8.12 Youth Culture of the 1960s

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), New Left, Free Speech Movement, Democratic Convention, Yippies, Weather Underground, counterculture, folk music, rock music, Woodstock, sexual revolution, Alfred Kinsley

student movements and the New Left

• Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (1962) - radical student organization calling for university decisions to be made through participatory democracy

  • New Left - activists and individuals who supported the ideas of the leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Tom Hayden

• Free Speech Movement - Berkeley students demanded an end to university restrictions on students’ political activities and greater voice in university government

students against the Vietnam War

• student demonstrations increased with greater U.S. involvement and drafts

• Democratic Convention (1968) - off-campus protest in Chicago involving peaceful and radical antiwar protesters, anarchists, Yippies, demonstration broken up by police

  • Yippies - members of Youth International Party

• Weather Underground - most radical fringe of SDS, embraced violence and vandalism as forms of protest against government war policies, racial unfairness, and corporate greed

  • extremism and bombings discredited New Left idealism

counterculture

expressed in rebellious clothing, music, drug usage, communal living, folk music, rock music

• Woodstock Music Festival - gathering of hundreds of thousands of young people

• sexual revolution - pioneered by Alfred Kinsley, STD antibiotics and birth control pills contributed to increased visibility and acceptance of premarital sex, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality

Alfred Kinsley

pioneered surveys of sexual practice, revealing premarital sex, marital infidelity, and homosexuality were more common than suspected (1940s and 1950s)