The American Century: Literature since 1945 525commitment to new forms of feminism. “We can no longer ignore that voice
within women that says, ‘I want something more than my husband and my children
and my home,’ ” wrote Betty Friedan (1921–2006) in The Feminine Mystique (1963).
Following on from her, there was an exponential increase in writing about
experiences and issues that vitally affected women – women’s sexuality, the
“feminine” role, childbirth, domestic politics, lesbianism – and a steady development
of feminist criticism and theory, social history and aesthetics. Not long after
The Feminine Mystique was published, in 1965, Luis Valdez (1940–) combined
Mexican-American literature with political purpose when he joined with the farm-
workers’ union led by César Chavez to form El Theatre Campesino. This theater
company mixed traditional Spanish and Mexican dramatic forms with agit-prop
techniques to create dramatic sketches in support of union issues. The publication
of House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday in 1968, heralding the emergence of
a major movement in Native American writing, coincided with an upsurge in Indian
protest: the symbolic seizing of Alcatraz and later armed conflict on reservations
that helped generate revisionist histories like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)
by Dee Brown (1908–2002). Asian-Americans, too, gradually asserted their presence,
first male writers such as Louis Chu (Eat a Bowl of Tea) and then later female writers
like Chuang Hua (Crossings). In these works, a similar confluence of the personal
and political was perceptible: the lives of Chinese men, who have left their wives to
search for a better existence in America (Eat a Bowl of Tea), the lives of women
struggling with the racial and cultural constraints imposed on them by an ancient
culture (Crossings).
Both the impulse toward more openly political forms of writing, and the
postmodern inclination toward the absurd, received a push from events that took
place not long after President Kennedy took office. Indeed, if his inauguration acted
as a catalyst for the optimism of the early 1960s, then his assassination in Dallas in
November 1963 served as a focus for energies of another kind. The belief in the
possibility of radical change persisted, but it was now continued within a harsher,
more abrasive and confrontational sense of the social realities. The divisions and
discontent that had always been there – in a society still painfully split between rich
and poor, white and colored, suburbanite and ghetto-dweller – now came to the
surface; the violence that brought the president’s life to an end was echoed in the
national life, at home and abroad. Of course, there was and is an honored tradition
of protest in American life, ever since the Puritan settlement, and a spirit of unease
had been particularly notable in the culture since the late 1950s, symbolized by
popular heroes like James Dean and poetic heroes like Allen Ginsberg. But now the
protest became more widespread and exacerbated, and the uneasiness burgeoned
into open revolt. The civil rights movement, for example, grew more militant.
Instead of merely boycotting segregated businesses and services, black and white
activists began to use them, challenging the authorities to enforce iniquitous
segregationist laws. Confrontations occurred in several Southern townships between
civil rights workers and white authorities: in Little Rock, Arkansas, for instance, in
Selma, Alabama, and Oxford, Mississippi. In August 1963 there was a massiveGGray_c05.indd 525ray_c 05 .indd 525 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM