Title: Protest Movements | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Protest Movements
Protest Movements
PROTEST MOVEMENTS
PROTEST PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS OF PROTEST
CONSEQUENCES OF PROTEST MOVEMENTS
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Content: This gives evidence of the long-term societal legitimation of these acts, which grew out of protest movements. Success of these and other movements is often tempered by countermovements, participants in which perceive their relative positions and interests to be threatened. For instance, the women's movement experienced a series of challenges from religious groups, often fundamentalist, that adhered to a male-dominated patriarchy. As a consequence, women's progress was slowed in winning various forms of equal treatment and opportunity in educational, economic, political, and social areas of life, and in the 1970s and the 1980s Congress failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, which was supported by the women's movement. More generally, after passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, a series of protest movements within the Democratic and, more extensively, the Republican parties resulted in growing administrative, legislative, and judicial resistance to equality in educational, occupational, and housing opportunities. The countermovement result has been a reentrenchment of a long-established economic structure of racism and low-income class rigidity that functions independently of personalized racist feelings and beliefs (Wilson 1987). A reflection of such countermovement pressure is the growth in perception among white males that affirmative action educational and occupational policies directed toward racial and ethnic minorities and women constitute a form of reverse, or affirmative, discrimination (Glazer 1989). Countermovements have generated their own counterprotest movements. This countermovement variation of Hegelian dialectic does not result in a return to whatever constituted premovement normalcy. In conventional political terms the results are more conservative, reactionary, liberal, or radical than what existed before the protest movement.