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| Davis Hall, Wellesley College October 1966 |
I'm eighteen years old in 1968, a sophomore at Wellesley College. As girls of the time, our childhood had been spent in the sheltered 1950s. We were demure, conservative, and gently reared. We arrived at college to be educated in the liberal arts—as the world began to change around us.
We were rule-bound: curfew at 11 pm, men permitted in your room only on Sunday afternoons, dress code for football games requiring suits, heels and white gloves. Sunday mornings, girls poured over the engagement columns in the New York Times. But three undercurrents were rising—women's rights, civil rights, and the war in Vietnam—and 1968 would be the year they crashed together.
Winter: hope rises
It is election year.
By early 1968, almost half a million American troops were fighting in Vietnam. Every month 40,000 boys were being drafted. Undergraduates could still defer, but draft deferments for graduate students had just been cancelled. The system protected the privileged—those who could afford four years of college—while working-class boys were sent to war. The men we knew were drawing closer to being drafted.
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| Eugene McCarthy campaign poster 1968 |
All of us were canvassing the streets of New Hampshire in support of Eugene McCarthy—a Democratic senator from Minnesota challenging President Lyndon Johnson on a peace platform. Through mushy snow, we knocked on doors, handed out leaflets for McCarthy. On March 12, he secured 42.4% of the vote to Johnson's 49.5%. The primary should have been a shoe-in for Johnson. We were jubilant. Days later, Bobby Kennedy, much more well known, who'd watched from the sidelines, declared his candidacy.
Two weeks later, on Sunday evening, March 31, President Johnson delivered his famous address to the nation, withdrawing from the race. He declared he would not seek the nomination and would begin to de-escalate the war by halting the bombing of North Vietnam. He invited Hanoi to join him in moves towards peace. The next day he announced he would meet Bobby Kennedy and work together towards national unity. By Wednesday, the North Vietnamese were ready to talk peace.
It was all wonderful for 24 hours.
Spring: everything shatters
On Thursday, April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Johnson cancelled his flight to Hawaii. Hanoi cancelled plans for talks. Fierce riots broke out in Washington, Baltimore, New York, Boston. All the momentum toward peace—gone in an instant.
The weather was beautiful that spring of '68, but the violence kept escalating. At Columbia University in New York, 1,000 students invaded five campus buildings protesting the university's involvement in weapons research and plans to encroach on Harlem. Police were called. The campus exploded. Unrest spread to Chicago, to Paris and the Sorbonne.
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| Columbia protests, April 1968 Hugh Rogers Photography/ /Columbia College Today |
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| Guiding a medivac helicopter to pick up casualties, near Hue, April 1968 AP Art Greenspan/Alamy |
Not long after Christmas the year before, I'd had breakfast with Hillary Rodham, who lived across the hall from me. She was talking about the National Organization for Women, formed just the previous October.
"What do you think," Hillary said to me, "should Wellesley join?"
"I think the basic question is: are we feminists?"
I suppose I am fortunate to have first heard the term from Hillary Rodham Clinton.
By the following spring, something had shifted in us. We realized we had been raised in a world that turned entirely on men and their view of things. The childhood activities thought appropriate for boys rather than girls. The stories and films in which the male is in charge, noble and dominant; the female a possession, passive, unable to negotiate the world alone. We were waking up.
Summer: the second assassination
We had hardly got home for the summer holidays when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5.
Two murders in two months. Two leaders who represented hope for peace and civil rights, gone. The violence wasn't theoretical anymore—it was consuming the people trying to end it.
August: Chicago
My roommate Anne traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everyone knew the city was armed to the hilt. A peaceful anti-war demonstration was planned for the last afternoon. Young men offered up draft cards like communion chalices to burn before the crowd. The crowd chanted, "Hell no, we won't go."
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| Burning a draft card, Grant Park, 28 August 1968. Anne Trebilcock |
Kennedy's assassination had left nearly 400 delegates uncommitted. McCarthy was still in the race. But Johnson's favorite, Hubert Humphrey, was trying to pave a middle way. By nightfall, it was cold. Everyone knew the Convention had slipped away from the peace candidates. The Vietnam war would go on. Nothing would change.
Outside in the park, Anne was exhausted. There were so many people. Floodlights glanced off police helmets. All of a sudden—no one knows why—huge armored cars barreled down the street. The National Guard fired tear gas. Police with clubs moved in a line and began to run, swinging left and right. Canisters popped. Smoke rose. The air burned. Sirens wailed. Protesters seized trash cans and hurled them back. Anne's eyes teared up. She couldn't breathe. She covered her mouth and nose with her McCarthy scarf and ran. There was a shriek as a baton cracked hard on someone's head. A girl was dragged by her hair and tossed into a paddy wagon. People were screaming.
All of it, seventeen minutes, was broadcast live on television around the world.
The whole world was watching the American government turn violence on its own citizens who were calling for peace.
Fall: a new view of the world
By fall 1968, there was a new vibe on campus. Hemlines were mid-thigh. Girls went about with no makeup, their hair long and loose. Some Black girls adopted Afros—emulating Angela Davis. Everyone talked of the relief of not wearing bras.
Over the summer a group called Cell 16 had set up a "female liberation front" in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Women had had enough of listening to men on ego trips, of being assigned to take minutes and make coffee, of being treated as objects to be possessed. The scales fell from our eyes. The term male chauvinist was coined.
In November, the Democrats lost the election. Richard Nixon was elected president. The war would continue.
All the things we had been raised to believe in, all the systems we had taken for granted—the structures of government, not perfect, but relatively benign—all of it now known to be corrupted and degraded. Two-thirds of government resources devoted to war and outer space. Basic human dignity denied to Black citizens. Our own role as women of no consequence. The planet threatened by pollution and nuclear annihilation.
Who could you trust in authority anymore?
The echo across decades
In the winter of 1967, I had stayed with Yale's chaplain, William Sloane Coffin—one of the Freedom Riders arrested in 1961, a man Martin Luther King had bailed out of jail. Over drinks, the talk was electric. About conscience—and the role of civil disobedience.
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| William Sloane Coffin on his arrest Montgomery Alabama, 25 May 1961 |
How far are you prepared to let something go before you stand up to be counted?
Looking back across nearly 60 years, I see 1968 as the year America broke open. In twelve months we went from hope to despair, from believing in our institutions to watching them fail us, from trusting authority to questioning everything. We watched two assassinations destroy the peace and civil rights movements' momentum. We watched police violence broadcast into living rooms. We watched a war grind on despite massive opposition.
The patterns feel disturbingly familiar in today's America. Deep divisions. Struggles for civil rights taking new forms. Women fighting again for control over their own bodies. The sense that institutions meant to protect us have been corrupted.
The question Bill Coffin posed that electric night remains: how far are you prepared to let something go before you stand up to be counted?
Each generation must answer for itself.
Stephanie Williams is a historian and writer who lives in north London.
Her latest book, telling the story of her four years as a Canadian, convent-educated girl at an elite American women's college is The Education of Girls -- coming of age in 4 years that changed America, 1966-1970.
'A rich and stirring history of a moment when everything was changing for women in higher education.' Hillary Rodham Clinton
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