Womens Liberation Movement †Definition and Overview

Women's Liberation Movement - Definition and Overview The womens liberation movement was a collective struggle for equality that was most active during the late 1960s and 1970s. It sought to free women from oppression and male supremacy. The Meaning of the Name The movement consisted of womens liberation groups, advocacy, protests, consciousness-raising, feminist theory, and a variety of diverse individual and group actions on behalf of women and freedom. The term was created as a parallel to other liberation and freedom movements of the time. The root of the idea was a rebellion against colonial powers or a repressive national government to win independence for a national group and to end oppression. Parts of the racial justice movement of the time had begun calling themselves the  black liberation. The term liberation resonates not just with independence from oppression and male supremacy for individual women, but with solidarity among women seeking independence and ending oppression for women collectively. It was often held in contrast to individualistic feminism. The individuals and groups were loosely tied together by common ideas, although there were also significant differences between groups and conflicts within the movement. The term womens liberation movement is often used synonymously with womens movement or second wave feminism, although there were actually many different types of feminist groups. Even within the womens liberation movement, womens groups held differing beliefs about organizing tactics and whether working within the patriarchal establishment could effectively bring about the desired change. Not Womens Lib The term womens lib was used largely by those opposing the movement as a way of minimizing, belittling, and making a joke of it. Womens Liberation vs. Radical Feminism   The womens liberation movement is also sometimes seen as being synonymous with radical feminism  because both were concerned with freeing members of society from oppressive social structure. Both have sometimes been characterized as a threat to men, particularly when the movements use rhetoric about struggle and revolution. However, feminist theorists overall are actually concerned with how society can eliminate unfair sex roles. There is more to womens liberation than the anti-feminist fantasy that feminists are women who want to eliminate men. The desire for freedom from the oppressive social structure in many womens liberation groups led to internal struggles with structure and leadership. The idea of full equality and partnership being expressed in a lack of structure is credited by many with the weakening power and influence of the movement. It  led to later self-examination and further experimentation with leadership and participation models of organization. Putting Womens Liberation in Context The connection with a black liberation movement is significant because many of those involved in creating the womens liberation movement had been active in the civil rights movement and the growing black power and black liberation movements. They had experienced disempowerment and oppression there  as women. The rap group as a strategy for consciousness within the black liberation movement evolved into consciousness-raising groups within the womens liberation movement. The  Combahee River Collective  formed around the intersection of the two movements in the 1970s.   Many feminists and historians trace the roots of the womens liberation movement to the New Left and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Women who worked in those movements often found that they were not treated equally, even within liberal or radical groups that claimed to fight for freedom and equality. Feminists of the 1960s had something in common with feminists of the 19th century in this respect: Early womens rights activists such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were inspired to organize for womens rights after being excluded from mens anti-slavery societies and abolitionist meetings. Writing About the Womens Liberation Movement Women have written fiction, non-fiction, and poetry about ideas of the 1960s and 1970s womens liberation movement. A few of these feminist writers were  Frances M. Beal, Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Carol Hanisch, Audre Lorde, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Steinem. In her classic essay on womens liberation, Jo Freeman observed the tension between the Liberation Ethic and the Equality Ethic, To seek only equality, given the current male bias of the social values, is to assume that women want to be like men or that men are worth emulating...  It is just as dangerous to fall into the trap of seeking liberation without due concern for equality. On the challenge of radicalism versus reformism creating tension within the womens movement, Freeman goes on to say, This is a situation the politicos frequently found themselves in during the early days of the movement. They found repugnant the possibility of pursuing reformist issues which might be achieved without altering the basic nature of the system, and thus, they felt, only strengthen the system. However, their search for sufficiently radical action and/or issue came to naught and they found themselves unable to do anything out of fear that it might be counterrevolutionary. Inactive revolutionaries are a good deal more innocuous than active reformists.

What Fossilized Poop Can Tell Us About Dinosaurs

What Fossilized Poop Can Tell Us About Dinosaurs Herbivorous, house-sized dinosaurs like Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus, not to mention carnivorous behemoths like Giganotosaurus, had to eat hundreds of pounds of plants or flesh every day to maintain their weight - so as you can imagine, there was a lot of dinosaur poop littering the ground during the Mesozoic Era. However, unless a giant blob of Diplodocus doo happened to fall on the head of a nearby critter, he was unlikely to complain, since dinosaur feces were an abundant source of nutrition for smaller animals (including birds, lizards and mammals), and, of course, a ubiquitous assortment of bacteria. Dinosaur droppings were also crucial for ancient plant life. Just as modern-day farmers scatter manure around their crops (which replenishes the nitrogen compounds that make the  soil fertile), the millions of tons of dinosaur dung produced every single day during the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods helped keep the worlds forests lush and green. This, in turn, produced a near-endless source of vegetation for  herbivorous dinosaurs to feast on, and then turn into poop, which also enabled carnivorous dinosaurs to eat the herbivorous dinosaurs and turn them into poop, and so on and on in an endless symbiotic cycle of, well, you know. Coprolites and Paleontology As important as they were for the primitive ecosystem, dinosaur droppings have proved equally crucial for modern-day paleontologists. Occasionally, researchers stumble across huge, well-preserved piles of fossilized dinosaur dung- or â€Å"coprolites,† as they’re called  in polite society. By examining these fossils in detail, researchers can figure out if they were created by plant-eating, meat-eating, or omnivorous dinosaurs- and they can sometimes even identify the type of animal or plant that the dinosaur ate a few hours (or a few days) before going Number 2. (Unfortunately, unless a specific dinosaur is discovered in the immediate vicinity, its nearly impossible to attribute a particular piece of poop to a particular dinosaur species.) Every now and then, coprolites can even help to settle evolutionary disputes. For example, a batch of fossilized dung excavated recently in India proves that the dinosaurs responsible fed on types of grass that weren’t believed to have evolved until millions of years later. By pushing back the flourishing of these grasses to 65 million years ago from 55 million years ago (give or take a few million years), these coprolites may help explain the evolution of the megafauna mammals known as gondwanatheres, which had teeth adapted for grazing, during the ensuing Cenozoic Era. One of the most famous coprolites was discovered in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1998. This gigantic poop fossil (which looks pretty much the way you’d expect) measures 17 inches long and six inches thick, and was probably part of an even larger chunk of dinosaur dung. Because this coprolite is so enormous - and contains fragments of bone and blood vessels- paleontologists believe it may have derived from a Tyrannosaurus Rex that roamed North America about 60 million years ago. (This type of forensics is nothing new; as far back as the early 19th century, the English fossil-hunter Mary Anning discovered bezoar stones, containing fish scales, nestled in the fossilized skeletons of various marine reptiles.) The Coprolites of the Cenozoic Era Animals have been eating and pooping for 500 million yearsso what makes the Mesozoic Era so special? Well, aside from the fact that most people find dinosaur dung fascinating, absolutely nothingand coprolites dating from before the Triassic period and after the Cretaceous period can be equally diagnostic of the creatures responsible. For example, the megafauna mammals of the Cenozoic Era left an exquisite assortment of fossilized poops, of all shapes and sizes, which has helped paleontologists tease out details about the food chain; archaeologists can even infer facts about the lifestyles of early Homo sapiens by examining the minerals and microorganisms preserved in their feces. No discussion about fossilized poop would be complete without a mention of Englands once-burgeoning coprolite industry: during the mid-18th century (a few decades after Mary Annings time had come and gone), a curious parson at Cambridge University discovered that certain coprolites, when treated with sulfuric acid, yielded valuable phosphates then  in demand by the growing chemical industry. For decades, the east coast of England was a hotbed of coprolite mining and refining, to the extent that even today, in the town of Ipswich, you can take a leisurely stroll down Coprolite Street.