Abstract
The Counterculture of the 1960s set the stage culturally for the Women’s Movement much as the New Left and Civil Rights Movement had done politically. The Counterculture challenged all the conventional social realities: sexual relations, art and media, religion, and the family. In its own alternatives, it espoused female values and a feminine way of being while it oppressed women in practice. The Counterculture broke down the liberal distinction between the public/political and the private/personal. It treated as primary and public those values and characteristics traditionally assigned to women and children in the private sphere. The Counterculture emphasised spontaneity and dependence on others, rather than self-control; intuition and feeling, instead of detached rationality; cooperation and consensus over competition and efficiency; and a preference for face-to-face relationships rather than bureaucratic structure. The Counterculture also devalued those social priorities and motivations which had been traditionally masculine — aggressiveness, toughness, material success — and which had rewarded men more than women.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 267–8. Author’s emphasis omitted.
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1970), pp. 307–8. Originally published in 1959.
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 218. See Chapter VII, ‘The Myth of Objective Consciousness’, pp. 205–38, for full discussion.
Philip E. Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press. 1970), p. 90.
Ellen Willis, ‘The Family: Love It or Leave It’, in Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (Wideview Books/PEI Books, 1982), p. 155. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981.
Myra Friedman, Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin (New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 155. Originally published by William Morrow, New York.
Alix Kates Shulman, ‘Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, V, 4 (Summer 1980), 592 and 594.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978), pp. 259 and 273.
Ralph J. Gleason, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, The American Scholar, XXXVI, 4 (Autumn 1967), 556–7. Emphasis in the original.
Katherine Orloff, Rock ’N Roll Woman (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974). Interviews with Grace Slick, Terry Garthwaite and Bonnie Raitt, pp. 160, 73, 65 and 115.
Robin Morgan, ‘Women Disrupt the Miss America Pageant’ and ‘Three Articles on WITCH’, in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1978), pp. 64 and 74.
Margaret Fuller, ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’, in Perry Miller (ed.), Margaret Fuller: American Romantic: A Selection from Her Writings and Correspondence (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp. 137 and 172.
Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 73.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated and edited by H. M. Parshley (New York: Bantam, 1961), pp. 138, 145 and 60.
Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1971), pp. 5–6.
Barbara Starrett, ‘I Dream in Female: The Metaphors of Evolution’, in Gina Covina and Laurel Galana (eds), The Lesbian Reader: An Amazon Quarterly Anthology (Oakland, California: Amazon Press, 1975), p. 112.
‘WITCH Documents’, in Robin Morgan (ed.), Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1970), pp. 539–40.
Jules Henry, Pathways to Madness (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973), p. 374.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 174.
Kit Leder, ‘Women in Communes’, Women: A Journal of Liberation, I, 1 (Fall 1969), 34.
William Hedgepeth and Dennis Stock, The Alternative: Communal Life in New America (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 74. Emphasis in the original.
Kinkade, quoted in Richard Fairfield, Communes USA: A Personal Tour (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1972), p. 98; Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 171.
Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 171.
Vivian Estellachild, ‘Hippie Communes’, Women: A Journal of Liberation, II, 2 (Winter, 1971), 40–3;
Judith of Lime Saddle, ‘Some Views from Women in Communes’, Communities, 7 (March—April 1974), 13.
Copyright information
© 1987 Rochelle Gatlin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gatlin, R. (1987). Women and the 1960s Counterculture. In: American Women Since 1945. The Contemporary United States. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18896-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18896-3_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-31182-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-18896-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)