Posted on 01/01/2018 11:30:04 AM PST by otness_e
In a way, it does (though not in a way that made it any better of a time period). I definitely know the Vietnam Veteran and Lawyer were the only guys in the opening who truly impressed me (I don’t know if they actually were conservative or liberal, though). At least the Veteran actually called out the Sixties as being a bad time and cited smoking weed as one of the reasons (though that being said, he did unfortunately imply that we shouldn’t have been in Vietnam), and the deep-voiced glasses wearing Lawyer definitely seemed to be advocating that the Weathermen be executed based on what he was saying.
And yeah, definitely agreed. Diversity only results in division (heck, it’s literally in the root word for it.), not true strength.
Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll?
Try just sex. Prior to the 60s, the overwhelming culture was to teach youth to make wise choices, to delay gratification, to use caution and make sure you were making the right choice before doing something fun that might have consequences you were not yet prepared for.
Sex, Of course, was the paramount fun.
The birth control pill changed all that. You could have fun without consequences. Abortion became popular precisely because the pill did not always work...or people forgot to take it, etc.
You could have fun without consequences turned the focus to fun and then to happiness. In the 1950s, happiness was one of several personal qualities that were valued. But many other qualities competed with happiness.
Post birth control, fun resulting in happiness became #1 and pre-empted all other. Immediate gratification became the expectation. That led to the teaching in college in the 60s that we could have both guns and butter... both economic prosperity and a war.
There is no other thing Post WWII that has changed US culture and society more than birth control.
Well, to be fair, the Pill also qualifies as a drug, not to mention LSD and thus various hallucinogenic drugs like grass were all the rage back then. But yeah, sex is the primary part of the sixties influence.
Think about the sixties in relation to a child graduating from high school this year. The Vietnam war was is to them as the Spanish American war was to a boomer.
The solution is to speak to the kids today. Talk about the reality of the war—what it meant to you and your peers. Record your experiences.
Remeber, the documentarians of today were babies or not even born in the 1960s. They are writing the history—unless you do.
Marcuse was the father of the new left, which had a large influence on the 60’s
I went from 20 to 29 in the 60’s. A big problem was that there weren’t a helluva lot more Kent States. Another major catastrophe was the election of Johnson over Goldwater. The terrible after effects of that continue on to this day.
Yeah, no kidding, and the rest of the Frankfurt School also had a massive influence as well.
I have to tell you that in fact women were traditionally not considered candidates for professions. This is a fact. The only two professions which were open to them were nursing and teaching. And nursing as a profession did not exist prior to the Civil war era. Women didn’t get the vote until less than a century ago. These things are true. The fact that teaching was so close to being the only profession open to women had the effect of subsidizing education; women who would have undertaken more seriously regarded roles in society took up teaching instead.In fact during WWII the US Army had a codebreaking operation in Washington, and one of their covers for the secret operation was the fact that women were doing all the work, so it couldn’t possibly have been serious work of interest to spies. Meanwhile, of course, the women were straitly charged against giving any hint to the outside world of what they were doing.
In thinking about the charges against Roy Moore, they boiled down to the fact that he spent his 20s in Vietnam, and came home and took interest in unmarried girls. Well, guess what! In my HS class it seemed as if 95% of the girls were married within a year of HS graduation. Granted that that was a few years ahead of Vietnam - but also it was Pennsylvania, not Alabama. IOW, not every woman who was unmarried at age 30 ever would marry. And altho he ended up marrying a divorcee, it would have been understandable indeed for him to not have considered divorcees his primary market going in.
That relates to “women’s place” exactly how? Girls learned housekeeping skills by mentorship from their mothers - and realistically, a girl wouldn't have to be 20 yo to have learned as much as she was ever likely to about housekeeping skills without being in charge of them herself. And the same is not true of a man, who needs a college degree or other technical training/experience to qualify to support a family. Thus there is nothing really strange about a 30yo man taking interest in a teenaged girl. It has always been typical for grooms to be older than their brides.
Like I said, I really fail to see how she wouldn’t be applied for the medical profession during that time since... well, being a nurse IS IN the medical profession. It’s kind of the point of being a nurse, to be able to provide medical needs to someone prior to a doctor’s visit, not to mention first aid if someone is undergoing injuries or medical problems in the air. Not to mention first aid and medical training is actually required during the fifties to become an air stewardess anyways (at least until the late 1950s when they dropped that bit).
And I don’t deny that women probably had few opportunities in professions (many of them weren’t even interested in those kinds of professions anyhow barring the ones listed, or even if they were, they also had some sense of family unity and respect towards their husbands especially if they came from a culture that looked down upon men who couldn’t provide for their families), or that women weren’t allowed to vote until the 1920s. I’m just saying that it makes zero sense to claim they were specifically barred from entering the medical and science professions during the 1950s, since you kind of need some knowledge in medical stuff and science to even BE a nurse (now, pre-Civil War, I can understand since nursing as a profession didn’t even exist yet as you said). Besides, it’s not necessarily rare for women to be in the work force by that time. My paternal grandmother briefly worked at IBM regarding cataloguing while my grandpa was fighting on the German Front during WWII, and she did a good enough job that they even considered giving her a permanent job at it. She refused, due to respect for her husband (my grandpa was of norwegian descent, and it would have resulted in him being looked down upon if he was not the breadwinner).
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