ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the Beat movement,

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a relentless devotion to rhythm.

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Yeah, hey. Sing it, Gloria.

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All right, check out this excerpt. Here we go.

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"This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution.

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Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences,

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have been the primary ways of organizing human beings

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into superior and inferior groups,

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and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

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We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles

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other than those chosen, or those earned.

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We are really talking about humanism."

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Gloria Steinem, right there. All right.

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And the question:

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What movement was the excerpt referring to?

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And here are the potential answers.

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[ mumbles ]

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All right, well in the excerpt, Gloria Steinem -

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this woman right here with our CEO, yep, that's her -

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writes that "sex and race, because they are easy,

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visible differences,

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have been the primary ways of organizing

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human beings into superior and inferior groups."

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So let's see which answer describes the movement that united

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these differences into a moving force for change.

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Does this excerpt refer to B -

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Beat movement?

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Hmm. Well, the Beat movement dealt primarily with

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the culture surrounding a generation of writers in the 1950s.

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Uh, so, think more poetry than politics.

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All right, is Gloria Steinem writing about the C - suffrage movement?

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Well, not quite. The suffrage movement succeeded in

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gaining women the right to vote

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50 years earlier,

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so that's out of C.

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Could Steinem be describing the D - conservative movement?

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Well, hmm. Activists like Steinem were fighting against conservatives,

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which often opposed granting equal constitutional rights

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to women. So D is dead in the water.

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And that means Steinem was speaking in support of A -

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the feminist movement.

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Gloria Steinem was well known for her leadership during the feminist movement.

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And during the 1970s and 80s she fought hard

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for the level of equality described in the excerpt.

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So A is the right answer.

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The feminist movement made a point of challenging the nation's

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founding fathers, hoping to prove that it wasn't just men who were

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created equal.

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[ woo! ]

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