Linda LeClair was an unlikely sex symbol. The Barnard sophomore had grown up going to Sunday school in Hudson, New Hampshire. At twenty, she wore her lank dirty-blond hair tucked behind her ears. For press photos, she favored cardigans and pastel-colored shift dresses that fell at her knees. She had been living with her boyfriend, Peter Behr, in an apartment on Riverside Drive for around two years.
He was a junior at Columbia; they had met in a seminar. It is difficult to imagine that either of them anticipated the uproar that they would cause when they agreed to give an interview to a New York Times reporter in March 1968. The trends piece that appeared, quoting them, made Linda into a national celebrity—and scapegoat—overnight.
“An Arrangement: Living Together for Convenience, Security, Sex,” the headline read. The article called Peter only by his first name, and it called Linda “Susan.” But she had identified herself as a sophomore at Barnard, and the college quickly tracked her down. Almost as soon as they did, calls and letters started inundating the office of the president, Martha Peterson. Some men wrote in saying that LeClair was living proof that women were ruined by higher education. Prominent Barnard alumnae, including Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, an heiress to the New York Times fortune, threatened to cut off donations to the school if she was not expelled immediately.
Officially, LeClair was in trouble for lying on her housing forms. According to Barnard regulations, students could live off campus only with family or an employer. She had claimed to be working as an au pair on the Upper West Side and provided the address of a married friend who agreed to cover for her. But the hate mail that poured in made it clear that she had violated a more serious, unspoken rule.
As disciplinary proceedings against LeClair began and the national media picked up the story, letters arrived at Barnard from all over the country. They called LeClair a “whore” and an “alleycat”; they called Barnard “Barnyard.” In his widely syndicated column, the conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. denounced this undergraduate student as an “unemployed concubine” who was “gluttonous for sex and publicity.”
When Life magazine put her on their April cover, LeClair said the opposite. All the attention was exhausting. “I find it hard to think of myself as a person any more.” She shook her head. “I have ceased to exist. I am Linda LeClair, the issue.”
What exactly was the issue? It could not be only that a young woman was having premarital sex; statistics had long shown that most young women did. Nor was LeClair a “whore” by any stretch. She had been in a monogamous relationship for years. What rankled was that she felt no need to hide it. Again and again the hate mail Barnard received used the verb “flaunt.” LeClair and Behr were “openly flaunting their disregard for moral codes.” They were “flaunting their dereliction.”
LeClair and Behr rallied fellow students to support Linda. They had a mimeograph machine in their apartment, and they printed hundreds of pamphlets and questionnaires. Three hundred Barnard students anonymously admitted that they had lied on their own housing forms; sixty sent the college signed letters attesting that they had done so.
LeClair and her defenders argued that the Barnard regulations constituted a form of sex discrimination, since Columbia placed no equivalent restrictions on male students. And they argued that all students, male or female, had a right to date however they wished.
“Is the purpose of Barnard College to teach students or to control their private lives?” LeClair asked an interviewer at Time magazine. “I believe that it is the former. Barnard has no right to control personal behavior.” President Peterson soon pressured her into dropping out, and Peter Behr left Columbia in solidarity. But they had made their point, and those who shared their point of view would win in the long run. They already were winning. By the late 1960s, the belief that everyone has a right to love without outside interference was becoming widespread.
* * *
We are all heirs to the sexual revolution. Whatever our sexual preferences, we now live and date in the world that revolution created, and we do so freer from fears of ostracism, persecution, or unwanted pregnancy than we would be if it had not taken place. But the expression came to refer to such a wide range of phenomena that it can be difficult to know what exactly we mean when we say it.
It is also easy to forget that the 1960s marked its second coming. The term “sexual revolution” was first used to describe the antics of the Flappers and Fussers of the Roaring Twenties. Two young and then unknown New Yorker writers, James Thurber and E. B. White, coined it in 1929, in a book that they wrote together and Thurber illustrated. Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do parodied the kinds of advice manuals that had become popular over the previous decade, which used Freudian vocabulary to explain to readers their own sex lives and psychological “adjustment.”
In the chapter titled “The Sexual Revolution,” the authors described the changes taking place in the language of rights. Specifically, they said that the revolution began when young women discovered that they had “the right to be sexual.” When the archetypal New Woman went to college, and then took a paying job, they said, she began to discover that she could do many things that only men had done before. The New Woman rented her own apartment. She smoked and drank and bobbed her hair. Sometimes she even wanted sex.
On January 24, 1964, Time magazine announced that “The Second Sexual Revolution” had arrived. The cover story observed that “champagne parties for teenagers, padded brassières for twelve-year-olds, and ‘going steady’ at ever younger ages” had resulted in an “orgy of open-mindedness.”
There have always been rebels and libertines. Plenty of statistics show that turn-of-the-century shopgirls and dykes, Greeks and fairies, could be just as promiscuous as the hippies who succeeded them. The difference was that the first group had often described their own activities as unnatural, or at least exceptional. Their sex was sexy because it felt illicit.
By contrast, the soldiers of the second sexual revolution declared that no desire could be unnatural. If prior generations had winked that rules were made to be broken, more and more young people seemed to believe that no rules should exist. They agreed with the Flappers that everyone had a “right to be sexual.” However, they did not stress the equality that this right gave them. Instead, they argued that having sex was a way to express another inalienable right: freedom.
* * *
The 1960s’ most important philosopher of freedom was a Jewish Marxist named Herbert Marcuse. Often hailed as the “father of the New Left,” he fled Nazi Germany and eventually took a position as a professor at Berkeley, where his teaching and writing made him a hero to the student radicals.
Marcuse’s 1955 book Eros and Civilization anticipated the second sexual revolution, saying that technological progress would soon make sexual repression obsolete. Following Marx, Marcuse argued that increasing automation would eliminate the need for work and expand the opportunities for leisure. Freed from labor, people would soon escape what Marx called the “realm of necessity” and enter the “realm of freedom.” This meant that everyone would have more time to do what he or she wanted—including experimenting with sex.
To make the most of this new freedom, Marcuse wanted people to unlearn the Freudian psychology that had become so popular in the preceding decades. For Freud, sexual repression was an essential ingredient of human civilization. If we all had as much sex as we wanted all the time, Freud said, our species would never have discovered fire or made the wheel or figured out how to grow food or build houses or develop medicines.
Although this may have been true at an earlier stage of human history, Marcuse argued that sexual repression was no longer necessary. The new leisure would liberate sexuality, and transform society in the process. Laws governing sexual behavior would be repealed. Traditional institutions like marriage and monogamy would be overthrown.
Marcuse’s message resonated with the partisans of the second sexual revolution. In his 1965 book The Erotic Revolution, the Beat poet Lawrence Lipton hailed the emancipation of sexual pleasure that technology and prosperity would soon make possible. “‘The New Leisure’ is already presenting new opportunities for orgiastic recharging of the life-force,” he wrote.
Like other figures of the counterculture, Lipton demanded an end to all legal restraints on sexual behavior: “Repeal all the laws and statutes regulating premarital sex. Repeal all laws making homosexuality, male or female, illegal … Repeal all laws making any sexual act, the so-called ‘unnatural acts,’ illegal.”
These laws had tried to contain sexuality within the conventions of marriage. They said that individuals should be allowed to invest their sexual energy only in particular kinds of relationships—the ones that would create new nuclear families and produce children. Lipton disagreed. He said that private relationships were like private property. Individuals should be able to spend their own sexual desires, and whatever desire they attracted from others, however they saw fit.
The ways that sexual revolutionaries spoke about sex often echoed the ways that free-market advocates were beginning to speak about the economy. Both wanted to maximize individual liberty. Both agreed that a laissez-faire approach was best.
While Marcuse was in Berkeley demanding sexual liberation, the economist Milton Friedman was in Chicago arguing for market liberalization. Friedman wanted to make markets as “free” as possible, by shrinking the state and slashing social protections. He believed that removing all barriers to economic activity was the fastest way to create a wealthy society.
The sexual revolutionaries said the same things about sexuality. Even though Friedman and Marcuse came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, each wanted to liberate individuals from all external restraints. The second sexual revolution is often cited as the moment when dating died. Dating did not die; it was simply deregulated. “Free love” turned the meet market of dating into a free market.
* * *
Laissez-Faire Love took many different guises. Before Marcuse and Lipton wrote about eros and the orgiastic life force, Hugh Hefner launched Playboy magazine. The first issue hit the newsstands in 1953. The centerfold showed a stark-naked Marilyn Monroe, sitting on folded knees and tilting back with one arm crossed behind her head. A wall of scarlet fabric is unfurled behind her. Her eyes are closed but her ruby lips are parted. They match the fabric.
Alongside nudes, Playboy brimmed with photos of “bachelor pads,” well appointed with barware and stereo equipment. The magazine allowed readers to enjoy a fantasy life of pure leisure, where having sex would be just like drinking a cocktail or listening to a record. Afterward, a man could smoke a cigarette and forget about the whole thing as quickly as he would the details of a James Bond paperback.
The life of ease that Playboy promised not only freed men from the constraints of marriage or monogamy. By turning female bodies into consumer objects, it also freed men from the burden of having to have feelings about the women they slept with. The editors promised readers that in the new age of abundance, they could “enjoy the pleasures that the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved.” The architectural spreads promised men that they, too, could have rooms of their own.
Playboy said that sex was ideally a form of recreation. The vision clearly appealed to people. At least, some people. The first issue sold out in two weeks, and Playboy quickly became a cultural fixture. By the early 1970s, each issue sold millions of copies and one in four male college students in the United States subscribed. By then, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the oral contraceptive pill for use. The availability of reliable birth control seemed to make it possible for women as well as men to at least daydream about treating sex as harmless fun.
When Cosmopolitan hired Helen Gurley Brown to rebrand it in 1965, after a decade of falling circulation, they created a national spokeswoman for the Playboy point of view. With Brown as editor, Cosmopolitan became a Playboy for girls—sort of. Like Playboy, the magazine was all about consumer pleasures, of which sex was the most important. Like Playboy, the covers featured scantily clad, conventionally beautiful white women. But while Playboy presented its readers with images of women they could enjoy and then dispose of, Cosmo told women how to make themselves enjoyable and disposable—the kinds of girls playboys desired.
The magazine called the ideal reader it imagined the Fun Fearless Female. Fun Fearless Feminism promised young women that they could have the same freedoms that their brothers and boyfriends did when it came to enjoying sex. It said that all these pleasures would come to them along with the other formerly masculine privilege they were suddenly claiming: the right to work outside their homes.
* * *
When a census taker arrived at the front door of the Friedan household in 1960, Betty was having a coffee with her friend and neighbor Gertie. Gertie overheard the man asking Betty what her occupation was, and Betty answering “housewife.”
Gertie interrupted. “You should take yourself more seriously.”
Betty corrected herself. “Actually, I’m a writer.”
It took her two more years to finish the book she was then struggling to finish, The Feminine Mystique. By the time it came out in 1963, Friedan was already used to giving interviews and appearing on television; the excerpts she had been publishing were garnering widespread attention. Over the next few years, she would be widely hailed for having helped launch the second-wave feminist movement in the United States.
The Feminine Mystique opened with a chapter describing the sense of entrapment and discontentment that Friedan herself experienced as a full-time housewife during the 1940s and ’50s, despite leading a life that closely resembled the ideals she saw on television, in movies, and in women’s magazines. Friedan attested that her peers were suffering, too. She called what afflicted them “the problem that has no name.” By the end of the first chapter, she had diagnosed it. The housewives suffering from anxiety and depression and the alcohol they used to self-medicate were all struggling to come to terms with a voice in their head that said: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”
For hundreds of pages, The Feminine Mystique investigates the forces that conspired to convince American women that they should want this life—and that if they were unhappy in it, there was something wrong with them. In the final chapter, Friedan laid out the necessary steps women could take to emancipate themselves.
The first thing they needed was work. Women, Friedan said, must make a “lifetime commitment … to a field of thought, to work of serious importance to society. Call it a ‘life plan,’ a ‘vocation,’ a ‘life purpose’ if that dirty word career has too many celibate connotations,” she joked.
Friedan devoted many pages to the importance of systematic reforms in order to help women meet these goals. She called for a national program similar to the GI Bill for women who wanted to continue their education, which would cover tuition fees, books, travel expenses, and even household help, while they pursued higher degrees that might enable them to reenter the workforce.
She was optimistic that the first lucky women who broke through into male professions would help their sisters. “When enough women make life plans geared toward their real abilities, and speak out for maternity leaves or even maternity sabbaticals … they will [not] have to sacrifice the right to honorable competition and contribution any more than they will have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood.”
Yet in the popular version of the call to women to develop life plans, the serious and systematic elements of Friedan’s argument faded out. The popular feminism Helen Gurley Brown pioneered at Cosmo sold well because it turned the life plan of the Career Girl into another glossy product.
* * *
Before she took over Cosmo, Brown had become a national celebrity for her advice book Sex and the Single Girl. It was hugely successful. One point of comparison: To date, The Feminine Mystique has sold three million copies. Sex and the Single Girl sold two million within the first three weeks. Sex and the Single Girl told female readers that they should feel just as free as the men they worked with to date around. They should ignore all the concerned friends and relatives urging them to get married and enjoy casual sex while focusing on their careers.
Like Playboy, Helen Gurley Brown constantly described sex as a form of “play” and “fun.” In her bestselling follow-up book Sex and the Office, Brown even refers to her male coworkers as “playmates.” Yet if a Single Girl could collect lovers, just as a playboy would, a big difference remained between them. Hugh Hefner constantly appeared in photographs in his bathrobe. He presented a vision of the life of Playboy as a life of leisure. Helen Gurley Brown, always pictured in neatly tailored skirt suits, knew that the women she wrote for could expect no such luck.
“There is a catch to achieving single bliss,” she warned. “You have to work like a son of a bitch.”
Despite her breezy prose, Brown’s descriptions of the life of the Single Girl make it sound exhausting. “Why else is the single woman attractive?” she asked. “She has more time and often more money to spend on herself. She has the extra twenty minutes to exercise every day, an hour to make her face up for their date.”
At the dawn of dating, Charity Girls had turned to men to treat them because the pittances they earned hardly allowed them to support themselves otherwise, much less afford any leisure. But Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl does not aspire to rest.
“Your most prodigious work will be on you—at home,” Brown instructed. “You can’t afford to leave any facet of you unpolished.”
In asides that are no doubt meant to be endearing, she hints at the rigors of her own beauty routine. “When I got married, I moved in with six-pound dumbbells, slant board, an electronic device for erasing wrinkles, several pounds of soy lecithin, powdered calcium and yeast-liver concentrate, for Serenity Cocktails and enough high-powered vitamins to generate life in a statue,” she says.
Brown encourages Single Girls to treat their jobs as opportunities to meet men, just as the working-class Shopgirls who came before them did. However, Brown tells readers that ideally they perform this work with no end in sight. Shopgirls aspired to find husbands to save them from the sales floor. But the ambitious Single Girl reverses their priorities. She sees her desire for men as a kind of engine to make herself work harder.
“Managements who think that romances lower the work output are right out of their skulls,” Brown exclaimed. “A girl in love with her boss will knock herself out seven days a week and wish there were more days.”
Sex and the Office also extolled work as the highest moral virtue. It is through work on her person, as well as her professional image, that a Single Girl comes to deserve the delights that come her way. “Your goal is a sexy office life with marvelous things happening to you,” Brown says, “and these don’t accrue to girls who are slugs.”
In an earlier era, Shopgirls had aspired to attain the glamour of a life of ease. Brown made doing endless labor look like the most glamorous thing imaginable. The highest goal, in this worldview, is not actual companionship but desirability. The Single Girls Brown writes about work hard to accrue the attraction of men like currency. The men themselves seem interchangeable.
“Use them,” Brown exhorts her reader, “in a perfectly nice way just as they use you.”
Playboy was all for it. Hugh Hefner ended up being one of Brown’s biggest advocates. Her insistence that regular gals were interested in sex encouraged Playboy readers that “the pulchritudinous Playmates” they admired were not “a world apart.” They were everywhere.
“Potential Playmates are all around you,” the editors wrote. “The new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found Miss July in our circulation department, processing subscriptions, renewals, and back copy orders.”
Brown promised that if you just worked hard enough, you might be the girl lucky enough to get plucked up by the powers that were, to become the ultimate Sex and the Office success story—a nationally recognizable pornographic star.
* * *
It is easy to imagine why a young woman facing down a lifetime spent making beds and sandwiches and grocery shopping and watching the light change until dinner and then getting drubbed nightly by the same man in missionary position might find the life Helen Gurley Brown described appealing. But as a solution to the problems that Friedan had diagnosed, it was shortsighted.
On the surface, The Feminine Mystique and Sex and the Single Girl seem like very different books. One is set in suburbia; the other takes place in the city. The narrator of one is a bored housewife; the heroine of the other is a sexually liberated career girl. Yet the two books share more in common than it seems. Both embraced the idea that once individual women took paid work outside their homes, all women’s problems would be solved.
Both also shared the same blind spot. They imagined that “allowing” women to work would eliminate gender inequality.
The opportunities that certain women gained in the 1960s to work outside their homes and earn money did give them choices. As Brown emphasized, Single Girls could now support themselves. They had the income to buy all kinds of things—particularly if they opted not to have children. But this freedom to choose how they spent their time and money did not end gender inequality. It simply gave women a chance to work harder trying to break even in a system that was rigged against them.
Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backward and in high heels, the saying goes. The Single Girl was told to do everything a Playboy did while making herself into a Playmate as well.
To put it slightly differently, the sexually liberated woman whom Brown describes does not get out of the predicament of having her worth defined by men. In the end, the Cosmo girl was not so different from the Steady who desperately fended off her boyfriend in the backseat of his car. The one was told that she had to parry male desire. The other was told that she had to attract it constantly. Neither convention produced any model of what a woman who was an agent of desire might look like.
Black feminists and working-class feminists tended to be much more perceptive than their white middle-class counterparts about the limitations of Fun Fearless Feminism. Because African American women had always worked outside their homes, ever since their ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves, they did not mistake the “opportunity” to work as an adequate solution to all the problems that women had to deal with.
To work or not to work had only ever been a choice for a very limited part of the population. The rest knew that earning a wage was not a fix-all. In fact, many black feminists attested that in their homes was the only place that they felt respite from a racist world.
When the young black writer Gloria Watkins published her first book, Feminist Theory, in 1984 under the pen name bell hooks, she faulted Betty Friedan’s school of feminism for its obliviousness of the majority of American women.
“Friedan’s famous phrase, ‘the problem that has no name,’ … actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life,” hooks wrote. “The one-dimensional perspective on women’s reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement.”
The new feminine mystique that Brown hyped has also persisted. Cultural icons from Britney Spears to Sheryl Sandberg still tell young women that, for them, the prerequisite to a good life is an insatiable appetite for effort.
As a teen, the pop star entreated an imaginary boyfriend to “hit her one more time” and panted that she was “a slave 4 him.” But after marriage, children, divorce, and a very public nervous breakdown, her comeback album celebrated Single Girl self-reliance. “You’d better work … work … work … work…,” she intoned in her hit single “Work, B*tch.” Sandberg offers the same advice to young female professionals in Lean In. When the going gets tough, she says, “keep a foot on the gas pedal.” If working does not work, work harder. A worthy girl always has more to give.
* * *
If Fun Fearless Feminism failed to address the concerns of so many women, then what explains its success? It was market-friendly. This brand of feminism can be used to sell almost anything.
During the 1960s and ’70s, Virginia Slims turned feminism into an advertising slogan. You’ve come a long way, baby! meant: You have come far enough to be able to buy the gender you were assigned at birth back in the form of special cigarettes. Companies fell over themselves to capture the earnings of the Fun Fearless Female. They sold her back her labor as liberation. Today we can thank them for ads that brand everything from pens to dildos to political candidates who oppose reproductive rights as “empowered.”
Cosmopolitan continues to speak as if having choices were the same thing as having power. Its signature feature is the list. Every single issue lists dozens of Ways You Can Please Your Man. That the same tips show up, worded slightly differently each month, should tip us off that our choices may not be as infinite as the constant updates imply, and that they may have less to do with fulfilling our needs than with fulfilling those of the magazine to sell issues. Read one, and you will find that there are fewer choices than the cover led you to believe. Almost invariably, many are rewordings of the last month’s choices. At least three will involve applying pressure to the prostate.
Most important, your pleasure rarely makes the list. Cosmo not infrequently lists, as one of the main reasons to enjoy sex, the fact that men like women who like having it.
Brown was progressive in her positivity about sex. But she did not challenge a view of the world in which women were there to offer recreation to men. Part of the ways they were supposed to make things easy was by performing the familiar role of the woman-as-object. Brown did not call the power structures that enforced sexism into question. On the contrary, she directly told her readers that it was morally imperative, as well as professionally strategic, to accept these structures and work them to her advantage.
“I don’t feel there’s any justifiable cause to criticize a boss ever,” she declared in Sex and the Office. “You must love him like crazy. Denying love and devotion to a good boss who spends eight hours a day with you would be like a yellow-breasted mother swamp finch denying worms to her yellow-breasted swamp-finch babies.”
The opening pages of Sex and the Single Girl belie that although Brown encourages her readers to revel in their sexual freedoms, these freedoms do not make them independent. The book begins with a boast.
“I married for the first time at thirty-seven,” Brown writes. “It could be construed as something of a miracle considering how old I was and how eligible he was.” She goes on to tell us that her husband is a successful Hollywood producer and that she herself did not start out with any unfair advantages. She was not unusually pretty and did not grow up with money; she did not go to college.
“But I don’t think it’s a miracle that I married my husband. I think I deserve him! For seventeen years I worked hard to become the kind of woman who might interest him,” she exclaims.
Before we embark on the adventure of single girlhood with her as our guide, she wants us to know why we should trust her: In the end, she did get her prince.
Given the choice between housework and working like a son of a bitch, it becomes easy to understand why a young woman might say “Fuck it,” toss her Valium and soy lecithin, and head for the West Coast.
* * *
The second version of the sexual revolution was more radical than the one Playboy and Cosmo developed. The hippies of the 1960s were not the first Americans to call themselves free lovers. The country has a long history of countercultural movements gathering forces beneath that banner. The white abolitionist Frances Wright established its first “free love” commune in 1825. She invited freed slaves and abolitionists to live and work together in a community that had no marriage and no expectation of monogamy.
Many nineteenth-century Marxists, anarchists, and feminists denounced marriage as a form of “sexual slavery” or prostitution. They rejected the idea of private romantic contracts that, they said, led men and women to treat one another like property. These critics recognized the fundamental inequality on which marriage rested: economic conventions and divorce laws that heavily favored men. The fact that many wives had no means of earning money outside the home meant that they had to sit tight while their husbands screwed around. If a man left a woman, he lost only her. But if she left him, her livelihood dried up.
In the 1870s, Victoria Woodhull, an activist who became the first female candidate to run for president of the United States, campaigned on a free love platform.
“Yes, I am a Free Lover,” Woodhull told her audience in an 1871 speech. “I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”
By this, Woodhull meant that women should have rights to marry and divorce freely. She argued that instead of economic needs and social obligations, affection and choice should govern loving relationships. But she recognized that in order for free love to flourish, the individuals who wanted to practice it would have to build new institutions to replace marriages and families.
She told her listeners in 1871 that she had a “right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise” of her right to love. “It is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.”
The mistrust of institutions felt by many young Americans during the aftermath of the Civil War made a powerful comeback during the Vietnam War. Once again young people turned toward free love in order to express their dissatisfaction with the world of their parents. But in contrast to Woodhull, they focused on what they wanted to destroy rather than what they wanted to build.
Young radicals in New York and San Francisco knew that they wanted something very different from the “sexy … successful life” that glossy magazines of the era promised. They did not want to grow up to be like their hypocritical fathers who pored over Playboy, or their stay-at-home mothers who sniffled when they found sticky issues stashed under the mattress. They did not want a more fun, fearless version of the society they had grown up in. They wanted a new world altogether. They were just not sure exactly how it should look.
* * *
One of the most influential free lovers was Jefferson Poland (at various points in his career, he went by Jefferson Fuck and Jefferson Clitlick). Together with the gay activist Randy Wicker and the poet and musician Tuli Kupferberg, Poland founded the Sexual Freedom League in New York. Members met weekly to debate just how many sexual taboos one could violate. Gender roles, they unanimously agreed, should be abolished. Bisexuality and group sex were in. Monogamy was out. Bestiality, they decided, was okay as long as the animal did not resist.
The rallying cry of the Sexual Freedom League was “no rape, no regulation.” Consent, or the absence of it, was the only factor they believed ought to restrict anyone from engaging in any sex act he or she wanted. In 1965, Poland moved to San Francisco and founded a chapter of the Sexual Freedom League there. He held a highly publicized “nude wade-in” at a city beach and participated in the vibrant street culture of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
Student protests at Berkeley, which had paralyzed the campus during the previous school year, produced an environment receptive to these ideas.
The spiritualist Richard Thorne had been using the Berkeley Barb, an underground paper that started on campus, as a platform to argue that in the absence of monogamy, copulation was “holy.” “We must abstain from selfishness, jealousy, possessiveness,” he wrote, “but not copulation.”
At the beginning of 1967, thousands of young people flooded Golden Gate Park for the “Human Be-In,” a public festival presenting Beat poetry, radical leftist speeches, and performances by hippie bands. The audience openly took drugs and sunbathed nude as reporters and photographers gawked and snapped pictures. The psychologist–turned–LSD evangelist Timothy Leary called on them to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
It was the image of freedom, but some worried it wouldn’t last. Standing onstage waiting to read his poetry, Allen Ginsberg turned to his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti and asked him a question below his breath: “What if we’re wrong?”
* * *
Images of the activities in San Francisco kept drawing more and more runaways and seekers. Many of them had no idea what they were looking for. They knew only what they were not looking for.
Julie Ann Schrader remembered seeing a series of photos of San Francisco in Life magazine when she was still a teenager living in suburban Wisconsin. They showed “a group of people wearing big smiles and little else at a love-in,” she reminisced to an interviewer in 2013. The moment she saw it, she said, she realized that she had to flee.
“If I remained in Wisconsin, I would marry my college sweetheart, teach Sunday school, have a family, and live the life my parents lived,” she wrote. “My future was locked in. The thought of it terrorized my spirit.” Schrader dropped out of school, ditched her middle-class life plan, and hitched a ride west. Many others did the same, eager to find love and romance outside the narrow possibilities that traditional marriage offered.
In San Francisco, couples dispensed with the formalities of dating. They met, mated, and drifted apart at incredible speeds. This is not to say that their relationships did not involve drama. Sex in San Francisco could mean many things. A one-night stand might lead to a spontaneous common-law marriage. A whirlwind romance might ensnare you in a life of hard drugs.
By the end of 1967, the Haight was flooded with runaways. The new world the hippies were trying to create was difficult to sustain. When they had repealed all the laws, they had not clearly established who would do the things that still needed to be done. In the absence of a plan, they often fell back onto highly stereotyped gender roles.
In her essay about the Summer of Love, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion described her encounter with “Max,” a young man who earnestly insists to her that it is possible to have loving relationships without any responsibilities or constraints.
“Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. ‘I’ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner and I come in three days late and tell her I’ve been balling some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say ‘That’s me, baby’ and she laughs and says ‘That’s you, Max.’”
“Max,” Didion concludes, “sees his life as a triumph over ‘don’ts.’”
Max may have rejected the repressive laws that had governed the lives of his parents. But what is striking about the relationship between Max and his “old lady” is how traditional it sounds. Max mentions his partner’s cooking offhand; he takes it for granted that she should make him meals and love him unconditionally. After the destruction of the institutions of marriage and family, it was unclear how else things would ever run.
The Haight did have one rogue group of volunteers who attempted to respond to the mounting disorder that was taking over the streets: the Diggers. The core members of this semianonymous group of artists and radicals had met performing in the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Their guiding star was the concept of “free.”
With a doctor named David Smith, the group established the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which treated the rampant spread of venereal disease and drug-related illness. They founded a “free store,” full of donated goods that anyone was allowed to take. They staged several “eat-ins,” serving free meals to runaways and municipal employees. They supported free street concerts by Big Brother and the Grateful Dead. They protested every for-profit, commercialized music event.
“Suckers buy what lovers get for free,” their protest signs declared. “It’s yours. You want to dance—dance in the street.”
The greatest ambition of the Diggers had been to teach by personal example.
The actor Peter Coyote, one of the founding members of the group, later explained their philosophy: “Our hope was that if we were skillful enough in creating concrete examples of existence as free people, the example would be infectious.”
Yet this process did not take place quite as spontaneously as they expected. Gathering clothes for the free store, cooking and distributing food—it all got to be a drag. And so, while the men planned spectacles to draw attention to the group, the women did the grunt work to keep things going.
They woke up at five in the morning, got the old truck running, stole or charmed meat and vegetables from grocers, cooked up hearty stews, lugged them, steaming, out to the Panhandle in massive steel milk containers, and ladled them out. Susan Keese, one of the female Diggers, later helped found the Black Bear commune north of San Francisco. She recalled what it took to keep the philosophy of “free” going.
“We would go collect free food from the San Francisco produce market a couple of days per week,” she told a reporter in 2007. “The guys at the market would give us food because of how we looked. We traded on that.” It turned out that free wasn’t free. Like Charity Girls of the 1890s and 1900s, these activists had to flirt for food; once they had it, they handed it over to boyfriends and strangers. The ethos that the Diggers promoted depended on being able to take advantage of female work.
Even the most politically radical men often sought traditional romantic relationships. In her autobiography, the activist and scholar Angela Davis expressed frustration and exhaustion at the sexism that she encountered while organizing with the Black Panther Party. “I was criticized very heavily, especially by male members … for doing ‘a man’s job.’ Women should not play leadership roles, they said. A woman was supposed to ‘inspire’ her man and educate his children.”
The activist and writer Toni Cade Bambara reported that the men she worked with in the Panthers justified their disregard for the concerns of female members by appealing to their shared ambitions to win racial justice. “Invariably I hear from some dude that Black women must be supportive and patient so that Black men can regain their manhood,” she recalled. “So the shit goes on.”
It made sense that many of the “dudes” Bambara worked with felt unmanned by the legacy of slavery. Systematic racism harshly punished black men for any show of sexuality and made it almost impossible for them to earn a living wage. Still, the fact was that the macho culture of the Black Panthers told its female members that they had to put their desires and aspirations second. Like the female Diggers, and like Max’s “old lady,” they should work and wait.
The Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael famously dissed the sisters who were trying to assist his cause. In 1964, he heard about a position paper that female volunteers were circulating about the role of women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the civil rights organization he would later lead. “What is the position of women in SNCC?” Carmichael joked. “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”
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Many “hippie chicks” ended up paying for “free” with more than shopping and washing dishes. They endured a culture of rampant sexual violence—of rape or sex they forced themselves to endure. “If It’s Their Thing,” the Berkeley Barb advised women in 1967, “Just Let ’em Leer.” Pity the women who did not feel so nonchalant.
In 1967, a member of the Diggers named Chester Anderson left the group in disgust and started publishing public communiqués on his mimeograph machine. Some of the bulletins that he posted around the Haight criticized the hypocrisy and racism of what he called “segregated bohemia.” Others criticized its misogyny. One announced that the streets had become dangerous for women.
“Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3000 mikes [micrograms of LSD, twelve times the standard dose] & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. The politics & ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.”
The policeman Colin Barker claimed in 1968 that rapes were so common in and around Golden Gate Park that they were “hardly ever reported.” The poet Ed Sanders described the neighborhood during those years as “a valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.”
Even when they were not drugged and “raffled off,” women in the counterculture often strained to live up to the ideal that they should always want sex. Susan Keese recalled her fears of seeming counter–sexual revolutionary. “There was this ethic that it was good for you to have as much sex as possible … and you were uptight and hung up if you did not. Some women seemed to be comfortable with that, but I was not.”
Within the counterculture, gameness for any sexual adventure was seen as proof of sophistication. Women felt enormous pressure to act on the principle of “free love,” even when their desires told them to act otherwise.
“It became the personal responsibility of women in the 1960s to work at removing their inhibitions,” the feminist Sheila Jeffreys recalled in her memoir Anticlimax. “To be accused by a man of having inhibitions was a serious matter, the implication being that the woman was old-fashioned, narrow-minded and somehow psychologically damaged.”
According to this logic, psychological health meant having to embrace a form of sexuality much like the one that Playboy purveyed. That is, sex understood strictly as (physical) “pleasure … without becoming emotionally involved.”
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The sexual revolution did encourage many women to do what they wanted, when they wanted, despite any cultural inhibitions they inherited. But when free lovers described the revolution as the freedom from all inhibition, they failed to acknowledge that individuals should also have the freedom to remain as inhibited as they like. Most of us feel inhibited when we feel unsafe. Many of us feel inhibited when we are with strangers. We may suddenly rediscover inhibitions and “hang-ups” after losing trust or interest in a partner.
Like Jeffreys, many women in the counterculture struggled to overcome creeping sensations of reluctance and fear. Often, they had good reasons to feel them. A woman was far more likely to experience sexual violence than her male counterpart. If a pregnancy or sexually transmitted infection resulted, she would almost always suffer worse consequences. The Summer of Love took place five years before she could legally seek an abortion.
Advocates of free love proposed to remove the obstacles that convention put in the way of the free exchange of affection. Yet in some cases, rather than liberating sex, sexual revolutionaries simply seemed to take it from people who were most vulnerable to being exploited.
Despite the great hopes that this era had placed on freedom, it could not bring the utopia that some had hoped for. In an unequal society, being freed from formal legal restrictions will not immediately make individuals equally free to pursue their ambitions. Freedom to start a business, for example, is not much use if you have no start-up capital. Freedom without food may mean only freedom to starve.
The free love that promised to liberate individuals from social conventions took a very particular model of male individuality for granted. It was based on a fantasy of manliness that media like Playboy sold. Freedom from having to feel certain ways about sex turned into an imperative not to feel anything about sex. This free love could start to look a lot like freedom from love.
Today, conservatives often say that the sexual revolution duped women into seizing freedoms they did not actually want. The opposite is true. The sexual revolution did not take things too far. It did not take things far enough. It did not change gender roles and romantic relationships as dramatically as they would need to be changed in order to make everyone as free as the idealists promised. It tore down walls, but it did not build a new world.