This is a story about a rare event in America: a radical shift in national social policy. Its precondition was a broader social revolution, the black civil rights movement that surged up from the South, followed by the nationwide rebirth of the feminist movement. The story's main focus, federal policy in civil rights during 1960-72, was originally conceived, like most studies of civil rights, as centering almost exclusively on racial policy. But the evidence and the logic of civil rights theory demanded an inclusion of gender as well as racial policy. - Introduction.