Reshaping Our Social Boundries

When you think of the 1960's images of Hippies with their peace and love mantra, Vietnam War protest marches in Washington D.C. and Universities, the great Civil Rights movements launched by great leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and the further enhancement of women's rights with women's groups and books demanding equality with men all come to mind. It was these social revolutions that have forever reshaped and reformed America's social boundaries. Without this massive social transformation in American Society the people of today would lack equality, freedoms to speak out against war and injustice, and the ability to provoke political change.

My life's path of raising a child as a single mother and my career in accounting has been greatly influenced by the social revolutions in the 1960s. Thanks to the dawning of women's rights, no longer are gender roles so straight and narrow as they once were. The ability to raise my daughter on my own without shame or disgrace would not have happened in the 1950's. Neither would witnessing a woman in the profession such as accounting and finance. In that era, a woman had "their place" and that was normally a homemaker while her husband worked, or if they did have to work it was in professions such as nurses and teachers. A woman's place was largely defined by her home and her suburban social circle. As said by David Farber in the age of great dreams America in the 1960's, "the women's movement challenged basic premises of mid-twentieth-century conventional wisdom: that men should control political and economic life and that women should participate in these public spheres, if at all, as men's subordinates, and that women were best measured by their beauty" (Farber, 1994, pg 241) In a fairly patriarchal fashion, the husband of the family unit was essentially the "authority figure." The voice of yesterday's woman was drowned out and really was not counted on as valuable. However, since 1960, women have made enormous social gains that have allowed me, along with many women, the fortitude to seek out whatever personal and career choices desired.

The women's movement of the 1960s has also made impressive political and global strides. Today, there are more than 1,500 women serving in Political office, some of the most noticeable being former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, presidential nomination rivals Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and President Michelle Bachelet of Chile. Women of today advocate no single doctrine or set of goals. All are united, however, by a belief that women have historically occupied an inferior position in education, politics, and the economic system. Today, there are more than 20 academic journals and 30 national feminist news and opinion magazines dealing with women's issues (Mintz, 2007). My ability to exercise my rights and opinions in society,

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