Oh yeah it was. Feminism was a different wave.
Everybody wants sexual liberation, but women don’t want to be liberated in quite the same way that horny males want to liberate them.
Something that every wannabe revolutionary should keep in mind.
I was born long after the hippie boom, but at 18 - in 1998 -, I started referring to myself as a hippie. In hindsight, my similarity to one was pretty much restricted to not shaving and to wearing clothes that lightly echoed 90s grunge.
Eventually, I realized that a lot of my stances conflicted with what the original hippies stood for. I stopped referring to myself as one and instead would refer to myself as a “freethinker”.
And homophobic.
Absolutely.
Intersectionality is a must.
And gay rights was yet another wave. First wave feminism was often homophobic too. Every underdog has to claw its own way out of the pile on, I guess.
I was born in 75. Dad was a beatnik for a time. He played recorder in coffee houses. Mom, thirteen years younger than Dad, is still basically a hippie. I didn’t realize this until I was older. She read to us from Stories For Free Children. I remember A Baby Named X, A Gun Is No Fun and The Princess Who Stood On Her Own Two Feet. She never allowed toy guns or war toys in the house. She owned and operated a state licensed daycare center and taught the same values there. I eventually moved out. Before that time, Mom never used recreational drugs that I know of. I’m sure that has changed since she moved to Florida. Since Dad died, she has dated extensively. Having had to go through the apps on her phone, there are many dating apps. She is also on Tinder. So, I feel she has embraced the concept of free love.
Re Growing Up And Becoming Conservative
Thirty years or so ago, I went with Dad to a current events group in their development. We were discussing an article about the homeless, I said that they were human beings who needed help and we should help them. One of the other seniors there had a much more cynical attitude. I restrained myself and politely pointed out the problems with her position. She said ‘You’re young. You’ll change your mind when you grow up.’ It took a massive effort not to say what I was thinking “No. Just because you gave up and sold out doesn’t mean I will.”
Again, that was thirty years ago. Some minor details of my position on the homeless have changed. I still feel they are human beings who have been failed by the system,
I’m not sure why but DocCathode just reminded me of one of my many sisters, some 17 years older, secretly taking me to one of the first Earth Days.
One of my boyfriends was vegan, a very back to the land type. I was more about peace and love and a good hamburger. He talked me into going to The Farm for a visit. We lived in Memphis and got up at zero dark thirty one morning and drove there. When we arrived, we were sent to the fields to pick some veggies because everyone had to work to eat. I remember that we were separated. I think the men worked in one area, the women in another. We all got together for lunch and I enjoyed talking with the other visitors.
He told me on the way home that night that it was a very spiritual experience for him. That was not my experience. I still remember part of my journal entry about it: “The other visitors were really nice but I found the people who lived there very boring, Daniel, gatekeeper, in particular”. It was interesting to visit but totally not my thing.
I was 17 in 1969. I went to Woodstock, smoked a lot of dope and took acid and mescaline (as well as cheap wine and cough syrup).
Whether or not that made me a hippie, I don’t know. It seems to me I was just a kid looking for a good time.
Looking back, I don’t have a lot of respect for the hippies. I think they thought the world owed them a good time. (“If it feels good, do it.” “Love The One You’re With,” etc.) As opposed to my parents’ generation, who understood that life isn’t all fun and games and sometimes you have to do stuff you don’t really want to.
(However, I do still enjoy those old Country Joe and the Fish records.)
This is news to me. Can you elaborate (briefly is fine, I don’t want to create a hijack)?
I was never a hippie, even though I was the right age for it (18 in 1967). I thought the philosophy, such as it was, just didn’t work, and I didn’t have much sympathy for it as a lifestyle. And I wasn’t interested in using drugs. Maybe also because I was still deeply in the closet, and desperate to appear “normal.”
I’m too young to have been a hippie, but growing up in 70s California I was absolutely influenced by the philosophy. As a gay academic I can’t manage a back-to-the-land existence, but I would love to do that.
My spouse would not love it, though.
First wave feminism as exemplified by N.O.W., was both implicitly and explicitly homophobic. Lesbians were viewed as ‘manhaters’ who would become the face of feminism if not shunned. Betty Friedan coined the term ‘lavender menace’ when N.O.W. was in the process of excluding lesbians from membership. She was even less kind to gay men. It is worth remembering that the concepts of feminism were loathed and reviled by the large majority of men, and that men had essentially all the power in all things. Feminists were trying to make inroads into that structure. Making common cause with homosexuals was not an affordable political move then.
Most hippies didn’t know it, but they were the vanguard of the concept that all humans should have the right to pursue the lifestyle they preferred. No accident that civil rights for blacks and hispanics was being fought for at the same time. They were all manifestations of the same movement.
I wanted to be, but I couldn’t afford it.
When I was 12 or so when being cool was the chief aspiration of life, a hippie told me that being cool was just having good manners. That’s something that’s stuck with me.
I also recall being a hippie as having a lot to do with class distinction. Because although the ABC Movie of the Week hippies were middle class kids who dropped out, ate discarded tacos, contracted VD and flew off Southern Californian cliffs on LSD, most IRL hippies were working class auto mechanics, truck drivers, hair stylists and other occupations who could work on and off as they pleased. And there were farmer hippies who worked daily but not unrelentingly.
Of course, people could wear tie dye, follow the Grateful Dead, etc. well into the 1990s, but it was a style made for the first wave Boomers. The surplus economy, drug policies, the ability to hitchhike through Afghanistan, etc. all were subject to greater forces. And, frankly, as much as that generation enjoyed disdaining their elders, many of them enjoyed equally sneering at their youngers. We’d missed the party, they’d won the war, so sex and drugs and rebellion were pointless for us.
When I arrived at college, the ex-hippie professors were the condescending jerks mainly in it for themselves. But the older professors, who’d come of age in the Beatnik era, had a greater breadth of knowledge, a greater enthusiasm for passing along information, and much more tolerance for our 20-year olds’ nonsense.
The closest I got to being a hippie was a summer romance with a beautiful Deadhead, which involved attending several Grateful Dead shows and purchasing some Birkenstocks.
the same “beatniks” that liked to mooch on others cause they were too good to work and the world owed them a living–when Kerouac did work, he still continued t be a parasite living off women including his mother
and what about the McKinnon’s, Dworkins, et al that having sex with a man was “rape”?
Never mind. See below.
Wondering why N.O.W. (founded in 1966) is considered “FIRST wave feminism” when IMO, feminism can be traced back to at least the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.
Yep. I turned 18 in 1984, got my driver’s license, and found that the hippies had used up all the gas. So I couldn’t afford to get to anyplace cool, like Haight-Ashbury.