You’re Gonna Make It After All

The TV program, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, modelled new ways of being, not just for young, single working women, but for everybody who worked. The series taught a new workplace etiquette premised on the equality of male and female workers. Mary also formed an informal sisterhood with her neighbour Rhoda. Perhaps most importantly, the series suggested that “family” could be co-workers and friends as well as biological family.

The Look I Want to Know Better

Youth becomes the defining force in fashion starting in the 1960s. This chapter looks at younger and older men’s adoption of a traditional womanly attitude toward fashion where clothing becomes a signifier or who one is. Stylish older men followed the British peacock look in the late 1960s. Younger men resisted fashion until the idea of hip consumerism emerged, enabling what they regarded as a holistic and authentic approach to style.

Introduction

This introduction sets up the argument that because traditional authorities lost power and centrality by the end of the 1960s, the popular culture became a more potent model for how individuals might live their lives. This was especially true of members of the baby boomer generation because of their numbers and life stages in the 1970s. While there was a backlash against the diversity and equality that were important features of this new society, most individual American lives changed because of the 1960s revolutions.

Conclusions

The conclusion argues that American society went from a pre-1960s hierarchical structure with white, middle-class men at the top to one that enabled individuals to define who they wanted to be, what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to love. The new attitude was both exhilarating and scary, but definitely present by the end of the 1970s.

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

In November of 1978 more than 900 Americans died in Jonestown, all followers of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple movement. Journalists themselves changed by the 1960s attempted to help Americans make sense of what happened there. In the end, the public response to the Jonestown tragedy demonstrates how many lessons from the 1960s Americans absorbed. They learned to be survivors and to fight the system however and whenever they could. Yet their viewpoint was fundamentally changed as they made more judgments in moral rather than legal or rational terms, thinking of Jones as evil.

I Feel the Earth Move

Singer-songwriters in the early 1970s played a key role in helping younger Americans define a different pattern of romance than their parents’ experiences, one focused around serial monogamy. Singer-songwriters helped to model these new patterns both with their songs and their publicly-lived lives.

Obviously Queer

Expert understandings of homosexuality changed in the 1970s as psychologists and doctors no longer regarded homosexuality as a deviance, accepting it as a sexual identity a person might be born with. Television, both sitcoms and dramas, depicted gay men and women in the 1970s, the first official representations, yet sitcoms presented gays as ordinary people while dramas often used them as villains. The emergence of the Christian Right as a political force raised a challenge to these new norms presented in the popular culture. Using such 1960s techniques as boycotts, the Right especially regarded the normalization of different sexual identities as a threat to family. Briefly succeeding in eliminating those images, by the 1980s, Americans were more accepting of sexual difference.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

The television mini-series of Alex Haley’s book Roots marked a television milestone, presenting an African-American family as the stars of a show intended for a broad American audience. The popularity of the series reflected Americans’ valuing of diversity in the 1970s, but also whites’ interest in their own pasts. What appealed to the audience is the degree to which Haley’s ancestors overcame adversity and fought authority even in the few ways allowed them. The program popularized a new interpretation of African-American history.