Expanding rights: women, Mexican Americans, American Indians, and people with disabilities

Inspired partly by the civil rights movement, other groups organized in the 1960s and 1970s. The women's movement, energized by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and the National Organization for Women (founded 1966), pushed for equal pay and opportunity; the Equal Pay Act (1963) and Title IX (1972), which banned sex discrimination in federally funded education, including school sports, were major gains, while the proposed Equal Rights Amendment fell short of ratification. In the Chicano movement, Mexican Americans fought discrimination in schools and politics, and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized farm workers into the United Farm Workers, using strikes and a national grape boycott. The American Indian Movement protested broken treaties and pressed for self-determination, and the Indian Self-Determination Act (1975) gave tribes more control over their own programs. Disability rights activists won Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973) and, later, the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). Gay rights activism grew after the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York. These movements broadened the meaning of equal rights, and debates over how far to extend them continue.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report