Urban problems became a focus again, particularly as they affected women and the young. The League, working with the National Commission on Crime and Delinquency and the Justice Department, launched IMPACT, a multi-faceted effort focusing on delinquency prevention and rehabilitation, court reform, prisons’ self-help programs, runaway shelter and return services, rape prevention, and community services.
This proposed amendment to the United States Constitution was designed to guarantee equal rights for women. While approved by the House and the Senate, it failed to be ratified by 38 states within the seven years provided by the legislation.
A new feminist movement surfaced in the early 1970s as more and more women entered the workplace. By the end of the decade, slightly over half of all American women worked outside the home. More than 60 percent of those women had school-age children, and another 45 percent had children under the age of six. Women married later, and the…
A movie superstar before she was 10, Junior League of Palo Alto member Shirley Temple had a great second act in life. In 1969, she was named a Delegate to the United Nations and was then appointed ambassador to Ghana in 1974. Two years later, she became the Chief of Protocol of the United States, retaining the position until 1977….
The Junior League of Toledo’s pioneering documentary Fate of a River: Apathy or Action, released in 1965, led to an invitation to testify in front of a Congressional committee debating the merits of the Clean Water Act, which was enacted in 1972 to deal with environmental problems such as those affecting Ohio’s Maumee River, the subject of the documentary.
In addition to continuing the League focus on fostering quality children’s television, some Leagues used the still-new medium to draw attention to larger problems. The Junior League of Greater Princeton pioneered a TV show focused on drug education. The Junior League of Boston worked with public television station WGBH to produce hour-long documentaries that looked at schools, hospitals, and training…
The 1960s are remembered as a time of turmoil and dramatic social change, war protest, civic rights demonstrations, hallucinatory drugs, youthful rebellion, and riots in the cities. The decade opened with the election of the first Catholic president in the United States, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. A war the French had lost in Vietnam…
By the end of the decade, Leagues reported over 300 community arts projects, the result of a decades-long emphasis on children’s theaters and museums.
During the workshop, “entitled Citizen Relationships to Legislation,” Kennedy stressed the importance of public opinion on legislation and asked that groups such as The Junior League keep adequately informed on all types of pending legislation in the public interest. The group met in the old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol, which was also (for a time during the Civil…
When the men came home from the war, the women were sent home from their jobs. Their patriotic duty done, women were to retreat to the home and hearth, settling into a peacetime life of ranch houses, all-electric kitchens, and swirling Christian Dior—style skirts. Instead of chauffeuring in military brigades, they ferried their children around the suburbs in station-wagon carpools….
