I was in college the Nixon years, 1968-1973. For me and my friends the counterculture wasn’t about going back to the land and getting spiritually high, but raging against the wars plural - the war in Viet Nam and the war that the Nixon administration was waging against its enemies, the young culture especially.
The Free Speech Movement started at Berkeley back in 1964, supporting the Civil Rights movement and hating the loyalty oath that all UC professors had to take. Free Speech back then meant being able to criticize the government without official retaliation. That seed created the internet as it was originally meant to be, not a place where people could spew hate without consequences. I’m sick that free speech has become a dirty word because it’s been so abused.
Drugs were a minor part of it; I didn’t indulge but I knew plenty of people who did. Ending the war on drugs, however, another Nixon pronouncement, was on everybody’s minds because kids who were found with marijuana were treated as dealers and given long prison sentences ruining their lives. Being beaten or even jailed for having long hair was a concern all over the country, but especially in the South. Rock music was still the devil’s music for a lot of people. Wearing blue jeans to high school was prohibited every year I was there.
All those everyday life choices made up the counterculture, but not the hippies. The counterculture numbered in the tens of millions and eventually took over the country. The hippies, sad to say - though many of them had wonderful ideals - disappeared up their own asses in a haze of heavier drugs, misogyny, and cults. The rest of us got called “plastic hippies” by the core faithful. I admit we, for the most part, cherrypicked all the good aspects of the “Youth Movement” and disdained the nuttier extremes. I’m still as liberal today as I was then so I think I made the right choices.
The term first-wave feminism itself was coined by journalist Martha Lear in a New York Times Magazine article in March 1968, “The Second Feminist Wave: What do these women want?”
Women’s political movements go at least as far back as the Suffragettes, and in terms of social liberation to the Flappers. Through the 1930s and 1940s there was recognition of women as aviatrixes, newspaper reporters and of course Rosie the Riveter during the war years. I think what happened though was there was a strong postwar backlash by men who wanted domestic women who would be wives and mothers. Look at how the fictional character Lois Lane devolved from smart, sharp investigative reporter in the Golden Age era to basically Lucy Ricardo in the Silver era. I’d argue that the Women’s Liberation movement of the latter '60s and 1970s was women insisting on catching up on a decade’s or more deferred social change.
Plus, the introduction of oral contraceptives at the beginning of the 1960s at first led to the “Sexual Revolution”, but that in turn sparked a backlash by women who felt like they were viewed as mere sexual party favors.
I was born in 60. So I’m sort of on the cusp. I ended up being more Led Zeppelin in High School, but not a total head banger at all. Was still way into the Beatles, Pink Floyd and others. I still listen to Floyd nearly everyday, but they are a bit more Psychedelic than hippy.
I now enjoy some stuff that is a mix of folk and rock. Love the Indigo Girls (one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen). Tom Petty, and KT Tunstall for a very small sample.
My high school was very cool. There where the usual cliques - Jocks, nerds/brains, stoners, music/drama. We all got along just great. Any and all of us could be a parties.
It would be good to read up on McKinnon and Dworkin. They are original thinkers who broke open a lot of the conventional thinking about women. You are, I believe, mischaracterizing them.
But yes, I recognize the truth when it is pointed out “hippie” and the “counterculture” and just simply “being youth in the 60s” were not the same things. Overlaps and subsets, yes, but not the same.
My perception is that whatever they may have called themselves or believed or done, what mass media and pop culture called “hippie” was basically an outsider’s label, a caricature, an appropriation even.
Later it became in some cases a snarl word as used by the “them damn dirty hippies ruined everything” crowd (the hippies were not in power to ruin anything).
From the testimonies a lot of OG hippies were not the stereotypical middle class Boomer kids who just turned on, tuned in and dropped out for a while until it was no longer fun, but honest to goodness withdraw-from-the-rat-race types who worked at it, and some may at some point have concluded it was no longer worth it or their leaders/mentors were steering them wrong. Similarly, later on the Yuppies were mostly not “hippies growing up”, but part of the majority of young people in America in the 60s who may have been into the music and the styles but only to a point for fun.
…
Thinking of it … As I grew up and caught up on what had been happening in adultworld during my childhood, I remember reading how in 1967 itself, the community leaders at Haight-Ashbury organized an event called “Funeral of Hippie” to mark how now that the Summer of Love had drawn mainstream media attention on that scene, a sincere hippie way of life was doomed, at least there. And writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1971, Hunter Thompson reflected on that only 5 years earlier those in the hard core of the counterculture thought they were riding on a great wave of change, but now “with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back”. It struck me how contemporary to the whole thing was the rise of voices saying the “real” hippie or “real” counterculture had been co-opted. That helped me develop my sense of how later on I’ve seen snarl labels and appropriations stick very fast, and movements and ideologies just as quickly develop “way of the founders” and gatekeeping issues.
The most notable thing about the counterculture of the 1960s is that it quickly became the most successfully co-opted revolution in History. Even the most conservative of us have hippie DNA, but only the fun and safe bits.
I was never a hippie. Conservative/Christian politics, from a Conservative/Christian family. But…
Off-grid with my parents for a year while I was in grade school. Barefoot and long-haired in high school and all through university. Duck-rescuing with Animal Lib. Volunteer Educator for disadvantaged schools. Lived in a share house until I was thirty.
What did I change into? Pretty much still the same person, but …
Shoes now, because my circulation is poor. Short hair, because I don’t want to look like those long-haired old guys. House owner, because my wife.
I get it that kids now are poor. But don’t they want to be free? How can they want to go straight from school to a job? Why would they want to live in the suburbs?
Classic example of this is Bob Dylan’s sudden use of an electric guitar at a folk music festival. Unbelievable sacrilege!! The crowd booed, some walked out.
They just couldn’t handle the …well, insult to their purity and elitism.
And this was in 1965, before the hippies had any impact on society.
