Social effects of the Cold War

Arms Race• ICBM• Sputnik• Bay of Pigs• Cuban Missile

Crisis

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/BayofPigs.jpg

McCarthyism

McCarthyism

• Politicians, FBI, educators, social commentators warn of communist spies

• Senator McCarthy - quest to expose communists - liberal, radical, behaving in “odd” way - thousands lose jobs for once being a communist– Conform to a socially sanctioned way of life

7

The Civil Rights Movement

• Irony of American “freedom,” exploited by USSR propaganda– weakness of capitalism – poverty, segregation, voting

rights, extralegal violence• Influence of Gandhi on Martin Luther King Jr. • Gradual successes:– Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954, against school

segregation– Rosa Parks, Montgomery Alabama, 1955

Feminism• Families provided best defense to Communism - Women stay

home and rear patriotic children, as opposed to working, like in the Soviet Union

• Women treated as second class citizens, unhappy with lack of choice/freedom

• More married women worked during cold war than WWII - feeling of shame not living up to standards

• Women inspired by Communist women, independence movements in Asia and Africa from colonial powers - equal rights

• Language of Marxism and anti-colonialism - oppressed class; against male colonization of female bodies; women’s liberation

9

Cold War Countercultural Protests

• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb– Critique of nuclear power policies

• Massive anti-Vietnam protests• Rock and Roll as counterculture• Watergate Scandal (1972-1974)– President Nixon orders illegal wiretaps, discovered

and forced to resign 1974

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Reagan and Gorbachev