America in the 20th Century Essay

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Significant Political, Social, and Economic Changes in America from the 1930s to the 1970s

From the 1930s to the 1970s, America modernized. Women gained suffrage in 1920 with the 19th amendment (The American Yawp, 2018), and America as a country was on the move, having just asserted itself abroad by helping to end WWI. Now with peace restored, America began to metamorphose. It transitioned from being a traditionally-minded country of various ethnicities—struggling from a decade of Prohibtion to a decade of Depression to the sequel to the Great War, which resulted in a victory for the Allies and a Baby Boom back home—to being a country torn apart by revolution, social unrest and a deep distrust of government that started with a string of assassinations in the 1960s (JFK, MLK, Malcolm X, RFK) and culminated in the resignation of Nixon in the wake of the Watergate cover-up (Dean, 2014; Stone & Kuznick, 2012). Two groups impacted in big ways during this period were American women and Jewish Americans. For both groups, the changes began with WWII: for women because they were finally introduced into the workforce, while the men were overseas fighting the Axis; for Jewish Americans because they obtained their own state in the aftermath of the War—Israel, founded in 1948, first recognized by the U.S.—a state that every Jew could call his home.

Both women and Jews were in the ascendancy following the war, socially, politically and economically. The Women’s Movement got underway with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Friedan (1963) lamented the woman’s lot in bitter terms: “We have made woman a sex creature…She has no identity except as a wife and mother. …She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is not interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, waiting for her husband to make her feel alive” (p. 29). The Feminine Mystique was the bugle call for women. As Horowitz (1998) pointed out, Friedan argued “that she came to political consciousness out of a disillusionment with her life as a suburban housewife” (p. 2) and her book was her manifesto. Women had gotten along fine during the War, had gotten a taste of the independent life, and had had their fill of Mary Tyler Moore type characters representing them on the screen. The 1960s were ripe for revolution—and Friedan (an American Jewish woman, no less) helped get the revolution going for women. Another Jewish American woman named Gloria Steinem would found Ms. Magazine that same decade and become the face of the Feminist Movement going forward. Steinem was a direct advocate of women’s liberation: the old world patriarchal order of the past had to be dismantled. Women’s liberation was their opportunity to dismantle it.

An example of the type of liberation Steinem represented was seen in an article she wrote years later entitled “We Had Abortions”—an article about women looking back from the standpoint of the 21st century on the revolutionary actions they took by aborting their babies and being proud of it: Steinem contended that no man had the right to her reproductive cycle—and that was her manifesto (Cooke, 2011).

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Roe v. Wade helped cement the status of the Feminists in 1973 and two decades later a strident abortion-rights advocate (an another Jewish American woman) by the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton. Looking back on Roe v. Wade with delight, Ginsburg would state that “government has no business making that choice for a woman” (Bazelon, 2009). Ginsburg would also sum up the spirit of Feminism with the words, “Better bitch than mouse,” which she was quoted as saying by the Jewish American journalist Jeffrey Rosen (1993) in an article celebrating Ginsburg’s appointment to the Court. Women had come a long way from their break-out turn as Rosie the Riveter during the war: they had made it all the way to Supreme Court as a Justice in the 1990s—and all it took was a little spunk, a little militancy, a little abortion advocacy, and a willingness to be called a “bitch” as Ginsburg was when she was younger (Bazelon, 20090. The New Woman that never quite materialized into anything substantial in the 1920s and 1930s now arrived full-blown like Athena out of the head of Zeus by the 1970s—and by the 1990s, after two decades of wielding her reproductive rights like a sledgehammer over men’s heads, she could support her claims with arguments like this one from leading Feminist scholar (and yet another Jewish American woman) Judith Butler (1990): “If there is no radical repudiation of a culturally constructed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction one is invariably in” (p. 31). Thus, the opportunities that women gained were based on repudiation all the way around—repudiation of everything that had come before: the old world values, the old world woman, the old world identity—all of it was to be incinerated, the ashes tossed to the wind.

Jewish Americans (who were not women) saw plenty of opportunities for advancement around this same time. The 1960s were good to them: with Kennedy’s assassination, the proudly-Zionistic Lyndon Baines Johnson took the Oval Office and commenced having former Irgun member Mathilde Krim stay for sleepovers (Segev, 2007). When the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty during the Six Day War, Krim was there to stay Johnson’s hand and make sure Jews weren’t reviled either abroad or in the U.S. 34 dead Americans….....

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