Sara Davidson, author of Loose Change (University of California Press, 1997) said, “It was resisted from top to bottom in society, by the straight world and just as vigorously and adamantly by the counterculture”. As John Denver’s popular lyrics went, “Kiss me and smile for me / tell me that you’ll wait for me.” Although women were peers in theory, in reality they continued to handle the same homemaking chores their mothers had done: taking care of children, tending the garden, and cooking the food. The perfect woman of the ’60s counterculture, an image propagated in literature and art, was a hippie chick who had a good time, took care of her man, and didn’t complain when he dumped her for the open road: the “old lady”. It was only a short decade after the restrictive ’50s, when women were expected to have dinner on the table and a nightcap in their perfectly-manicured hands before Father came home from work. While young men of the movement loved the sexual equality part (more women saying yes meant more sex all around), they balked at allowing women what they considered male freedoms. While the lasting image of ’60s teenagers is one of gentle, peace-loving hippies, in reality there was as much conflict in young people’s lives as there was in Vietnam freedom warred with law, love with jealousy, and commerce with creative expression.ĭealing with gender roles was equally as difficult. There was as much sadness, tension and anger as there was love”. Margo Adler, writer of Heretic’s Heart, says: “In the Berkeley of the mid-’60s there was an extraordinary amount of experimentation with sex and drugs, but that doesn’t mean that love filled the streets. The counterculture was a youth movement, which meant that along with the more popular peace, love, and understanding were equal amounts of angst and unhappiness. Crumb, now considered the greatest of the underground artists, played a large role in fostering this attitude, and through it, contributed to the demise of the first wave of the underground comix movement, which could have been an innovative forum for creative expression. However, rather than offering an open forum, these comix became a male-dominated arena, and rather than providing an intelligent, supportive atmosphere, they tended to endorse violence and misogyny. Underground comix started in the mid-‘60s as an exciting new venue for political discussion that was available to anyone with a photocopier and something to say. Although ’60s counterculture gave the women’s movement a chance to blossom, women were fighting an uphill battle they had to go up against not just The Man, but the men: their own supposedly sympathetic compatriots.
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