As scholarly and popular research from the last three decades has shown, the student movement against the Vietnam War relied upon a broad student base. While early researchers, predominantly sociologists and a few historians, linked the student anti-war activists to elite institutions that were tolerant of rebellion, more recent studies have exposed the diversity of student protesters, who held different religious beliefs, economic backgrounds, and ethnic identities. Despite this trend, there have been few attempts to explore the role of women in the student anti-war movement. While Barbara Tischler has explored the involvement of women in elite and urban institutions as well as in SDS leadership, there has been less focus on the role of women in the anti-war movement at midwestern and southern colleges and universities.[1]
In addition to the need for a further exploration into the role that female students played in protests and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, there is also an opportunity to explore the role that minority ethnic groups played in the anti-war movement at colleges in rural settings. While both Boren and Hoefferle examined the connections between the anti-war movement and other campus movements, the primary focus remained on elite and urban institutions. Although rural campuses may lack some of the diversity that their urban counterparts reflect, an analysis of the links between the anti-war movement and other student movements on public college campuses has yet to be undertaken.
For student protesters in the late 1960s, the statement “the campuses are gonna blow” was both a slogan and a mantra[2] They understood the profound impact that the anti-war movement could have upon college students, college campuses, the broader anti-war movement, and the nation. The history of scholarly and popular research of this student movement against the Vietnam War incorporates varied approaches to understanding the emergence and impact of student protests, teach-ins, and demonstrations that spread across American colleges and universities during the 1960s and 1970s. While some of this work has offered a one-dimensional portrayal of the movement and its proponents, the most compelling research has applied a multilayered approach to the student anti-war movement. This approach places the anti-war movement into the larger context of other student movements, accounts for a broad movement that manifested still itself singularly in different geographic locations, and identifies the diversity of those who participated in anti-war protests and demonstrations. As Moraniss argued in They Marched into Sunlight, student protesters “acted from their own convictions, with individual motivations and expectations, sharing the one overriding common principle of being opposed to the war in Vietnam.”[3] Acknowledging the complexity of these motivations, expectations, tactics, and experiences is crucial to understanding history of the student anti-war movement.
[1] See Barbara L. Tischler, “The Refiner’s Fire: Anti-War Activism and Emerging Feminism in the Late 1960s,” in Student Protest: The Sixties and After, ed. by Gerard de Groot (New York: Longman, 1998): 186-215; Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Bailey argued for the importance of removing the sexual revolution from the “radical fringes” and exploring it within the heartland, an argument that could be extended to acknowledge the importance of examining the changing role of women and notions of womanhood in colleges and universities throughout the United States.
[2] Wells, The War Within, 347.
[3] Moraniss, They Marched into Sunlight, 387.