisons. As Zinn writes, quoting a New York prison warden, "'In order to reform a criminal you must first break his spirit.' This approach continued."
These major points are meant to illustrate the ways that popular dissatisfaction with American institutions blossomed into a wide-ranging revolt against these institutions in the late 1960s.