After the Sixties, Came the Counter-Revolution
by Jean Stimmell I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ’50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist. That’s not just my opinion. Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.” “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.” 1 I rebelled: I wanted freedom! I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through …