How to Identify the Significance of the Civil Rights & Women's Movements

Feminists march near a 2010 world leaders' summit in Toronto, Canada.

The often intersecting movements for the human and civil rights of women, children, people of discriminated-against races or ethnicities, people with disabilities, economically disadvantaged people and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) people all have long and deep roots in U.S. and world history and have affected millions of lives. Identifying the significance of just one of these struggles is a large and complex task that you can approach in more than one way. However, careful attention to both a movement's history and possible future can yield rewarding answers to your questions about its importance.

Instructions

1. Explore a timeline, chronology or other retrospective of a movement that most interests you. For example, the National Consortium on Leadership and Disability for Youth publishes a disability rights timeline. It reveals that a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Stephen Hopkins, had cerebral palsy. He remarked: "My hands may tremble, my heart does not." U.S. culture did not catch up to Hopkins on any large scale until the1960s and 1970s, when disability rights activists, inspired by the struggles for African American civil rights, began to win enduring legal and social victories.

2. Talk with leaders and participants in this movement, or read their biographies and autobiographies. Discover their motivations, challenges and accomplishments. One example is Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer (1917-1977), a participant in the struggles for African Americans', women's and children's rights, was a poor Black woman with a sixth-grade education. She became politically involved after a doctor forcibly sterilized her in the early 1960s. She persisted despite opponents who beat and shot at her and firebombed her house. In the 1970s she reflected: "Denied access to the ballot until I was 50 years old, but things are a little better now."

3. Conduct a thought experiment with a specific event critical to the history of your selected movement. Try to imagine the consequences if the event had never happened. For example, consider the Trail of Tears, the U.S. government's forced removal during the 1830s of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands in the Southeast. What might Cherokees' lives today be like without the Trail of Tears? How might other cultural groups now relate to the Cherokee Nation if this massive and traumatic human rights violation had not taken place?

4. Examine the state of your selected human rights movement today. Find out what it defines as its future agenda and still-unfinished business. As an example, children's rights campaigns in the U.S. no longer focus as they did on child labor, but the International Labour Organization of the United Nations still concentrates on the issue.

Tips & Warnings

• Keep in mind that there are many differences of opinion regarding the significance of human rights movements. One especially well-known disagreement concerns whether abortion access is a human right or a human rights violation, an advance or a setback for women and children. However, such controversies themselves offer critical information on the significance of human rights movements.

References

• Cherokee Nation: A Brief History of the Trail of Tears
• Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project: Human Rights Timeline
• International Labour Organization: International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour
• National Consortium on Leadership and Disability for Youth: Disability History: Timeline
• Northern Illinois University: Labor History Links
• Prolife Feminism Yesterday and Today; Mary Krane Derr et al.; 2005

Resources

• Children's Defense Fund: Programs and Campaigns
• Gale Cengage Learning: Women's History: Timeline
• Independence Hall Association: ushistory.org: American Anti-Slavery and Civil Rights Timeline
• The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights [U.S.]: Civil Rights Chronology
• Teaching Tolerance: Latino Civil Rights Timeline, 1903 to 2006
• Time Magazine: Gay Rights Timeline