Robert E G Black History 450 Sexual Revolution to Political Revolution From Free Love to the Failure of Smash Monogamy

to the Strengthening of Marriage In the late 1960s, the radical organization Weatherman practiced criticism/selfcriticism sessions, in which one member would be attacked and berated over his flaws for hours on end. Doing this, they intended to break down the individual so he could rebuild himself within the collective. They also swapped sexual partners, sometimes breaking up established couples in the processthey called this smash monogamy. One night after Susan Sterns turn at the center of a criticism/self-criticism session, hours of being attacked over her egocentrism, she went to bed shell shocked.1 Susan told Weatherman leader Mark Rudd that she felt miserable, and he replied: I know how hard that first real criticism isits the toughest thing in the world to face how fucked up we are. But youll be much stronger for it, Susan.2 That night, as she was trying to sleep, she heard the muffled sobs of her friend Georgia, fending off Weatherman leader Mark Rudd in a nearby bed.3 Earlier, Rudd had told Georgia she had to strengthen herself to fight the reactionary tendencies within the collective. Now, Georgia told him I dont want you. I want Mike, she pleaded. I cant help it. I love him. As Rudd prepared to take what he wanted, he whispered endearingly, You have to put the demands of your collective above your love. Nothing comes before the collective. Lying there with her hands clamped over her ears, Susan Stern was struck by an idea she tried desperately to repress. Perhaps, she thought,

1 2

David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed (Jackson: UP of MS, 2008), 196. Susan Stern, With the Weathermen: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 168. 3 Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper, 1984), 340. This version of the story comes from a combination of Matusow, Barber and, of course, Sterns personal account. Rudd makes no mention of this incident in his own memoir, which was consulted but not cited for this paper.

Weatherman is wrong.4 By this time, Weatherman was already a political organization. Its radical sex was just a minor aspect, unknown to the public. But, this incident and the practice of smash monogamy are vital pieces of the greater sexual revolution. Before approaching the other pieces or putting together a picture of the greater sexual revolution, though, we must look to other historians and how they deal with marriage and sex. More openly discussed earlier in the decade, the mainstream saw the sexual revolution as a radical step away from the old morality of American marriage. The incident above was just one detail in a much larger social, cultural, political movement. Social Historian Karen Lystra has taken a microhistorical approach in examining marriage from the inside out in Husbands and Wives: Duty-Bound Roles and Unaccountable Love, and we must necessarily look in this same fashion, honing in on specific incidents and people and organizations to understand the ebb and flow of the sexual revolution. Importantly, Lystra concentrates on marriage as a voluntary act, and this voluntariness is important both at the start of the sexual revolution and, more vitally, at its end (if the sexual revolution can be said to have ever actually ended).5 Cott, similarly, focuses, especially early in her history of American marriage, on the voluntary nature of marriage; she argues that mutual consent in American marriage was especially congruent with American ideals, as our government is meant to work the same way.6 Kristin Celello approaches
4 5

Matusow, 340-1, citing Stern. Karen Lystra, Husbands and Wives: Duty-Bound Roles and Unaccountable Love, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Lystra specifically deals with Victorian marriage, exploring the impressions of husbands and wives about love and marriage, so the specifics do not apply here, but the approach does. It is important to view marriage as a relationship between individuals, however much the State (or other historians, for that matter) may treat it simply as an institution unto itself. 6 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, Nook edition.). 7.

marriage from the outside in Can War Marriages Be Made to Work? Keeping Women on the Marital Job in War and Peace, looking at how larger forces, particularly World War II, altered not only the way Americans practiced marriage but the way Americans thought about marriage. Perception is important, and Celello suggests the conditions after the war augmented the perception not of marriage, but of divorce; specifically, the mainstream saw divorce as result of individual shortcomings, primarily on the part of the wife.7 Celello argues that debate over war marriages contributed to the notion that marriage required work, especially on the part of the wife. Both ideasthat marriage takes work and its success is the wifes responsibilitywere parts of the old morality challenged by the sexual revolution. Female empowerment, specifically, as a result of the sexual revolution, directly challenged both of these ideas. On a much larger scale, as already mentioned, Nancy Cott argues in Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, that American marriage and American government are interconnected; changes in one lead to changes in the other.8 In early America, she argues, the community mostly defined marriage. During the sexual revolution, the community again attempted to define marriage outside what had become an American institution. Cott specifically deals with sexual nonconformity of the 1960s only briefly. She says, youth culture in the 1960s linked sexual disclosure with authenticity and brought into full light the equation between personal freedom and sexual freedom that had rumbled and murmured among free lovers and
7

Kristin Celello, Can War Marriages Be Made to Work? Keeping Women on the Marital Job in War and Peace, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 71. 8 This is Cotts overall thesis and she comes back to it chapter after chapter, drawing on issues over consent, slavery, immigration, polygamy, obscenity to changes in official policy in regards to marriage. Time after time, the government affirms monogamous marriage and rejects any challenges. The sexual revolution would not be the first challenge to American marriage, nor would it be the last.

bohemians for at least a century.9 This personal freedom brings Cotts discussion back again to the issue of consent. As we can see in the Weatherman incident above, consent was secondary to collective interests in the organizations more radical end of the sexual revolution. Cott suggests that, as the sexual revolution went on, premarital sex no longer caused expressions of shock or dismay.10 However, as we will see, shock and dismay were common reactions during the sexual revolution, especially in its early years. The sexual revolution involved a conflictoften direct, always perceivedbetween two moralities, two ways of life; one shocked and dismayed the other, and vice versa. Cott touches on the feminist movement, another piece of the sexual revolution, so we must also look to the connections between the new morality and the expression of freedom it engendered in women; this freedom could only be achieved through social change. Few historians have come at the sexual revolution directly; most treat islike the media did during the later years of the sexual revolution, as we will seeas a side note to political revolution and upheaval during the 1960s. Elaine Tyler May argues in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, that fears of sexual chaos [i.e. the sexual revolution] tend to surface during times of crisis and rapid social change.11 After the affluence of the 1950s, the new generation had more spare time, which meant more time to question their lives and their parents lives. May argues that sex outside of marriage specifically was already an issue before the so-called sexual revolution. She says that nonmarital sexual behavior in all its forms became

Cott, 279. Ibid. 11 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 93.
10

a national obsession after World War II.12 She suggests that government officials and others in authority connected communism and sexual depravity.13 Essentially, May links the roots of the sexual revolution with the Cold War, our conflict with communism being the crisis that gave rise to our fears. And those fears were targeted, among other things, at what Allen J. Matusow calls in The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s, the Dionysian impulse in the hippie counterculture.14 Between Mays roots of the sexual revolution and the counterculture of the sixties came the beat generation, which Matusow says lived outside the law for sex, pot, jazz, kicksin short, for Dionysian ecstasy.15 Matusow is not particularly kind to the beatniks or the hippies; he focuses on the influence of drugs in the transition from one to the other, and he spends almost no time on the sexual revolution outside of hippiesand, there certainly were participants outside hippie circles or communes, as we have already seen with Weatherman. In Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History, David Allyn injects medical advances into the mix; he says, with the pill, contraception became clean.16 And, clean contraception meant the young generation, college students, high school students, not simply members of the counterculture, were even more willing to step outside the accepted boundaries for behavior with nonmarital sex. This triumph over human biology allowed freedom that frightened the older generation.

12 13

May, 94. Ibid. We will see this connection to communism in the sexual revolution as early as 1960 with the case of Professor Leo F. Koch being fired from the University of Illinois later in this paper. 14 Matusow, 293. 15 Ibid, 281. 16 David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (New York: Little Brown, 2000), 33.

The repressive fifties flowed quite fluidly into the Sexual Revolution of the sixties. Allyn argues that the young men and women who came of age in the late sixties had grown up in times of unprecedented prosperity: as a result they could afford to put aside practical concerns about the future in order to savor lifes pleasures and live according to their ideals.17 Critics of the new morality, according to May, complained that the family-centered ethic of togetherness gave way to the hedonistic celebration of doing your own thing.18 Hilary Radner suggests, in her introduction to Swinging Single, that the focus of the sexual revolution emphasized individual fulfillment as the purpose and goal of sexual activity.19 The focus shifted from the family to the individual and the emphasis on marriage lessened as young people looked for new ways to make connections, numerous partners, anonymous sex, free love. Allyn suggests that the Sexual Revolution as a concept can be confusing because revolution can refer to not only a sudden, unexpected period of social transformationthe most obvious, and public, form in the 1960sbut also a calculated contest against the status quoin the 1960s, the counterculture often actively worked to come at the arena of sex and love and marriage from new directions. At the extreme, there came the smash monogamy movement, pushed by Lesbian feminists and by radical political groups like the SLA and Weatherman, formulated to tear away the patriarchal roots of marriage for something better. This came with a personal cost for some, in addition to the clear stance against the old morality and the old approach to love and marriage, as some detachment from the norm required more unnatural force than some revolutionaries would

17 18

Allyn, 80. May, 221. 19 Hilary Radner, Introduction to Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 3.

suppose. But, they had little choice, since, according to Sociologist Gilbert Zicklin, in Countercultural Communes: A Sociological Perspective, they saw the American nuclear family as something past its prime. Zicklin argues: The family was seen to be isolated in its privacy, conformist in its security-mindedness and dull in its routine, often hypocritical mode of existence. Life as it was lived in middle-class families seemed to confine and diminish the self, to cut it off unnaturally from the kind of confrontation with experience and encounter[s] with others through which perceptions are deepened and the sense of self heightened and transformed.20 This view of the family presented a new and distinct challenge to sex, to marriage, and to the old morality in America. The state of marriage in America was once again challenged by a new morality as the sexual revolution began. Newspapers reported on the alleged breakdowns in teenage morals.21 In 1960s America, the sexual revolution was the stock magazine piece.22 It was the topic of public discourse and of private conversation, debated in the home, in church, and on college campuses across the nation. The media presented the new freedom of the sexual revolution as a danger to the youth and as a challenge to the old morality of American monogamy and marriage. They were slow to present the issue in definitive terms, however, except for the negative. Specifically on causality, a 1966 New York Times article cited a child-study organization in calling the hue and cry over the new morality a smokescreen to protect the adult world from seeing that its entire moral code is in dire need of revision.23 The Los Angeles Times blamed adult hypocrisy, suggesting that American adults had a lascivious preoccupation on sex at one

20 21

Gilbert Zicklin, Countercultural Communes: A Sociological Perspective (Westport: Greenwood, 1983), 9. Natalie Jaffe, Adults Morality Called Hypocrisy, New York Times, 8 Mar 1966, 41. 22 Russell Baker, Observer: The Bacchanalia Gap, New York Times, 29 Apr 1965, 34. 23 Ibid.

extreme and a tongue-tied, blind, paralyzing fear of it at the other.24 This same articles title, Nuclear Family: Sex Morality Tug-of-War, encapsulates the new challenge to American monogamy and marriage quite simply as a battle between two moralities, the old and the new. But, not all the blame went to the parents. The media, when it paid attention, also pointed to greater structural forces that allowed for youths to have more opportunity. A New York Times article by Andrew Hacker in 1965 cited class mobility as a causal agent for the sexual revolution; sex has assumed a more explicit role in peoples lives, it said, because other things are missing. There is more movement than ever before, from place to place, from class to class, with each step forcing adjustments in values and expectations.25 David Allyn argues that the youth of the 1960s had grown up in unprecedented prosperity [and] could afford to put aside practical concerns about the future in order to savor lifes pleasures.26 Hacker, argued that moral standards become less absolute as the range of choices becomes wider and young Americans were simply looking for some kind of fixed relationship to replace the old ties of family, community and church.27 The New York Times also specifically noted involvement in the civil rights movement, suggesting that the questioning of some of societys rules led easily to the questioning of all.28 The Los Angeles Times assessed the situation in 1968, saying that the middle class had become a moral

24 25

Mary Ann Callan, Nuclear Family: Sex Morality Tug-of-War, Los Angeles Times, 12 Mar 1964, C8. Andrew. Hacker, The Pill and Morality, New York Times, 21 Nov 1965, 139. 26 David Allyn, 80. 27 Hacker, 139-40. 28 Jonathan Randal, Relaxed Campus Rules Reflect Liberalized Attitudes on Sex, New York Times, 25 Apr 1966, 1.

battleground in America.29 This paper takes a look at the watershed moments in this moral battleground, embodied in every conflict between the old morality and a new morality, in the reemergence of the idea of free love, and the more extreme extension of this idea in the radical notion called smash monogamy. What other historians have touched on only in passingthe more radical aspects of the sexual revolution at the end of the 1960s especiallywe must look to in more detail, to understand how gradual changes were seen as radical, as the more radical elements of those changes were lost in the political shuffle, and how, in the end, those changes strengthened the very institution they were trying to destroy: the institution of marriage. To do this, we must use two types of primary sources, newspapers from the early sexual revolution and memoirs dealing with the later sexual revolution. The eye of the media only focused directly on the sexual revolution for a short time, the first battle of the sexual revolution if you will. As a more political revolution began to take shape in America, the media stopped looking to the sexual revolution and looked to the more real one. Interestingly, the sexual revolution became more radical when no one was looking. The media had portrayed the sexual revolution in a negative light before, but was no longer paying attention when, arguably, the sexual revolution moved furthest from the old morality and took on its most negative aspect, smash monogamy. To understand the first battle of the sexual revolution, we must look at perceptions as the media presented them, but as the sexual revolution moved into new battlefields, primary media sources are rareand historians move away from the sexual revolution just as the media did at the time; mostly sexual topics get mentioned in passing in

29

Dial Torgerson, The New Morality: Is It New or Just in the Open? Los Angeles Times, 24 Nov 1968, B1.

10

discussions of political radicalism. But, radicals who have moved on with their lives (and radicals who have spent years in prison) have written about their experiences, and some of them, like Susan Stern in With the Weathermen: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman, do not shy away from the negative. So, to understand the continuing sexual revolution, we must look to their firsthand accounts and to secondary materials, monographs about the counterculture and the sexual revolution in their proper historical context. Only then can we see how the sexual revolution, particularly its perception early on and its more radical aspect later on, altered the fabric of sex and marriage in America. The perception of the sexual revolution as a moral battleground was built on the idea that the old morality was crumbling and a new morality was taking its place. The mainstream saw and the media presented promotion of the new morality as a negative and sticking to the conservative old morality as a positive. In 1964, the Los Angeles Times acknowledged sex as a major concern and preoccupation of anyone over 18 and, for some, earlier,30 but didnt take an obvious stance for or against the sexual revolution. Still, in a series of articles on the relationship between the nuclear family and the sexual revolution, the paper said that the public generally perceived the new morality as negative; even among the enlightened, the subject of sex is often lumped with the destructive and negative.31 Readers Digest put the blame on the mass media in 1965, because it emphasized gratification of sexual drives as natural and

30

Mary Ann Callan, Sex on Campus: Students in Search of a New Morality, Los Angeles Times, 22 Mar 1964, A1. 31 Callan, Sex Morality C8.

11

glamorous.32 Frank discussion of the sexual revolution had already been kept off the airwaves in 1963, when WNEW-TV cancelled David Susskinds Open End after a planned discussion of the sexual revolution in America. The President of Metropolitan Television called the planned discussion a tasteless and unseemly filibuster and cancelled the program.33 When J. P. Millers sexually frank play, The People Next Door aired on CBS Playhouse in 1968, it still shocked the American audience.34 Even as the sexual revolution progressed, the old morality held its ground, sticking to the perception that only bad results could come from the new morality. There would be no sexual revolution, whether only as a matter of perception or not, without the battle between the old morality and the new. The old morality had a traditional sense of marriage, encapsulated now in the form of the nuclear family. But, the political left took this constant returning to gender roles and patriarchal values as repressive. Barbara Epstein argued years later that for the left to identify with the family [was] to associate itself with authority and conventional morality.35 This conventional morality held that one man and one woman married, had children, raised a family, and per Nancy Cott, the State supported these units because it led to a more stable society. The sexual revolution and the freedom from traditional restrictions countered the very purpose of marriage. Lillian Faderman argued that it was not that monogamy inhibited wild sexual exploration that had it seen as an antiquated model by the new morality, but because it smacked too much of

32

If They Had Only Waited, Readers Digest Jan 1965, 87, quoted in Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers, 1994), 67. 33 Jack Gould. Backstairs at Open End, New York Times, 12 May 1963, X15. 34 Jack Gould, A Shock to Some and a Warning to Others, New York Times, 20 Oct 1968, D19. 35 Barbara Epstein, Family Politics and the New Left, Feminist Review 14 (Summer 1983): 35-45.

12

patriarchal capitalism and imperialism. It was mens way of keeping women enslaved.36 In its series on the nuclear family, the Los Angeles Times argued the weakening of traditional marriage and family in atomic terms; its atoms are held together not by economic necessity but by a voluntary relationship based one emotional need and, hopefully, loyalty.37 And, sex fit within these bonds, for practical reasons and as an exercise of spirituality. Christianity, especially through the Catholic Church, reinforced the old morality's sense of marriage in defining it as a spiritual enterprise. In a piece in the Journal of Social Hygiene in 1951, Edward B. Lyman argued that society, particularly American society, recognized marriage as a natural law as well as a divine precept.38 Coming into the 1960s, into the sexual revolution, the old morality operated under the assumption that sex within the bond of matrimony was morally right, while relations outside the protection of marriage were morally wrong.39 Lyman argued, and the old morality agreed, that you cannot separate the physical and spiritual facts of creation any more than you can separate body and soul.40 These facts of creation were to fall only within the bonds of marriage. Even late into the sexual revolution, in 1968, the Pope proclaimed that sex was not for pleasure and not even for the maintenance of a happy relationship between a couple. It has only one purpose, utilitarian, essential the procreation of children.41 In a survey at Columbia University, one student agreed with this

36

Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 233. 37 Mary Ann Callan, The Nuclear Family: Marital Fallout a Threat, Los Angeles Times, 11 Mar 1964, D1. 38 Edward B. Lyman, Lets Tell the Whole Story about Sex: A Paper before a Class in Family Living and Sex Education, University of Pennsylvania, Journal of Social Hygiene 37:1 (Jan 1951): 9. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid, 10. 41 Patrick ODonovan, The Church and SexOld Doubts, Los Angeles Times, 11 Aug 1968, L3.

13

higher ideal of love, of marriage, and of sex; specifically asked about sex on campus, he responded: As an abstract concept pushed on the general educated public as a liberal idea, I find it repulsive and ignobling, but as something that naturally happens between two people under the influence of the fine illusion called love, I find it beautiful.42 There are several important details to this quotation. First, as we will see later, college campuses were a major center for the moral battleground of the sexual revolution. Second, this student clearly still subscribed to the old morality, using words like repulsive and ignobling to describe the liberal idea of sex. Finally, his line about the fine illusion of love and sex under its influence being beautiful fit the religious notion of sex as a spiritual exercise, a moral good meant for specific circumstances. But, science ran counter to religion, here, in the mainstream saw the pill as a de facto invitation to promiscuity and a challenge to the old moralitys positioning of sex only within marriage. In 1965, in a Los Angeles Times article entitled The Pill and Morality, Andrew Hacker predicted that the pill would revolutionize, even subvert, moral standards in all parts of the civilized world.43 By the time he wrote these words, this idea was already an old one. People already debated the sexual revolution on college campuses, in churches, in homes, and the pill was already an enemy to the old morality. The Los Angeles Times had already reported a year earlier in its nuclear family series that scientific advancements, particularly birth control pills and containment of venereal diseases [had taken] some of the dont-ness out of sex.44 The New York Times described the situation in 1966: the availability of information and devices to
42 43

Survey at Columbia Find 83% in Favor of Premarital Sex, New York Times, 14 Mar 1964, 11. Andrew Hacker, The Pill and Morality, New York Times, 21 Nov 1965, 32. 44 Callan, Sex Morality, C1.

14

control conception and venereal disease have, in fact, created sexual freedom.45 The aforementioned Hacker piece referred to the pill-inspired undermining of our traditional moral codes.46 Cott puts this in more objective terms, suggesting that the pill enabled sex to be more decisively separated from pregnancy severing a link in the chain between sex and marriage.47 Susan Douglas is more subjective in her memoir, saying that with the availability of contraceptives and penicillin, the three age-old deterrents to premarital sexconception, infection, and detectionbegan to lose their power to terrorize middle-class girls.48 The language is important here in that premarital sex is something the new morality saw as an available option, while the deterrents against it were seen to terrorize. The negative terminology here is connected to the old morality, not the new. The Los Angeles Times in 1967 suggestedagain, a few years behind the timesthat with the day of the pill, girls have a sense of freedom [that] they can go where they please and when they please without threat of pregnancy.49 The detail here that is not behind the times is the presumption that girls going out will be having sex. Hacker argued that if pills are wanted, then, it is primarily by girls who intend to use them sparingly and monogamously.50 That is to say, most girls were not using the pill to go be promiscuous, however the old morality wanted to label them, but to have sex with one guy in a monogamous relationship. But, the moral battleground of the sexual revolution didnt allow for this distinction.

45 46

Jaffe, 41. Hacker, 32. 47 Cott, 192. 48 Douglas, 66. 49 Paul Houston, Young Girls Running Away at Record Rate, Los Angeles Times, 3 Sep 1967, F1. 50 Hacker, 139.

15

The general sense of the pill as a gateway into a new morality was amplified by a further sense that sex and the freedom that came with it were dangerous, not only to the old morality but also to the youth of the nation. But, the media often described premarital sex in negative terms; in the previously cited Los Angeles Times series on the nuclear family, author Mary Ann Callan says that premarital sex has been labeled promiscuous and solidly denounced by ministers in pulpits and mothers in daughters bedrooms.51 The Los Angeles Times referred to the symptoms of the new morality, suggesting the disease nature of the sexual revolution.52 The New York Times referred to students as casualties of the sexual revolution.53 This same New York Times piece tied mental health problems among students to the sexual revolution. At the University of Wisconsin, 86% of unmarried female psychiatric patients had indulged in intercourse and 72% had done so with more than one person.54 Dr. Seymour L. Halleck concluded that permissive sexual activity seems to be highly correlated with mental illness.55 The media also portrayed the new morality as a danger to runaways. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1967: because of the hippie movement, todays runaways are exposed as never before to the three letter hazards of pot, LSD, STP and sex.56 The paper presents sex as a de facto danger here, no elaboration on disease or even the moral argument. In a series on hippies, the Los Angeles Times reported that many officials saw [hippies] as a serious threat to todays

51 52

Callan, Sex Morality, C1. Torgerson, B2. 53 Donald Janson, Campus Sex Tied to Mental Ills, New York Times, 20 May 1967, 41. 54 Ibid, 37. 55 Ibid. 56 Houston, F1.

16

young people.57 Two years later, the New York Times reported on a commune called Oz that had a policy of discouraging runaways from visiting.58 But, this reality didnt matter as long as the perception was that runaways would be taken in by hippies and would have sex, and their lives would be ruined. The scorecard for the moral battleground had the old morality losing its youth to the dangers of the new morality. At the same time that the old morality crumbled, the sexual revolution took on a political valence to prove that these supposed dangers were not the issue. Historian Leerom Medovoi argues in A Yippie-Panther Pipe Dream: Rethinking Sex, Race, and the Sexual Revolution that the revolution referred both to New Left ambitions of toppling the state [and] the countercultural overthrow of traditional sexual mores.59 David Allyn suggests in Make Love, Not War that the term sexual revolution had a wide range of meanings in the highly politicized climate of the 60s and 70s; he says: Some student radicals used the term specifically to refer to the end of the tyranny of the genital and the arrival of an eagerly awaited age of polymorphous pansexuality. Young feminists equated the sexual revolution with the oppression and objectification of women and saw it, therefore, as something to stop at all costs.60 The politicization of the sexual revolution complicated all aspects of the battleground between the old and new moralities. The Los Angeles Times series on the nuclear family asked importantly, it did not state outrightif the acceptance of the new morality among youth [was] that start of a slow, tortuous route out of our hypocritical past to finally a healthier attitude
57 58

HippiesMenace to Selves, Youth and Society? Los Angeles Times, 9 Apr 1967, FB. Robert Houriet, Life and Death of a Commune Called Oz, New York Times, 16 Feb 1969, SM92. 59 Leerom Medovoi, A Yippie-Panther Pipe Dream: Rethinking Sex, Race, and the Sexual Revolution, in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, ed. Hilary Radner and Maya Luckett ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 133. 60 Allyn, 5.

17

toward sex as a basic part of human relations?61 The newspaper wouldnt support the sexual revolution explicitly, but it would promote the idea that the results were positive ones. Meanwhile, the moral battleground of the sexual revolution found focus on college campuses, where the battle over sex (and) education was fought slowly because college campuses were slow to change. The Kinsey Reports (reported in 1948 and 1953) reported that 51% of college males had sexual intercourse. The Packard survey in 1968 found this had increased to 57%.62 Meanwhile, Kinseys 27% of college females who had sexual intercourse had increased to 43% according to the same survey. But, more importantly, the Packard survey found that 30% of men had had intercourse with more than two partners, while 14% of girls had.63 Coming back to the pill, specifically, college physicians were less likely to give the pill to co-eds than local physicians back home. Hacker quotes a college physician who said: in giving the pill we would be implicitly condoning the use they would subsequently make of them.64 Hacker argues that college physicians were far more parent-conscious because of the idea of in loco parentis.65 The New York Times explained in more detail in 1963: parents do, under American ground rules, hold the college responsible for their childrens intellectual, personal and moral development.66 Off campus, physicians were more tolerant about the pill, Hacker

61 62

Callan, Sex Morality, C1. Linda Mathews, Campus Sex Revolution Seems Limited to Girls, Los Angeles Times, 9 Oct 1968, A6. 63 Ibid. It is important to note the use of men and girls rather than men and women. Also, it is implied but not stated explicitly in the Los Angeles Times article reporting the Packard results that having intercourse with more than two partners is the definition for promiscuity. While we will see later that the sexual revolution was more a matter of internal terminology than a matter of external reality, it seems more young people were admitting to having sex even if more were not really having it. 64 Hacker, 32. 65 Ibid. 66 Grace Hechinger and Fred M. Hechinger, College Morals Mirror Our Society, New York Times, 14 Apr 1963, 122.

18

explains, because they, unlike their university colleagues, have to deal with what happens when conception has not been prevented.67 That is, local physicians have to deal with pregnant young women. While the previously cited Columbia University survey found that 83% of its senior class believe[d] in premarital sexual intercourse, the survey did not actually ask whether or not the students had had sexual intercourse.68 On the one hand, collegiate authorities didnt want to know; the New York Times quoted George S. May, Dean of Yale College, who said, We are not interested in the private lives of students as long as they remain private.69 Meanwhile, the President of Vassar, Sarah Gibson Blanding, told students in a speech that if they wished to indulge in premarital sex relations or excessive drinking, they must withdraw from the college.70 She backed off from the literalness of this rule, but stood by the obvious subtext: sexually active students were not welcome at Vassar. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1964 that the drive for independent thinking among students came in part from what they term an abdication by parents and the community at large from exertion of external pressures.71 Still, college authorities were slow to change. The New York Times called university authorities purposely slow in adjusting regulations governing student behavior to what has been called the permissive society and the sexual revolution.72 In 1967, the New York Times claimed that proponents of sex education were winning their battle to make the classroom rather than the

67 68

Hacker, 32. Survey, 11. 69 Randal, 28. 70 Hechinger and Hechinger, 120. 71 Callan, Sex on Campus, A5. 72 Randal, 1.

19

locker room and alley the authoritative place for learning about sex.73 But, however much sex education might have been promoted, sex on college campuses remained mostly forbidden, at least in the open. While sex education purportedly led to a rise in premarital sex, it also resulted in a decline in venereal disease and premarital pregnancy.74 The director of school health for the Evanston public schools in Illinois predicted in 1967 that, in five to ten years sex education in schools no longer will be a subject for controversy. Decades later, the topic is still controversial, and seven years earlier, it had already jumped onto the national agenda after the firing of a professor who, allegedly, promoted free love. This battle over sex on campuses came to a head in 1960 with the firing of Professor Leo F. Koch for condoning premarital sex in the campus newspaper at the University of Illinois in Champaign, an act that put the sexual revolution on the national agenda and had people choosing clear sides. The controversy began when two students, Dan Bures and Dick Hutchison, wrote a letter entitled Sex Ritualized in which they criticized campus dating habits and argued that with a compulsion to participate, the inevitable result is the neglect of the dating partner as an individual.75 Koch, a biology professor, wrote a lengthy response that Bures, a year later, called a bitter criticism, written with a streak of hardness running through the grain of everything he said.76 The oft quoted excerpt from Kochs letter does suggest the acceptability of sexual intercourse on campus, specifically suggesting as well that a mutually satisfactory sexual experience might lead to longer lasting marriages. But, no one wanted to hear his conclusions

73 74

Donald Janson, Perversion Study in Schools Urged, New York Times, 13 Jul 1967, 39. Ibid, 75. 75 Dan Bures, Was Koch Bitter? Heres New Opinion, Champaign Urbana Spectator, 20 Feb 1961, 1. 76 Ibid.

20

as long as his argument condoned premarital sex relations.77 The context is important, though, so here is a segment of Kochs letter: With modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available at the nearest drugstore, or at least a family physician, there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics. A mutually satisfactory sexual experience would eliminate the need for many hours of frustrated petting and lead to happier and longer lasting marriages among our young men and women.78 While Koch made some clear points about the new morality and how it did not have to lead to negative consequences, most people couldnt get past his assessment that premarital intercourse among college students is not, in and of itself, improper.79 Newspapers around the nation had a field day with distorted headline like: PROFESSOR TO BE FIRED FOR URGING FREE LOVE.80 Even Hugh Hefner wrote about the case in Playboy, arguing: The professor included an all-too-prophetic paragraph that none of the major newspapers or wire services that reported on the incident cared to include in their coverage: The important hazard is that a public discussion of sex will offend the leaders of our religious institutions. These people feel that youngsters should remain ignorant of sex for fear that knowledge of it will lead to temptation and sin.81 Reverend Ira Latimer, member of the Bureau of Public Affairs, Institute of Economic Policy in Chicago, and the University of Illinois Dads Association, wrote a letter to the female students of the University of Illinois in which he called Kochs exhortation to sexual promiscuity an

77 78

Professors Score Ouster of Author of Sex Article, New York Times, 19 Mar 1963, 8. Quoted in Hugh Hefner, The Playboy Philosophy Part 5, Playboy, Apr 1963, reprinted on CouplesClick.tv 4 Apr 2009, http://www.couplesclick.tv/featured-lifestyle-articles/the-playboy-philosophy-part-5/2009/04/04/ and in Roger Ebert, Making Out Is Its Own Reward, Roger Eberts Blog, 12 Jan 2010, http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/making_out_is_its_own_reward.html 79 Quoted in Koch v. Board of Trustees of University of Ill., 187 N.E. 2d 340, 39 Ill.App.2d 51 (Ill.App. 1 Dist., 1962). 80 Hefner. 81 Ibid.

21

audacious attempt to subvert the religious and moral foundations of America.82 He called Kochs approach the standard operating procedure of the Communist conspiracy to demoralize a nation as a necessary preliminary to taking over Professor Kochs letter follows this formula point by point and he continued, Animal Koch would reduce us to a sub-animal level All this, of course, is a calculated appeal to the appetites of young men who thoughtlessly suppose that a college campus would be a paradise if coeds were no more inhibited than prostitutes.83 Latimer certainly had a cynical view of college men, but he spoke for the old morality in condemning Koch. The New York Times reported the dismissal of Koch for his belief that premarital sexual relationships should be condoned.84 This same New York Times piece suggested that Koch expresses offensive views contrary to standards of morality.85 In using these words, the newspaper referenced the university standards, but did not quote them directly or cite them specifically. The implication is that the paper sided with the university and with the old morality. Similarly, in the court of appealsKoch appealed the firing and lost Kochs views were seen as offensive and repugnant and contrary to commonly accepted standards of morality and his espousal of these views could be interpreted as an encouragement of immoral behavior.86 These words echoed the President of the University, quoted by the New York Times.87 But the court did not quote him; rather, it reiterated what he said, taking a moral stance against Koch, and not simply upholding his dismissal on contractual grounds. The same

82 83

Quoted in Hefner. Ibid. 84 Professor Ousted for His View on Sex, New York Times, 8 Apr 1960, 34. 85 Ibid. 86 Koch v. Board of Trustees of University of Ill. 87 Koch Ouster Stirs Faculty Protest, New York Times, 17 July 1960, 24.

22

court decision called Kochs letter an uncomplimentary reflection on the standards of morality presently existing at the University of Illinois and refused to repeat the text of his letter, saying, it would not be profitable to set forth its full text for the purpose of this opinion.88 The court not only sided with the old morality but refused to do exactly what Koch said, to allow public discussion. The Illinois division of the ACLU agreed, saying, Kochs dismissal would leave the young with the impression that conventional morality cannot stand the scrutiny of public discussion.89 Meanwhile, Koch did have some supporters. A committee of the American Association of University Professors censured the University of Illinois for firing Koch, calling his ouster outrageously severe and completely unwarranted.90 Hugh Hefner wrote an entire segment of his Playboy Philosophy column to defending Koch. Of course, Hefner and Playboy sat firmly in the new morality camp, so he mostly preached to the choir. And, on the University campus, students demonstrated in support of Koch and hung University President David D. Henry in effigy, complete with a sign that read Hanged for Killing Academic Freedom.91 Afterward, Koch remained infamous for years. When he got a job in 1964 as a science instructor at the progressive Camp Summerland in North Carolina, rumors of nudism and free love swept the area.92 Locals distributed hate literature around town, accusing the camp counselors of being

88 89

Koch v. Board of Trustees of University of Ill. Quoted in Hefner. 90 Professors Score Ouster of Author of Sex Article. 91 Hefner. 92 Ebert.

23

not only nudists but sex perverts, Communists and God knows what else.93 Organized opposition to the camp produced a newspaper that described alleged nude bathing and reported free love was being taught at the camp.94 Both state troopers and townspeople attacked the camp in a violent night raid and campers were evacuated to Camp Midvale in New Jersey.95 Koch was not specifically named, but clearly his reputation had preceded him. Regardless of any real connection to communists or any political radicals, the old morality identified Koch and those associated with him with the new morality. Meanwhile, in 1964, Reverend Frederick C. Wood, a chaplain at Goucher College, had to defend himself after his audience took one of his sermons as, like Kochs letter, promoting premarital sex. The New York Times reported that this young chaplain has been answering critics who accuse him of preaching a sermon favoring free love.96 He had dared to say that premarital intercourse need not be bad or dirty indeed, it can be very beautiful.97 This same New York Times piece mentioned the Koch case, comparing Woods views to Kochs. The President of Goucher College stood by the chaplain, though, saying that far from preaching immorality, promiscuity, or advocating premarital relationships he was attempting to sharpen the sense of personal responsibility in sexual as in all other human feeling.98 Coming back to that Columbia student who spoke of the sex as a liberal idea, it seems worth mentioning that Wood claimed that most of the letters of support he received came from girls, while most of the
93

Campers in Jersey after Carolina Riot, New York Times, 15 Jul 1963, 22, specifically quoting camp counselor Bruce Grund, an instructor from New York University. 94 Ibid. 95 Ebert. 96 Minister Defends Lenient Sex View, New York Times, 7 Dec 1964, 42. 97 Ibid. 98 Chaplain Defended for Sermon on Sex, New York Times, 22 Dec 1964, 60.

24

critical ones came from men, especially college men.99 We will see this gender distinction again later as the New Left turns against marriage, but first the moral battleground of the sexual revolution brought about a reemergence of an old ideafree loveamong the New Left. Free love ran counter to the bonds of marriage, to the old morality's admonition against premarital sex, and against the old morality itself, and though free love predated the nuclear family incarnation of the old morality, it became away to again reject tradition anew. Cott says that youth culture in the 1960s simply enacted an equation between personal freedom and sexual freedom that had rumbled and murmured among free lovers and bohemians for at least a century.100 Yippie John Sinclair described the new take on the old position: Our position, Sinclair intoned, is that all people must be free to fuck freely, whenever and wherever they want to in bed, on the floor, in the chair, one the streets, in the parks and fields. Fucking Sinclair argued, like dope, helps people to escape the hang-ups that are drilled into us in this weirdo country.101 Free love didnt necessarily mean sex with anyone and everyone. It meant openness among the members of the commune. They tried to overcome the sexual hang-ups of mainstream America. The communards of the counterculture took their position on the left side of the moral battleground of the sexual revolution.102 The counterculture made sexual nonconformity a political statement.103 The communards made it a complete lifestyle, welcoming sexual initiatives from women as well as men, demolishing sanctions on premarital relationships and
99

Minister Defends Lenient Sex View. Cott, 192. 101 Medovoi, 153, citing David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 182. 102 Communards is Zicklin's term, a way to differentiate between hippies living in, say, Haight-Ashbury and those who moved to rural communes. Notably, it was not until late in the decade that newspapers seemed to look outside the urban hippie enclaves to communes like Oz. 103 Cott, 192.
100

25

attempting to do the same for extramarital and cross-racial sex.104 The antithesis of the old morality, communards tended to ignore the trappings of marriage and monogamy, replacing them with open relationships and free love. Some communes practiced completely free love, where all members engaged in sexual encounters and where group sex or bisexuality might be accepted.105 The New York Times reported in 1969 that in some hippie communes, group sex is standard procedure. The truth of this did not matter, as long as the media presented it this way, the old morality could reject it sight unseen. The piece continues: At a few in the Southwest, newcomers are given to understand from the outset that property and bodies are to be shared freely, on demand. But at Oz, a commune near Meadville, Pennsylvania, orgies were few and far between.106 Communes like Oz were an exception in having less emphasis on sex, but were quite normal in avoiding any emphasis on politics. Oz did not exist to change the world; rather it existed outside the world. At its peak in the summer of 1968, Oz consisted of twenty men, fourteen women and one two-year-old girl, all of whom shared food and clothing, shared shelter and, most importantly, they shared life experience.107 And, though, yes, they didnt practice regular orgies or the more extreme forms of free love, they did share beds. Seven of the women of Oz were married or had an old man with whom they regularly shared a bed.108 But, there were perhaps four girls who regularly shared beds with two or three other men. And there

104 105

Cott,. 192. Terry H. Anderson, The Sixties, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 2007), 140. 106 Houriet, SM89. 107 Ibid, SM31. 108 Ibid.

26

were two girls who, by summers end, had slept with all but the two [celibate] men.109 This put them firmly in line with the popular definition for promiscuous mentioned above. Other communes dealt with sex and marriage in similar ways or more open ways. Billy Digger argued that while there would be marriage contracts on a commune and people could still have huge ceremonies when they meet something they dug if someone dug a different person every day, he could have a different ceremony every day.110 At a commune in Tao, New Mexico, simply called The Family, members lived together in an old house and considered themselves as all married to one another.111 At Oz, men wore jeans and little else, while women wore long, loose dresses, and nudity was commonplace.112 This of course drew attention to the farm among locals in nearby Meadville, Pennsylvania. Fed by fears that the farm was converting (or, as the residents put it, corrupting) numbers of local youth to a radical life style, locals started harassing the people at Oz.113 Ultimately, state police raided Oz, and members were charged with maintaining a disorderly house in violation of a century-old statute. They were also charged with corrupting the morals of a 16-year-old girl who lived on the farm with her parents knowledge and tacit consent.114 Of course, as already mentioned, Oz discouraged runaways from visiting, which ran counter to the old moralitys view of hippies. And, counter to much of the new morality, those at Oz actually felt that birth control devices were unnatural. Oz

109 110

Houriet, SM89. Stephen A. O. Golden, What Is a Hippie? A Hippie Tells, New York Times, 22 Aug 1967, 36. Golden explains that Billy Digger is one of the first Diggers of the Hippie movement. A Digger, Golden says, works and organizes so that the hippie community can have more freedom and not depend on the straight world. 111 Steven V. Roberts, Youth Communes Seek New Way of Life, New York Times, 3 Aug 1970, 28. 112 Houriet, SM89. 113 Ibid, SM92. 114 Ibid, 101.

27

stood out from the old morality, and also from the new morality, an exception to rules on both side. But, it would not last. Authorities nailed to the front door of the farm an injunction against using the premises for fornication, assignation and lewdness, and most of the members scattered, to new communes, or back to their old lives. The politics of the old morality intruded on the people at Oz, but in other parts of the counterculture, free love went hand in hand with politics from the start. In fact, the very existence of communes constituted almost a political statement in itself. As Billy Digger explained, the basic unit of the culture would be the commune instead of a house with one man and one woman in it.115 This contradicted and challenged the most basic notions of the old morality, of traditional marriage. Digger continued: The commune would not be owned by one person or one group but would be open to all people at all times, to do whatever they wish to do in it.116 Here, communes challenged the Protestant Ethic and American capitalism. And, finally, children in the communes, according to Digger, from the moment they were born, would be the responsibility of everyone, not only of the blood mother or father.117 This idea, while not at all new, broke with American tradition, taking parenting out of the realm of the biological parents and putting it on the collective. In the nuclear family, mom and dad raised their own children. The new morality in this way redefined marriage and marital relations even outside of the sphere of sex itself. And, not only communards did this redefining; radical groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and Weatherman also practiced free love, or some derivation thereof. When the SLA kidnapped Patricia Hearst, they invited her to join freely in nonexclusive sexual
115 116

Golden, 36. Ibid. 117 Ibid.

28

activities of the group.118 Politics and sexuality now went hand in hand, especially radical politics and radical sexuality. Coming from outside the notion of free love, but still on the side of radical sexuality, the women's liberation movement found common ground with the counterculture in wanting to reject the old morality's sense of marriage. The womens liberation movement did not fundamentally oppose men and women being together, but rather the patriarchal, oppressive form that marriage had taken. While marriage became more optional for womenand some of the womens liberation movement would have wanted it done away with entirelyit was still the only way that [some women] could find economic security.119 Susan Stern, in her memoir, With the Weathermen, presents the married womans side of the womens liberation as a beleaguered position, millions of women tired of being mothers, tired of being wives, tired of being mistresses, tired of doing laundry, tired of cooking, cleaning, sewing, serving, chauffeuring, mending, shopping, and suffering the daily tantrums not only of their children, but of their men as well.120 The Los Angeles Times quoted Dr. Paul H. Gebhard, saying the sexual revolution sounded like a continuation of the trend toward sexual equality with the female being regarded both my males and by herself as less a sexual object to be exploited, and more as a fellow human with her own needs, expectations and rights.121 Womens liberation existed now as a branch of the sexual revolution, but also as fuel for it as well. Andrew Hacker argued in the New York Times that the revolution has primarily to

118 119

Robert Kistler and Bill Hazlett, Hearst Not Coerced, SLA Papers Say, Los Angeles Times, 17 Oct 1975, B1. Clark-Flory. 120 Stern, 9. 121 Scientific Panel Finds No Sexual Revolution, Los Angeles Times, 30 Dec 1967, 6.

29

do with women, and middle-class women in particular. They are the ones who have finally come to embrace ways of thinking and behaving that have long been customary for others. He argued, essentially, that men already had some sexual freedom, some power of choice, and women were claiming that same freedom, that same power, now. As Stern puts it, women began to stir and breathe, to moan new words: freedom; liberation; independence; employment; unemployment; divorce, birth control. Political, and with a gallop, the Womens Liberation Movement was born.122 And, in the greater sexual revolution, others were claiming that freedom as a more ubiquitous ideal, for people of both genders, of every race, of every class. Choice, in sex or out, was not the realm of white men anymore. On a broader level, the entirety of the New Left had reason to reject marriage as well. Bill Digger said that hippies had none of the shut-in paranoid one-man-and-woman-and-children family structure of the old morality.123 And, this negative view of traditional marriage and family spread into the political side of the New Left as well. Gilbert Zicklin says in Countercultural Communes that the counterculture, including the hippies and the New Left, spread the idea that contemporary society had become a perversion of nature.124 This included, and even depended on, traditional marriage. In his memoir, Remembering Tomorrow, Michael Albert argues radical group Weatherman that the womens movement significantly affected Weatherman; it was not only out to end imperialism, but also to end patriarchy.125 Susan Stern agrees; in her memoir, channeling her younger self, she writes: Im no longer content to nurture
122 123

Stern, 9. Golden, 36. 124 Zicklin, 10. 125 Michael Albert, Remembering Tomorrow: From SDS to Life After Capitalism (New York: Seven Stories, 2006), 166.

30

children, or to give a husband support and strength. I need all my strength for the Movement, to fight imperialism, to create a world in which people can live with dignity and without fear and starvation and war.126 Stern effectively equates imperialism with the patriarchy of marriage, and suggests it was hardly a coincidence that the sexual revolution and an actual political revolution moved forward together. Like Susan Stern, not all those in the movement could afford to detach themselves from the world to live in communes; some wanted to be more direct in confronting the old morality. So, groups like the SLA or Weatherman became active in the late 1960s into the 1970s, taking more and more radical stances and actions to combat not only the old morality but the American government as well. Coming back to Cott, this makes sense, as American marriage and American government have been intertwined since our nations inception. Lillian Faderman, in her lesbian history, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, says that, coming into this latter part of the sexual revolution, some lesbian feminists even believed it a duty to Smash Monogamy, as their buttons proclaimed, sporting a triple womans symbol () and rejecting the notion [even] of the lesbian couple ().127 SLA papers, published in the Los Angeles Times in 1975, said that in order to preserve feminist self-determination, women in the SLA fought successfully to smash the dependencies created by monogamal [sic] personal sexual relationships.128 And, they directly challenged the old morality and traditional marriage, arguing that there were two aspects of our bourgeois conditioning that make male supremacy possible: 1) Conditioning that makes exclusive personal relationships seem desirable (e.g.
126 127

Stern, 123. Faderman, 233. 128 Kistler and Hazlett, B1.

31

monogamy) and 2) Conditioning that makes people feel comfortable accepting oppressive sex roles.129 Like the lesbians in Fadermans history, the SLA not only rejected heterosexual monogamy but all monogamy, cutting into the heart of the old morality. They considered it their primary struggle to break down monogamal [sic] personal relationships and to do this we had to destroy monogamy in the cell.130 When free love wasnt enough, the rejection of traditional monogamy and marriage became even more reactionary and proactive with smash monogamy. It helped that free love, or the more radical smash monogamy, was actually practical within the collectives of the radical elements of the New Left. Early in Cott, she suggests that a communitys shared belief in the morality and ability of its marriage practices forms part of its sense that it is a community.131 This applied to the communal or radical collective just as well as it applies to mainstream communities. Within the SLA, for example, they believed in the new morality, and wanted to break down monogamous bonds; they called them exclusive relationships and believed that in order to maintain harmony within the cell they needed to help the other comrades meet their sexual needs.132 They had only each other, and so belief and action had to be one and the same. Devaluing marriage but still having human drives, they had to work with what they had. Zicklin argues that the small size of cells in the SLA or in Weatherman, not to mention on most communes, operated as a direct answer to the problem of

129 130

Kistler and Hazlett, B29. Ibid. 131 Cott, 32. 132 Kistler and Hazlett, B28.

32

individuality in a large-scale organizational society.133 Kistler and Hazlett said that, in the SLA, they were not making a sexual revolutionthough obviously they were operating within its bounds on the far left side of the moral battlegroundbut rather they were merely trying to adapt to the needs of all the individuals in the cell.134 The individual mattered in the sexual revolution, in the radical cell. In American society, in the nuclear family, the individual was just one atomic piece of a larger whole. Despite our beliefs in rugged individualism and the American Dream, that any one person can succeed if he works hard enough, we had built our society on monogamous couples and family units, and the revolution went as much against that system of organization as it did the patriarchy behind it or the imperialism that resulted from it. The SLA put a high degree of importance on its members sexual activity, because that served as a simple and primary expression of their revolutionary lifestyle.135 When, the most basic parts of their lives ran counter to tradition, they could know that they were not a part of the mainstream any longer; they were revolutionaries through and through. As Bill Ayers, one of the leaders of Weatherman wrote in Fugitive Days: A Memoir, to renounce all the habits and cultural constraints of the past [was] to make ourselves into selfless tools of struggle.136 Using the same terminology as the women's liberation movement and the SLA, Weatherman sought to smash monogamy within its collectives as well. Ayers, describing the casualness that smash monogamy could involve, writes: Another night Diana and Rachel and Terry and I bedded down together, out sleeping bags and pillows scattered across the living room floor. In the mayhem we searched our every
133 134

Zicklin, 40. Kistler and Hazlett, B1. 135 Ibid. 136 Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 142.

33

possibility and I woke up with Terry in my arms, Rachel and Diana curled up across the way. We were, we said, an army of lovers.137 Prior to this, Ayers and Diana had been a couple. But, he told her he would not allow himself to be tied to one woman anymore and she started spending time with a number of other men.138 In this, Weatherman operated similarly to Redbird, a lesbian community in Vermont, where members thought they would smash monogamy too by rotating through everyone in the collective until [they] had been with everyone and then having open sexual options within the collective.139 Weatherman operated in this same fashion. But, this forced rotation of partners, self-implemented, as Ayers admits, took a lot of energy. [Y]ou were supposed to fuck, no matter what.140 The Los Angeles Times reported in 1970 that collectives attempted to destroy all their old attitudes about sexual relationships and the paper gave credit for the idea to the womens liberation caucus at Weathermans Cleveland conference.141 The female introduction is important here in that hints of the failure of smash monogamy were already in place. According to Weatherman member Naomi Jaffe, when a womens group formed within Weatherman while awaiting trial after arrest in Pittsburgh, Weatherman leaders viewed it as a threat and worked to dismantle it.142 Berger describes how people joining the collectives would often leave friends and family, even husbands and wives, to commit

137 138

Ayers, 142. Days of Rage Riots a Time of Tempering, Los Angeles Times, 26 Nov 1970, 7. 139 Paul J. Cloke and Jo Little, Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation, and Rurality (London: Routledge, 1997), 111, citing documentation of the community by Cheney (1985). 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid, 8. 142 Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 292, citing an unpublished manuscript criticism of Weathermans publication Prairie Fire by Naomi Jaffe.

34

themselves to the organization and to the revolution.143 But, even stepping away from their lives, they had trouble stepping away from their cultural upbringing; especially the men, found it all but impossible to give up old gendered standards. They could take the idea to smash monogamy from feminists and lesbians, but they could not fathom a womens organization in their midst. One slogan used by Weatherman was SMASH MONOGAMY! NO LOVE! NO LIFE!144 They were supposed to be an army of lovers and now they were cheering against love, and against life. This stance, taken literally, could never hold. Meanwhile, this revolutionary trading of partners, however positive in theory, was far more negative in practice. The Los Angeles Times reported that smash monogamy in Weatherman led to a situation in which any man could simply announce that he wanted to sleep with a particular woman and she would be required to submit.145 Susan Sterns account of Mark Rudds behavior within the collective supports this idea. We will get to the gender aspect later, but it is already important to see that this did not value every individual. This methodology did not allow for nonparticipants. At Redbird, they chose lovers by drawing name out of a hat, and then [would] go about loving that person, until, after several months they would redraw and go again.146 This randomness did break down old standards and surely countered the old morality, but it valued no one as an individual; they were merely names in a hat. These campaigns to smash monogamy, Kathy McAfee and Myrna Wood wrote in the New Left magazine Leviathan in 1969, might produce effectiveness and homogeneity and loyalty but they would not

143 144

Berger, 105. Stern, 153. She repeats this but passes no judgment. 145 Days of Rage, 8. 146 Cloke & Little, 111.

35

produce freedom.147 These feminist authors understood the problem before the practitioners of smash monogamy did: theory and practice were from the same thing. People had emotions and theory didnt take those into account. Diana Oughton asked Bill Ayers one day, after Weatherman and smash monogamy were underway, If this is liberation then why dont I feel free?148 Still, the practice continued in Weatherman as long as the collectives could maintain itafter the organization went fully underground in the 1970s, this discipline became less rigid. And, Ron Jacobs argues in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground, that smash monogamy only freed men from responsibility and, consequently, replicated the structures already in existence.149 Here we can see one of the most obvious reasons that smash monogamy failedthe New Left simply couldn't get past the patriarchy it tried so hard to reject. The on-demand sex favored the men of the organization. As the Los Angeles Times reported, women quickly came to resent the fact this did not seem to work in the opposite direction.150 Berger argues that smash monogamy played out in typically sexist ways, in which women were expected to be sexually available to men.151 And, refusal to participate led to dissent, even among the women. When Susan Stern didnt want to participate, she lashed out at Carol, who supported smash monogamy; You just want us to give up our relationships, she said, because you dont have anyone to

147

Quoted in Ron Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (London: Verso, 1997), 92. The original article, What is the Revolutionary Potential of Womens Liberation, ran in the June 1969 issue of Leviathan. 148 Ayers, 142. 149 Jacobs, 92. 150 Days of Rage, 8. 151 Berger, 291.

36

fuck.152 In her memoir, Susan Stern recounts a night in which Weatherman leader Mark Rudd was going around kissing everyone, men and women. Susan thought this must be the most fucked-up, phony thing Id ever seen.153 This was the same night that, as Stern recounts in painful detail, Rudd raped her friend Georgia. You have to put the demands of your collective above your love, Rudd said, nothing comes before the collective.154 Susan Sterns response was to think, Perhaps, Weatherman is wrong and she wondered where did building strength end and torture begin?155 Smash monogamy sowed the seeds of its own destruction. In an unpublished manuscript, Rudd says, Smash Monogamy was a guiding principle, as promiscuity and even the occasional orgy were encouragedwhich isnt to say the collectives engaged in discussions about consent and healthy sexuality.156 He writes of consent as if it was an afterthought, and it seems, at the time, it was. Sterns tone in her memoir changes after this. Monogamy was still the number one topic, she writes, SMASH SMASH SMASH! The illness was growing like a cancer.157 The illness was no longer monogamy, no longer marriage and the old morality. For Stern, the illness was now smash monogamy. Imprisoned Weatherman member David Gilbert credits the glorification of violence for promoting male supremacy within Weatherman.158 But, it seems more likely that it was simple male dominance within the organization, not in
152 153

Stern, 156. Ibid, 168. 154 Ibid, 169. 155 Stern, 170. 156 Cited in Berger, 106. 157 Stern, 180. 158 David Gilbert, Letter to Cyrana B. Wyker, 14 Sep 2008. Quoted in Wyker, Cyrana B. Women in Wargasm: The Politics of Womens Liberation in the Weather Underground Organization (MA Thesis, University of South Florida, 2009), 41.

37

belief, not in theory, but in practice, that ruined any chance for success with smash monogamy. Robin Morgan wrote in Rat in 1970 an article entitled Goodbye to All That, in which she said goodbye and good riddance to the male-dominated peace movement the male-dominated Left to the Weather Vain, with the Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice of sex on demand for males counterfeit Left, counterleft, male-dominated crackedglass mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare.159 The sexual revolution had reached its peak, its most radical aspect has failed, but the ideology remained. Weatherman believed that group sex and smash monogamy would abolish private property and usher in a new age of socialist harmony.160 The logic is faulty, but it is clear that people within the organization believed in the cause. Maybe not all the waySusan Stern faltered in her commitment, for examplebut they did believe in their revolution. Recall Professor Kochs letter, in which he wrote, There is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics.161 The question now is this: if Weathermans code of morality mandated smash monogamy and allowed for forced rotation of sexual partners, can we call the theory of smash monogamy immoral? It had its social consequences, and it certainly has its detractors and even its victims. But, if everyone in the organization had remained committed, smash monogamy would have worked as open sexual relations worked at Oz. Eventually people still coupled there, but they did not fight in the earlier,

159

Robin Morgan, Goodbye to All That, Rat, Jan 1970, reprinted on Fair Use Blog, 29 Sep 2007. http://blog.fairuse.org/2007/09/29/goodbye-to-all-that-by-robin-morgan-1970/ 160 Allyn, 224. 161 Quoted in Ebert and Hefner.

38

more open period; Ozs problem was that people outside the commune didnt like what they saw. Not until Weatherman went underground, and in some cases not until Weatherman ended, did the people outside know what had been going on inside the collectives, at least not in detail. Weatherman communiqus did not discuss the sexual revolution. They spoke of imperialism, they certainly hinted at patriarchy, but even on the moral battleground of the sexual revolution, sex remained relatively private. So, what changed? A scientific panel found in 1967 that there was no sexual revolution. The Los Angeles Times reported that instead there was simply a continuation of long existing trends. Newer contraceptive devices do not seem to have prompted any rise in the percentage of women having intercourse before marriage.162 Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, argues that contraceptives as well as legalized abortion in the 1970s, instead merely weakened the links that once tied sex to love, marriage, and procreation. Men and women now pursue sexual pleasure as an end in itself, unmediated even by the conventional trappings of romance.163 He wrote that in 1979, yet we havent lost romance or love or even marriage. All of these things remain, but out attitudes about them have been changed. Hilary Radner argues in Swinging Single that even if the political agenda of the 1960s did not produce the utopia it promised, the sexual revolution resulted in an irrevocable reconfiguration of identity within significant political and economic implications.164 The womens liberation movement

162 163

Scientific Panel, 6. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner, 1979), 191. 164 Radner, 3.

39

gained ground for women, homosexuals gained some ground as well, but clearly not enough.165 Similarly, we have not become as open about sex as much of the rhetoric in the 1960s would suggest. As already mentioned, the director of school health for Evanston public schools predicted in 1967 that in five to ten years sex education in schools no longer will be a subject for controversy.166 The topic still makes headlines every time some school district tries to make the discussion of sex more liberal. The sexual revolution brought us sex education, sex on college campuses, free love, womens liberation, smash monogamy, and each challenge to the old morality by the new was a brand new conflict, breeding headlines and national debate. The moral battleground of the sexual revolution was not contained within the 1960s; it had already begun before, and has been continuing every since. As Dr. Ira L. Reiss was quoted by the Los Angeles Times in 1967, there has really be no sexual revolution in a strict sense because the change has been gradual and continuous, and also because the adult institutional control structures of churches, parents, law and such have changed much slower than the youth culture.167 Every generation sees even minor changes to the way things are as a radical challenge to its way of life. There is always a boundary between the old morality and the new morality, even if that boundary moves over time. Gradual changes were initially seen as radical, but the more radical elements of those changes were lost in the shuffle of later politics. But, ultimately, all of those changes strengthened marriage.

165

The issue of homosexuality within the sexual revolution or since, unfortunately, is a topic far too large to include with this one. 166 Janson, Perversion, 39. 167 Scientific Panel, 6.

40

It is vital, to mention this major positive change that came from the so-called sexual revolution, not the reemergence of free love, not the failure of smash monogamy, but a strengthening of the institution of marriage. This strengthening happened because, not despite, marriage becoming more optional. In The Myth of Marriage, Monica Mehta argues that because marriage is now more optional for the first time ever, men have equal rights in marriage and outside it.168 Mehta suggests that marriage has been tremendously weakened as an institution but points to only negative aspects that have been removed, namely its former monopoly over organization sexuality, male-female relations, political, social and economic rights, and personal legitimacy.169 But, one has to wonder how removing the bad things from marriage can make it weaker. How can giving men and women choice over whether to even get marriedpreviously a cultural expectation for all, especially womenbe bad? Mehta defines traditional marriage as one based on love for the purpose of making peoples individual lives better.170 She uses this definition to point out that the purpose of marriage was not this for thousands of years, but this detail is beside the point. In Why Feminism Was Good for Marriage, Tracy Clark-Flory argues that marriage has become much fairer. Its also become much more satisfying for men and women, when it works.171 That last phrase is important, to be sure; marriage does not always work. But, the sexual revolution has allowed us to redefine marriage as something optional, even more dependent on consent than it was at the beginning of our nation. It has also become something mutually satisfying, something that is, or at least

168 169

Monica Mehta, The Myth of Marriage, AlterNet, 21 Jul 2005. http://www.alternet.org/story/23400/ Ibid. 170 Ibid. 171 Clark-Flory.

41

shouldnt be, patriarchal and oppressive to women. Marriage as an oppressive, unfair institution was weakened. But, marriage as an idea and an idealthat has only been strengthened. Free love could work around it, smash monogamy could try to destroy it. But, human beings, however much they can or cannot explain it, do experience love and do pair off into couplesnot always, but that is the point here; now they can choose more freely. The old moralitys notion that everyone had to marry and produce children has gone away for choice and options. And, one final note: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, both a part of Weatherman and smash monogamy, went on to marry underground. They had two children of their own, and became guardians to the son of two of their fellow Weathermen in prison. This was not the family we could have imagined a decade earlier, Ayers writes in Fugitive Days about taking on the guardianship, but it was the family we now had. To call it dysfunctional would be both unnecessarily cruel and redundantarent they all? I mean, when you say family, isnt the next thought all the strange little secret lore, all the stories and eccentricities?172 Replace family with our society, and the same still applies. We may be dysfunctional, constantly battling between old and new moralities, but in the end, even if this isnt the America we could have imagined, it is the America we now have. The sexual revolution opened things up, but we still have far to go.

172

Ayers, 292.

42

Bibliography If They Had Only Waited. Readers Digest, Jan 1965. 85-9. Albert, Michael. Remembering Tomorrow: From SDS to Life After Capitalism. New York: Seven Stories, 2006. Allyn, David. Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History. Boston: Little Brown, 2000. Anderson, Terry H. The Sixties, 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 2007. Ayers, Bill, Fugitive Days: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Baker, Russell. Observer: The Bacchanalia Gap. New York Times, 29 Apr 1965, 34. Barber, David. A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Berger, Dan. Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. Oakland: AK Press, 2006. Bures, Dan. Was Koch Bitter? Heres New Opinion. Champaign Urbana Spectator, 20 Feb 1961, 1-2. Callan, Mary Ann. The Nuclear Family: Marital Fallout a Threat. Los Angeles Times, 11 Mar 1964, D1, 6. ---. Nuclear Family: Sex Morality Tug-of-War. Los Angeles Times, 12 Mar 1964, C1, 8, 9. ---. Sex on Campus: Students in Search of a New Morality. Los Angeles Times, 22 Mar 1964, A1, 5. Campers in Jersey after Carolina Riot. New York Times, 15 Jul 1963, 22. Celello, Kristin. Can War Marriages Be Made to Work? Keeping Women on the Marital Job in War and Peace. Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009, 44-71. Chaplain Defended for Sermon on Sex. New York Times, 22 Dec 1964, 60.

43

Clark-Flory, Tracy. Why Feminism Was Good for Marriage. Salon, 12 Jan 2011. http://life.salon.com/2011/01/12/coontz_qa/ Cloke, Paul J. and Jo Little. Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation, and Rurality. London: Routledge, 1997. Cott, Nancy F. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, Nook edition. Days of Rage Riots a Time of Tempering. Los Angeles Times, 26 Nov 1970, 7-9. Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Three Rivers, 1994. Ebert, Roger. Making Out Is Its Own Reward. Roger Eberts Blog, 12 Jan 2010. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/making_out_is_its_own_reward.html Epstein, Barbara. Family Politics and the New Left. Feminist Review 14 (Summer 1983): 3545. Ex-Professors Plea Fails. New York Times, 28 Jun 1961, 13. Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Gilbert, David. Letter to Cyrana B. Wyker, 14 Sep 2008. Quoted in Wyker, Cyrana B. Women in Wargasm: The Politics of Womens Liberation in the Weather Underground Organization (MA Thesis, University of South Florida, 2009). Golden, Stephen A. O. What Is a Hippie? A Hippie Tells. New York Times, 22 Aug 1967, 36. Gould, Jack. Backstairs at Open End. New York Times, 12 May 1963, X15. ---. A Shock to Some and a Warning to Others. New York Times, 20 Oct 1968, D19. Hacker, Andrew. The Pill and Morality. New York Times, 21 Nov 1965, SM 32, 138-40. Hechinger, Grace and Fred M. Hechinger. College Morals Mirror Our Society. New York Times, 14 Apr 1963, 22, 120-2. Hefner, Hugh. The Playboy Philosophy Part 5. Playboy, Apr 1963. Reprinted on CouplesClick.tv, 4 Apr 2009. http://www.couplesclick.tv/featured-lifestyle-articles/theplayboy-philosophy-part-5/2009/04/04/

44

HippiesMenace to Selves, Youth and Society? Los Angeles Times, 9 Apr 1967, FB. Houriet, Robert. Life and Death of a Commune Called Oz. New York Times, 16 Feb 1969, SM30-1, 89, 92, 94, 100-2. Houston, Paul. Young Girls Running Away at Record Rate. Los Angeles Times, 3 Sep 1967, F1, 4. Jaffe, Natalie. Adults Morality Called Hypocrisy. New York Times, 8 Mar 1966, 41. Janson, Donald. Campus Sex Tied to Mental Ills. New York Times, 20 May 1967, 37, 41. ---. Perversion Study in Schools Urged. New York Times, 13 Jul 1967, 38, 75. Kistler, Robert and Bill Hazlett. Hearst Not Coerced, SLA Papers Say. Los Angeles Times, 17 Oct 1975, B1, 28-9. Koch Ouster Stirs Faculty Protest. New York Times, 17 July 1960, 24. Koch v. Board of Trustees of University of Ill., 187 N.E. 2d 340, 39 Ill.App.2d 51 (Ill.App. 1 Dist., 1962). Jacobs, Ron. The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. London: Verso, 1997. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Warner, 1979. Lyman, Edward B. Lets Tell the Whole Story about Sex: A Paper before a Class in Family Living and Sex Education, University of Pennsylvania. Journal of Social Hygiene 37:1 (Jan 1951): 8-37. Lystra, Karen. Husbands and Wives: Duty-Bound Roles and Unaccountable Love. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, 192-226. Mathews, Linda. Campus Sex Revolution Seems Limited to Girls. Los Angeles Times, 9 Oct 1968, A6. Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper, 1984.

45

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Medavoi, Leerom. A Yippie-Panther Pipe Dream: Rethinking Sex, Race, and the Sexual Revolution. In Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, edited by Hilary Radner and Maya Luckett, 133-78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Mehta, Monica. The Myth of Marriage. AlterNet, 21 Jul 2005. http://www.alternet.org/story/23400/ Minister Defends Lenient Sex View. New York Times, 7 Dec 1964, 42. Morgan, Robin. Goodbye to All That. Rat, Jan 1970. Reprinted on Fair Use Blog, 29 Sep 2007. http://blog.fair-use.org/2007/09/29/goodbye-to-all-that-by-robin-morgan-1970/ ODonovan, Patrick. The Church and SexOld Doubts. Los Angeles Times, 11 Aug 1968, L3. Professor Ousted for His View on Sex. New York Times, 8 Apr 1960, 34. Professors Score Ouster of Author of Sex Article. New York Times, 19 Mar 1963, 8. Professors Ouster Is Upheld. New York Times, 30 May 1963. Radner, Hilary. Introduction to Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, 1-35. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Randal, Jonathan. Relaxed Campus Rules Reflect Liberalized Attitudes on Sex. New York Times 25, Apr 1966, 1, 28. Roberts, Steven V. Youth Communes Seek New Way of Life. New York Times, 3 Aug 1970, 28. Scientific Panel Finds No Sexual Revolution. Los Angeles Times, 30 Dec 1967, 6. Stern, Susan. With the Weathermen: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Survey at Columbia Find 83% in Favor of Premarital Sex. New York Times, 14 Mar 1964, 11. Torgerson, Dial. The New Morality: Is It New or Just in the Open? Los Angeles Times, 24 Nov 1968. B1-3.

46

Zicklin, Gilbert. Countercultural Communes: A Sociological Perspective. Westport: Greenwood, 1983.