Cold War 3

1. After World War II and before the Vietnam War, most Americans and their leaders viewed the world in terms of a constant struggle to contain communism, evident in the Korean War. In the Vietnam War, the United States used this idea again, building up troops gradually without risk-ing war with the entire Communist bloc. After the United States failed to defeat the North Vi-etnamese and withdrew its men, the policy of détente was used in the Cold War. West German chancellor Willy Brandt was the first major European political figure to use it when in Decem-ber 1970 he flew to Poland for the signing of a treaty of reconciliation and for commemorating a Polish unknown soldier and an armed uprising of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto. Brandt’s gesture was aimed at reconciliation with eastern Europe and at establishing a peace settlement for central Europe and the two Germanys. West Germany claimed that East Germany lacked free elections and thus any legal or moral basis. West Germany also refused to accept the loss of Germany territory to Poland and the Soviet Union. Brandt, who was mayor of West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, saw the wall as representing the painful limitations of West Germany’s official hard line toward communist eastern Europe and the need for a new foreign policy. After becoming chancellor in 1969, Brandt negotiated treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia that formally accepted existing state boundaries and the loss of German territory to Poland and the Soviet Union in return for a mutual renunciation of force or the threat of force. Brandt’s government also entered into direct relations with East Germany, aimed for modest practical improvements. His initiatives encouraged President Nix-on to sponsor a broader framework of reducing East-West tensions in the early 1970s, as evi-dent when he gradually reduced American involvement in Vietnam. In 1975, the United States, Canada, and all European nations except Albania signed the Final Act of the Helsinki Confe-rence, agreeing that Europe’s existing political frontiers could not be changed by force and ac-cepting many provisions guaranteeing the human rights and political freedoms of their citizens. However, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union increasingly ignored the human rights provisions of the Helsinki agreement in the late 1970s. Many Americans believed that the Soviet Union was using détente to build up its military and push for political gains and revolutions in Third World countries. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Americans feared that the states of the Persian Gulf would be next, so President Jimmy carter urged the Atlantic alliance to enact economic sanctions against the Soviet Union, but only Great Britain supported it. After the world became more conservative in 1980, the United States under newly elected President Ronald Reagan got new allies in western Europe. Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher supported Reagan and a revitalized Atlantic alliance. When pro-American Helmut Kohl came to power in 1982 in West Germany, it and the United States coordinated military and political policy toward the Soviet bloc.

2. The postwar international monetary system was based on the American dollar, which foreign governments could exchange for gold at $35 an ounce. The United States sent billions abroad in foreign aid and for fighting foreign wars. By early 1971, it had only $11 billion in gold left while Europe had US$50 billion. Foreigners panicked and exchanged their dollars for gold, but President Nixon stopped the sale of American gold, sending the value of the dollar down greater, inflation to accelerate worldwide, and fixed rates of exchange to be abandoned. After the war, the abundance of cheap oil led energy-intensive industries to expand rapidly and lead other sectors of the economy forward. By 1971, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries had watched the price of crude oil decline, so it presented a front against the oil companies. When the United States supported Israel during the fourth Arab-Israeli war in Oc-tober 1973, OPEC declared an embargo on oil shipments to the United States, quadrupling the price of crude oil. With the world’s big powers doing nothing, the Soviet Union benefitted while the United States was immobilized. With the two economic crises, the world had its worst economic decline since the 1930s, with rising unemployment and declining productivity and living standards. Just when there was a modest recovery by 1976, a fundamentalist Islamic revolution occurred in Iran, causing oil production to collapse in that country and the price of crude oil to double in 1979. Unemployment and inflation rose greatly before another recovery in 1982; however, in the summer of 1985, the unemployment rate in western Europe, with ni-neteen million people, was at its highest level since the Great Depression. The troubled econ-omy led to the misery index, which combined the rates of inflation and unemployment togeth-er. Misery increased between 1970 and 1986 in the United States, Japan, and the Common Market, but it was greatest in western Europe. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Common Market appeared to be on the verge of disintegration due to economic dislocation and economic na-tionalism. As the Common Market became known as the European Economic Community, Denmark, Island, and Britain joined in 1973, Greece in 1981, and Portugal and Spain in 1986.

3. The economic conditions of the 1970s and early 1980s caused optimism to give way to pessim-ism and romantic utopianism to yield to realism. There were the human tragedies of lost jobs, bankruptcies, homelessness, and mental breakdown. The welfare system created after the war prevented mass suffering through extended benefits for the unemployed, pensions for the age, free medical care and special allowances for the needy, and other supports. The crisis also contributed to the preservation of political stability and democracy. The response of govern-ments to social needs caused an increase in total government spending in most countries dur-ing the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1982, western European governments spent an average of 50% of gross national income compared to 37% fifteen years earlier. Because people were more willing to see increased spending than raised taxes, there were rapid growth of budget deficits, national debts, and inflation. This movement reversed by the late 1970s. When Thatcher came to power in Britain in 1979, she slowed government spending and privatized industry. Her government also encouraged low- and moderate-income renters in state-owned housing projects to buy their apartments at low prices. President Reagan in 1981 pushed through major cuts in income taxes but failed to cut government spending. His massive military buildup and social programs grew, as he was obsessed with the Soviet threat and the government had to spend more unemployment benefits, welfare benefits, and medical treatment for the poor. With his anti-welfare rhetoric, liberal opposition was mobilized to defend the poor and many moderates turned against him. Nevertheless, the budget deficit and the U.S. government debt tripled in a decade. When François Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981, he broke away from conservatism and used the Socialist party and Communist allies to launch a vast program of nationalization and public investment designed to spend France out of economic stagnation; he had failed by 1983. When governments cut back on spending, large scientific projects were stopped, reinforcing the computer revolution, as small research groups and private businesses led the way. The energy crisis of the 1970s forced individuals to reexamine their fuel bills and the pattern of self-indulgent materialism, leading to a leaner and tougher lifestyle in Europe and North America in the 1970s and early 1980s. There was less reliance on medical science for good health and a growing awareness that individuals were responsibility for most of their illnesses and diseases, as individuals could increase their life spans by eating regular meals, sleeping eight hours a day, exercising three times a week, maintaining moderate weight, forgoing smoking, and using alcohol in moderation. Men and women were encouraged to postpone marriage until they had firmly establishing their careers, increasing the age of marriage. The threat of unemployment caused students in the 1980s to be serious, practical, and conservative. More women were employed in the workforce, even after they were married, due to economic necessity.

1. The women’s movement dated back to the French Revolution, when pioneering feminists for-mulated the first systematic demands for women’s rights and gender equality. This cooled down but began again the later nineteenth century, as the women gained some modest rights. The gains of World War I for women were rescinded in the 1920s and 1930s, nor did the eco-nomic expansion after World War II help women’s standing. Before the Industrial Revolution, most men and women married late, with many not marrying at all. When a woman was mar-ried, she had as much children as possible, with a third to a half not surviving to adulthood. As industry and urban society grew, people began to marry earlier and fewer remained unmar-ried. With industrial development came higher incomes and better diets, causing more child-ren to survive to adulthood, greatly increasing the population in the nineteenth century. How-ever, contraception within marriage was spreading. These trends continued after World War II, as the typical Western woman continued to marry earlier and have her children quickly, with 80% of their children born before she was thirty. There were larger families and a rapid population growth of 1 to 1.5% per year in many European countries. In the 1960s, the long-term decline in birthrates resumed, and from the mid-1970s onward, total population stopped growing or declined in many Western countries. Pregnancy and childcare occupied a much smaller portion of a woman’s life than at 1900 because by the early 1970s, about half of West-ern women were having their last baby by the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven. Women be-came frustrated as their role as mothers no longer absorbed the energies of a lifetime and as work was limited or unavailable. Before the Industrial Revolution, ordinary women worked hard and long on farms and in home industries while caring for their families. With the growth of modern industry, young women continued to work as wage earners, but poor married women struggled to earn money at home by practicing low-paid craft as they looked after their children; middle-class women hardly ever worked, though they did for charity. With the complexity of the modern economy and its technology after World War II, almost all would-be wage earners had to go outside the home to find cash income. Married women had less eco-nomic value for families after they bore their children. Young women also were able to be fully educated and take advantage of the need for well-trained people. This trend was strongest in communist eastern Europe, with women accounting for almost half of all employed persons after the war. Women were no longest acceptable of sexism and discrimination, as they saw employment as a permanent condition for income and psychological satisfaction. As more married women were employed, the birthrate decline because raising a family while holding a full-time job was a great challenge. The demands of job, motherhood, and marriage became more manageable with fewer children.

2. There were three reasons for the rebirth of the women’s movement in the 1970s. First, ongo-ing changes in underlying patterns of motherhood and paid work created novel conditions and new demands. Second, a number of feminist intellectuals articulated a powerful critique of gender relations, stimulating women to rethink their assumptions and challenge the status quo. Third, dissatisfied individuals recognized that they had to band together if they were to in-fluence politics and secure reforms. French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was the first and one of the most influential major works, as it showed how the adolescent Beauvoir came to see her pious and submissive mother as foolishly renouncing any self-expression outside of home and marriage. She analyzed the position of women within the framework of existential thought, arguing that women were in essence free but that they had usually been trapped by inflexible and limiting conditions. Only by courageous action and self-assertive creativity could a woman become a completely free person and escape the role of the inferior other than men had constructed for her gender. She inspired Betty Freidan, who reopened the serious discussion of women’s issues in the United States. She reflected the American faith in group actions and political solutions. She became aware of the conflicting pressures of career and family and conducted a survey of her classmates fifteen years after they graduated that reflected her dissatisfaction. In her The Feminist Mystique, she identified this dissatisfaction as the problem that has no name, a crisis of identity. After there was little attention to sex discrimination, she founded in 1966 the National Organization for Women to press for women’s rights. It grew from seven hundred members in 1967 to forty thousand in 1974, with other women’s organizations addressing the problem as well. NOW’s goals were laws against discrimination, equal pay for equal work, and measures such as maternal leave and affordable daycare. The movement concentrated on gender and family questions, includ-ing the right to divorce, legalized abortion, the needs of single parents, and protection from rape and physical violence. The women’s movement of the 1970s won new rights for women, but it began to diffuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. Homosexual men and lesbian women pressed their own demands, while the physically disabled promoted their interests.

3.
a. Marriage is permitted when the elements of maintenance and progression are implied. Men experience change and progress and only after they are tired do they find a home. Women take care of his home and children in the evening. A married woman benefits from a traditional marriage by that she has a stable life in which the problems of the past avoid the menaces of tomorrow. Women are allowed to make her home her own, find social jus-tification, and provide herself with an occupation in domestic work. The household chores she does is the denial of life. Woman’s work gives her no autonomy, is not directly useful to society, and produces nothing.

b. Beauvoir believes that marriage should be a combining of two whole, independent exis-tences. The couple should not be regarded as a unit but rather each individual should be integrated in society where each could flourish without aid.

c. After World War II, women were not treated as true equals to men. There was sex discrim-ination, unequal pay for equal work, the glass ceiling, and women were not allowed certain women actions like divorcing and abortion. Basically, though women had the right to vote, they had few real gains in the twentieth century, supporting what Beauvoir says.