It's the summer of 1968. I'm back from a year in England, and my pals call me to come over and catch up on all the things that happened while I was away. So I go over to their house, where we sit on the floor (we sat on the floor a lot in those days) and they tell me all about this new thing, the women's movement.

What? I say. Women? Who's worried about women, we have civil rights to fight for, we have the anti-war movement, what is this about women?

So they tell me. And tell me. They read me things. They ask me to consider my own experience. By the end of the afternoon, I see they have a point.

Over the next year or two, there's more discussion with more people. Consciousness raising. Sitting around on the floor and discussing "Our Bodies, Ourselves."

Feminist collectives to combat domestic violence are formed, and women's bookstores spring up in Cambridge and other cities. We learn how to write using non-sexist language; little mimeographed guides explain how to do it.

We all join NOW. Ms. magazine is launched. Those of us in academe start teaching this new "women's studies" to each other on Saturdays, starting from some much-copied reading list that probably comes from California. We picket the Bunny Club. Some of us in philosophy start the Boston chapter of the Society for Women in Philosophy, and women in other fields start similar groups. At some point we decide, enough with meeting on Saturdays to learn women's studies, it needs to be part of the curriculum. So that new phase of the struggle begins.

There are steps forward -- Title IX. There are steps backward -- ERA. Twenty-plus years later, however, the women's movement has re-made our world. Language has changed. We have different notions about what is appropriate work for men and women. Men can stay home and take care of the kids. Women can be CEOs. Hillary's running for president!

Today it is not a perfect world, but it is a different world.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, in Cosmopolitanism, discusses how our minds change over time as we get confronted with new thoughts, and how new thoughts gradually cause new behavior and new societal realities.

At the beginning of a cultural change, there may be mass demonstrations, radical manifestos, groups trying to out-do all the other groups in terms of way-out pronouncements, confrontations, academic factions, social upheavals, reactions, jokes, derision, culture wars great and small. But gradually, the once unthinkable, revolutionary and startling becomes just the way it is. The women's movement is one good example.

The civil rights movement is another. Here's a blast from the past for those of my generation: Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, came to UMF last fall and spoke to a packed house. There were a few '60s types in the crowd, but it was mostly students.

Who would have imagined, as he stood chained in that Chicago courtroom in 1968, that he would show up one day on the college lecture circuit talking to youngsters eager to learn new aspects of American social history?

How the world has changed: we have a national holiday to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A national holiday! It is a fitting tribute to one who truly was a "founding father" of his country, or maybe better, a re-founder, leading us to behave, and believe, more in line with our own best aspirations.

Boycotts, marches, sit-ins, strikes, speeches, writings ... King stands for the teamwork and concerted efforts of a generation of civil rights leaders and workers, and his birthday symbolizes the birth of something much greater than one man.

And now Barack is running for president! It's not that women and African-Americans haven't run for national office before. Think Shirley Chisholm, Geraldine Ferraro. And don't imagine that racism and sexism are dead -- there is plenty of both diseases still around. But a tipping point has been reached and passed. Both Hillary and Barack are now part of the mainstream, not the margins.

The civil rights movement and the women's movement have changed the way we behave, think and dream. Their models have helped others do likewise. More on that another time.

Theodora J. Kalikow is president of the University of Maine at Farmington. She can be reached at kalikow@maine.edu