Let’s get out of the way that when I say that the mores became looser, I am explicitly not saying this is undesirable. To prevent this thread from going into GD territory, let’s keep normative commentary out.
Societies in the West became much less formal after WWII. I get the impression that this change really got started in the 60s and early 70s but I may be wrong.
What made this so?
Here’s a jumble of examples:
Wearing a hat became less common in the 60s. Suits started being the preserve of only some office jobs around that time too. I get the impression that before then, it was common for men to wear suits and hats in the middle of summer when doing activities as leisurely as attending a sporting match.
The increase in sexual acts and the decoupling of sexuality with the nuclear family can partially be attributed to a technological innovation; the pill. There must have been other factors, however. The Stonewall riots occurred in the 60s. The facts of Roe v. Wade occurred in 1969 and the suit was filed in 1970.
Then there were the hippies who undertook experiments, whether communal or chemical.
I also get the impression that music became a lot of varied and drastically changed. Not many number 1 hits prior to the 60s are still listened to today in the same way that, say, the Rolling Stones’ songs are. For example, most of the songs here seem quite quaint: - YouTube
Here’s the number 1 song on US charts in 1950: - YouTube
Here’s the number 1 song on US charts in 1965: - YouTube
Here’s the 1972 number 1, which I don’t think would have gotten a lot of play before the 60s: Gilbert O'Sullivan - Alone Again (Naturally) - YouTube
Movies and TV seem to have become less goody two-shoes in the early 70s.
I get the impression that the practice of calling your parents “sir” and “ma’am” started to become less common in the 60s as well.
So, how come?
I think a lot of it was due to affluence. The depression taught that generation the lesson that nothing is guaranteed, you can be peniless and living in a cardboard shack tomorrow. Then WWII taught a generation after them that conflict could destroy everything and overturn society in a moment.
These generations in North America (a) benefitted from being the only untouched industrial area on the planet, and (b) had a desire for properity and security that they put into action. So the boomer generation, growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, found that there was almost limitless resources, that even if you did not work, you could live a passably comfortable life (depending on your definition of comfort). For those who did work, labour was in short supply and money was good. With economic independence and meritocracy came freedom from pressure; if you had a job and money, who cares if society did not approve of your behaviour? Hang out with others who do. The boomer generation was big enough to form their own peer group.
This is the moral dilemma even today… Why should a person not be sexually active whenever and with whomever they want? Going to hell - only if you believe in that god. Society disapproves? Who cares if your friends don’t disapprove. Why dress up for work? Why seek approval from the higher ups in society? They don’t approve of abortion? Why should you care what they think, they’re not the ones stuck with a child… etc.
Issues like the Vietnam war or Civil Rights only helped to solidify the view. A social power structure that refused to listen and seemed hypocritical did not have the moral authority to impose behavioural standards.
There was a similar relaxing of – let’s call it societal norms – after World War I (“how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?”)
Affluence was a part of it, the Pill was a part of it, the shift (worldwide) from rural/small town to urban/suburban life. It wasn’t so much that it happened all at once. More like it reached critical mass all at once.
You’re asking a history question so the answer can’t start in the 60s. It properly starts in the 1920s.
The 20s were everything that the 60s were. America was a changing country in large numbers of ways. It was urbanizing, with cities doubling in size over 1900. Many of their inhabitants had moved from farms or villages to work in factories, but tens of millions of immigrants had entered the country and they mostly stayed in cities. City culture was cosmopolitan and therefore looser and more tolerant.
WWI was just over and that drove freedoms. A million men had seen the world for the first time and it isn’t a cliche that seeing Paris made them rethink what was possible in life. At home woman won the right to vote and threw off their corsets for flapper fashions - short hair, raised hemlines - and started smoking and drinking. Woman had been mostly banned from saloons but Prohibition made everyone equally lawless and they partied together at speakeasies. And afterward, horizontally. And the 20s were mostly boom times and money does equal frivolity.
Then the Depression destroyed everything. No money. No jobs. Women were chased out of the workplace because men needed jobs - they had families. (Women had what - cats? Whatever. They didn’t count.) Reading about that whole period is like viewing through a curtain. Everything is drab.
WWII brought back money but it couldn’t be spent. More than ten million men were in the Armed Forces. Everybody else worked ridiculous hours. And rationing meant that they couldn’t use up their gas and tires to go to places which couldn’t buy supplies to have fun with.
So it’s totally logical and completely expected that the reversal of all this would see a culture-shaking loosening of all morality when the money and men returned. The only hard question to answer is why it took 15 years for it to happen instead of coming in the late 40s.
I don’t think I’ve read a really good answer. The best partial answer lies in demographics. Birth rates went way down in the Depression years. In addition, immigration had been almost totally cut off in the late 1920s and immigrants tended to be young. The percentage of young people was probably at or near an all-time low after WWII. The ones who were there made up for all those lost years not by partying but by getting married and having babies. The Baby Boom starts in 1946 and babies tend to be a drag on morality. Additionally, people fled the cities and went into suburbs. Whatever the cliches about 50s suburbs, they were isolated and homogeneous and drew the important demographic away from cities. I think it just took time for a new national culture to develop with enough participants to make it explode.
Obviously you can find roiling undercurrents throughout the 50s. Juvenile delinquency was the big topic and rock ‘n’ rock was a scourge to be stamped out. The Beatniks were a small but very visible precursor to the hippies. But the larger culture’s overwhelming desire for normalcy after two freakish decades kept the lid on.
And then it’s a Billy Joel song. Kennedy. The Beatles. The Pill. National television. National radio. Sexy movies. 1968 is so removed from 1963 that most people who lived through it haven’t recovered from the whiplash. But change of that magnitude happened from 1919 to 1924 and from 1929 to 1934 and from 1939 to 1944. Radical change used to be normal. It’s the lack of five-year periods of radical change since the 70s that’s so odd.
Not sure that they did, the 20s were quite decadent and the Victorian era wasn’t as straight laced as people tend to think it was.
Perhaps in more recent times it’s become the social norm for people to be a bit looser in their behaviour, whereas once upon a time that sort of behaviour was the province of the well off?
There was a feeling among a lot of young people that their elders had screwed everything up, and that society had to be reinvented. There were many causes for this, including:
[ul]
[li]the Vietnam war[/li][li]the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.[/li][li]environmental degradation (which was becoming increasingly obvious in those years)[/li][li]the fact that the roles (and treatment) of women had not caught up with the modern era[/li][/ul]
Many people responded to this by deliberately ignoring what they saw as a bunch of arbitrary societal rules. A lot of these rules actually were arbitrary (such as when you are and are not supposed to wear a hat). People didn’t re-adopt all these rules when society calmed down again.
I think some of it has to do with women spending less time raising children and more time working; another part had to do with leaving children alone with the TV for years on end. Children shifted their focus to their peers rather than adults, took their behavioral cues from the TV; working parents were often clueless about what was going on in their kids’ heads, leading to what we came to call the Generation Gap.
That’s just two parts of the puzzle, though. There was also an increasing media emphasis on entertainment, rather than education/information…in turn driven by a perception of where the profits lay, which was in the affluent and often idle young. Children learned boundaries and behavioral parameters from the TV and their peers, with whom they spent the most time.
Increasing interest in experimentation with drugs (rather than their parents’ favorite, alcohol) led to a further divide in the population, call it the care-free vs. the care-full. It eventually led to people who would not “turn on” with drugs, compensating by turning increasingly inward in a different direction: towards religiosity and evangelism (“being saved,” “finding Jesus.”)
Many people who survived/outgrew/escaped altogether the drug phase in life went on to become more permissive and tolerant of non-typical behavior, while many of those who went into the religious/evangelical direction, became less permissive and more intolerant.
Like all generalizations, there are too many exceptions to the above to count. My point is simply that these are some of the trends I saw develop during my lifetime - often as they were happening.
My view is that the world wars were the time when the old society collapsed once and for all and the baby boomers were the first generation to live in a time when the old values were basically meaningless.
Basically, the society before the world wars was one divided between the aristocracy and the lower classes. The aristocracy considered themselves the leaders of society, which included establishing morals that the lower classes were meant to follow. Over time, especially once industrialization started, the lower classes gained more and more wealth, which led to more and more freedom, which led to the lower classes questioning why they should bother listening to the aristocracy at all. This social tension lasted until it finally exploded with the two world wars, and this is why you can kind of see it starting before them.
Before the wars, you basically had the aristocracy making the rules (though not always following them) and imposing them on the lower classes, who would be called immoral when they didn’t follow the aristocrats’ rules. After the wars, there was barely any reason left to care what the aristocrats and people felt free to question everything. Of course, there were other factors that led to this happening in the 1960’s in the US, many already mentioned in this thread.
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. Up to then there’d only been a sort of bargaining, a wrangle for the ring, a shame that started at sixteen and spread to everything.
This would be where those other factors come into play, namely a depression and another world war. Then I suppose people were too worn out after all that and wanted to start questioning old values again. I sort of see the 20s as a false start. That is, the 20s would have been the 60s if the world hadn’t plunged back into crisis.
The post-war years were prosperous, but they were hardly a hotbed of social freedom. Anyone who didn’t conform to rigid mores of society was suspected of being a Red. Their children, however, saw their parents as uptight squares, and wanted to break out of that mold. This along with unrest among the minorities, and a social powder keg was born.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The pill, the discovery of LSD and the rediculously strict laws against harmless pot, and a form of music youngsters could identify with but their parents didn’t. The vietnam war…civil rights…lots of things came together all at once, and suddenly Junior and Missy aren’t listening to mom and dad any more.
In hindsight, it would have been stunning if our mores hadn’t relaxed.
