1970s and Early 1980s > Social Movements
Social Movements
Along with the counterculture, the social movements of the 1960s also continued through the 1970s. In response to the 1968 protests, Columbia had begun to admit more applicants of color. And even as the war in Vietnam drew to a close, campus activism mounted as Black, Hispanic and Asian students pushed for inclusion in all aspects of university life and expressed their views on national issues. Similarly, the Stonewall Riots in downtown Greenwich Village marked the start of a Gay and Lesbian pride movement on campus. And, of course, the bitter experience of Barnard and Columbia women relegated to subservient roles in the protests of 1968 gave new impetus to a century-old debate over coeducation at Columbia.
Black Forum, 1972
In this publication of the Urban Center, Beverly Clark, the first Columbia Equal Opportunity Officer, discusses changes to Columbia's affirmative action program. Inadequacies of an earlier program had led the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (later known as the Department of Education) to freeze Columbia's participation in federal contracts.
Kate Millet's Sexual Politics
More than any other text, Kate Millet's Sexual Politics channeled the rage felt by women radicals who had found themselves marginalized and objectified in the protests of 1968. Based on the dissertation Millett wrote while a graduate student in Columbia's comparative literature and English department, the text assails the patriarchal values of major figures in English literature from D.H. Lawrence through Norman Mailer. The dominance of such voices within the Western literary tradition, Millet argues, has reinforced the political subjugation of women. Mailer's vitriolic and sexist response to Sexual Politics helped make the work a major touchstone of second-wave feminism. In the text, Millet's reduction of the "Western canon" to its gendered political content anticipated similar radical arguments the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the meantime, her attacks on women's education at Barnard (where she taught as a graduate student) helped to reignite long-dormant discussions of coeducation.
![Sexual Politics [Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Ph.D.]](https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/files/original/e3ec840636f5df85bb39900b86da5879.jpg)