I don't have to read them -- I was there. I was just as active in the '70s as I was in the '60s, as were lots of other people. But when we talk in shorthand about "the '60s," of course, we don't just mean the period from 1960 to 1969 -- they started with the surge in civil rights and especially anti-war activity around 1964 and include the early '70s. Besides the economic conditions (which I think, though I'm not sure, were about the same in the early '70s as in the late '60s), there was the war -- the headline-making, TV-camera-grabbing, take-over-the-streets kind of activism declined when the US troops pulled out of Vietnam, but of course lots of solid work was done after that in the feminist, gay rights, anti-nuke, etc., movements without TV floodlights focused on it.
> And it is really silly to suggest that some social change movements
> came about because of economic factors. The women's movement of the
> 1970s? The environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s? The
> anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 80s?
What's silly? It seems to me that economic factors are *especially* relevant to those movements, especially the women's and environmental movements. But no one is suggesting that they "came about because of" these factors. They came about because people decided to take action on these issues, of course.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit, 'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet; Nor ever ever shall, until that I die, For the longer I live the more fool am I. -- Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melancholy (1684)