especially the pill (oral contraception); increasing educational opportunities, and
the narrowing of the gap between men and women in educational attainment.
Certainly feminism does champion oppressed women, but the leadership of women’s
organisations as well as academic feminist theorists are drawn disproportionately
from relatively privileged social groups. This is not in any way to denigrate feminism- our concern here is simply to identify the reasons why feminism emerged as a
fully fledged ideology when it did.
Turning now to ecologism, the link between rising prosperity and ecological
consciousness may seem much more tenuous. However, political scientist Ronald
Inglehart identified the emergence in the 1970s of a generation born during or just
after the Second World War – sometimes called the generation of ’68 (a reference
to the student disturbances of 1968) – that espoused ‘post-materialist values’:
questioning of authority, liberal attitudes to human relationships, rejection of job
security, importance of ‘self-realisation’ and individuality (Inglehart, 1977). The
preceding generation, which had directly experienced the inter-war depression, the
Second World War and the hardships of the immediate post-war period, were much
more inclined to hold materialist values. The word ‘materialist’ should not be read
as ‘selfish’ – the war generation simply wanted an end to the deprivations of the
war, and so were strongly committed to job security and rising prosperity. The post-
war generation might be thought more selfish because they took for granted the
opportunities provided by the welfare state and economic growth policies.
Nonetheless, the post-war generation did, according to Inglehart, display a distinct
set of values, and it is not difficult to see how these values might lead that generation
to reject traditional political ideologies and movements in favour of an ecological
consciousness.
The socio-economic conditions that gave rise to the development of multi-
culturalism are slightly different, but are still connected to rising levels of prosperity
among certain key groups. The post-war period was characterised by increasing
levels of economic migration from south Asia and the Mediterranean fringe to the
countries of central and northern Europe. For example, the so-called ‘economic
miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder) in West Germany was made possible by ‘guest labour’
from (especially) Turkey, and large numbers of south Asians came to Britain in
search of work. These groups – disproportionately made up of men – tended to
seek protection in their own communities, especially as tensions rose in the late
1950s. However, by the 1960s there emerged organisations that campaigned against
discrimination. It is, however, significant that ‘race’ rather than ‘culture’ was the
central concept, with the emphasis on overcoming ‘skin prejudice’; this was
paralleled on a much larger scale in the United States, with the emergence of a
powerful Civil Rights Movement (although, of course, the African-American
community had a quite different history to European immigrant communities). It
is only in the 1970s and 1980s that there emerges a shift from the language of race,
and the idea of a multiracialsociety, to culture, and the notion of a multicultural
society. Certainly, some of the advocates of multiculturalism were first-generation
immigrants, but many were the children of first-generation immigrants who argued
that the recognition of pluralism required an analysis of society centred on culture
rather than race. Again, as with feminism, while the aim was to overcome
disadvantage, the political and intellectual leadership of this movement was relatively
advantaged.
308 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies