Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 27

Identify Movement Influences: The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s emerged as a result of women’s experiences in the New Left, the student movement, and the civil rights movement. What do these documents reveal about how the principles, analyses, and strategies of those progressive movements influenced the women’s liberation movement? What do they suggest about how women’s experiences in these movements might have spurred them to organize their own liberation movement?

Integrate Sources and the Text Narrative: In what ways do these sources support, illustrate, supplement, or contradict this chapter’s narrative discussion about the women’s liberation movement and the antifeminist backlash of the 1970s? To what extent did these documents help clarify your thinking about the issues raised in the textbook? What questions do you still have about the material?

Notice What’s Missing: These five sources represent two extremes of American activists’ views of women’s status and relations between women and men in the 1960s and 1970s. Whose views are not represented in this collection of documents? Where might you look for documents that represented other, less extreme perspectives on these issues, and what arguments would you expect those documents to make?

Make Comparisons: What are the agendas expressed by the four proponents of women’s liberation in this collection of documents? In what ways do they agree and overlap, and in what ways do they disagree with one another?