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In June of 2001, a group of us gave a presentation at the NASW-MN conference in St. Paul. As an exercise to get people thinking about how social change can and does happen, we had participants list significant social changes that have occurred over the last century. Below is the list that the group compiled, by decade.
1900's * 1910's * 1920's * 1930's * 1940's * 1950's * 1960's * 1970's * 1980's * 1990's * 2000's
- Radical Social Work emerges
- Settlement Houses
- National Health Insurance Movement
- The Jungle, (1906) Upton Sinclair
- Dorthea Dix -Reforms Mental Hospital Conditions
- 1st Feminist Movement
- Prison Reform
- WWI
- Automobiles and roads
- 1913 - Federal Income Tax
- 1916 - Worker's Strike, Lawrence, MA
- Social Casework (Freud)
- Birth Control Movement (Margaret Sanger)
- Women's suffrage (1920) - women's movement died
- American Indians given "citizenship"
- Prohibition
- Discovery of insulin
- Rank and File Movement (Socialist Economic Programs)
- Social Work Today founded (1934)
- Depression - The Okies
- New Deal
- Social Security (1936)
- Labor Movements strong decade
- ADC, Unemployment insurance, other safety nets, height of urban political machinery
- Baby Boom
- Women enter the work force
- movement to suburbs
- WWII
- armed forces are segregated
- Japanese internment camps
- Bomb - nuclear
- 1948 - integration of military
- 1948 - Humphrey integrated (began) housing
- Boarding School Era
- United Nations - Declaration of Human Rights
- Unions
- McCarthyism
- Birth of anti nuclear movement
- Rachel Carson starts writing Silent Spring
- Relocation of American Indians to urban areas (from reservations)
- "The Beat" generation
- US Interstate roads built
- destruction of neighborhoods
- Migrant workers - Harvest of Shame, Edward R. Murrow
- Betty Friedan, Feminist Mystique
- Anti War protests
- "The Pill"
- Title IX
- Cesar Chavez - Farm Worker
- Bobby Kennedy met Ceasar Chavez (sic.)
- =67 - >68 race riots
- VISTA/Peace Corps
- The Other America, M. Harrington
- Civil Rights Movement
- Berlin Wall went up
- Assassinations: Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Kennedy
- Peace marches
- environmental movement
- Standoff at Wounded Knee - 1973
- Women's Movement - Battered
- Women's Shelters - Domestic Abuse treatment begins
- ICWA
- Nixon resigns
- introduction of multiple treatment modalities in clinical practice, i.e. T.A., etc.
- hospice
- Vietnam and Laotian immigration to Minnesota
- American Indians given "religious freedom"
- Roe vs. Wade
- Women's movement
- 2nd wave of feminism (women's rights, equality, women in the workforce, etc.)
- Bertha Capen Reynolds Society formed
- AIDS Crisis
- down sizing/closing of state hospitals
- ERA
- Amnesty International (1989)
- Berlin Wall falls (1989)
- ketchup declared a vegetable
- Farm Crisis
- mediation was considered a radical concept
- Peace movements - anti nuclear, local: Honeywell Project and civil disobedience
- The Children's Mental Health Act
- MEPA?
- National Health Insurance Movement re-emerged and failed again
- Ellen comes out
- "Insider" speaks out about tobacco industry
- American Disabilities Act
- Family Medical Leave
- Clinton Scandal
- Affordable housing crisis
- Anita Hill/Sexual Harassment
- Waco/Oklahoma Bombing/Columbine!
- land mine protests
- violent madness
- change of how society views mentally ill? media?
- Rodney King and the Watts riots
- NAFTA
- Welfare reform
- East African refugees immigrate to Minnesota
- Bring your daughter to work day
- explosion of young feminist movement (New Moon magazine)
- Million Man March
- New activism around economic globalization
- April 16 protests against World Bank International Monetary Fund
- Technology advancements explode
- Psychotherapy via the Internet
- WTO protests in Seattle - bringing awareness of corporate globalization
- Elian Gonzalez
- work proceeds to counter violence - bring more control over guns/gun safety
- Million Moms March