What kind of change?

The tag line, "Change begins with a whisper," prompted us to ask what sort of change, if any, takes place in the course of The Help.  Reading documents from the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights/Women's Liberation movement extends the question.  What sorts of changes were called for?  What changes were actually accomplished? 

More bluntly, how is the United States different now than it was before, say, Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-1950s or before Title IX?  Thinking about this question, I'm reminded of our earlier observations about the interaction of social constraints and permissions with individual action.  Some constraints have been lifted by legal changes, thus opening up possibilities.  The likelihood of a person walking through the open doors is effected by factors beyond legality: access to quality education, family expectations, health, and many more.  And so much depends upon the measures we use to make comparisons and the scale of our sample.  Have women achieved the goal of equal pay for equal work?  Has this woman, employed in this company, achieved equal pay for each work? 

While the temptation to ask, "Are Americans happier now?" lurks, I think that the question is too vague.  Has the "problem that has no name" disappeared?  That might be a question we could tackle with some survey data and a look at a range of publications.  My hunch is that we'd find that it has not been eradicated, but that there is less of it.  What kind of changes are involved?  Some are in educational policy and practice, some are economic, some are personal.  What has not gone away: the persistent tension between self-interest and commitment to groups including the people to whom one is most intimately related.