Free love: Not a smooth ride

By Brian Alexander

The Summer of Love may be remembered for its rejection of middle-class morality, but the hippies trekking into San Francisco didn’t create the concept of free love. It’s an idea that traces back to the 19th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelly, up through the suffragettes and the American jazz age of the early 1900s. Post-World War II social changes further hastened the liberalization of sex in the United States, along with the Beat poets, the coffeehouse scene and the comedian Lenny Bruce, who helped heat up the sexual conversation in America. 
 

Sexual culture was already in flux before the first tie-dyed teenage runaway hitched a ride to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Playboy’s first issue had arrived 14 years earlier in December of 1953. The birth control pill became widely available in 1960. Researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson published “Human Sexual Response,” the best-selling masterpiece of human physiology and anatomy, in 1966. In May of 1967, a Michigan youth commission recommended sex education be introduced into the schools. Throughout the year, formerly single-sex colleges announced they were going co-ed.

Nevertheless, many of the “love the one you’re with” enthusiasts of the 1960s were about to discover that the free-love train was not going to be a smooth ride. 

It didn’t take long for many women to realize that the sexual freedoms associated with the hippie era didn't necessarily change their role in mainstream America — they just wore different costumes. 

As black activist Stokely Carmichael famously put it, “The only position for women in the movement is prone.” He may have been talking about the civil rights struggle, but many of the scruffy Summer of Love scenesters viewed women in a similar way.

Money was looked down upon by many hippies, but women sometimes served as a replacement currency.

“Women were used as an inducement to get new members into a commune or crash pad,” Smith recalls. “If you joined, you got to have sex with the girls.”

The girls were young, cute and free, an irresistible combination for both hippies and non-hippies.

“We would go collect free food from the San Francisco produce market a couple of days per week,” recalls Susan Keese, who journeyed from Ohio to join up with The Diggers, the anarchist group comprised mainly of artists and actors who helped create the original Council for the Summer of Love. “The guys at the market would give us food because of how we looked. We traded on that.”

Hippie women were expected to be just as available to the men in their own crowd.

“There was this ethic that it was good for you to have as much sex as possible ... and you were uptight and hung up if you did not,” says Keese, who was 20 years old and living in San Francisco during the summer of ‘67, and later in the Black Bear commune further north. “Some women seemed to be comfortable with that, but I was not. Years later I found out many of the other women did not want to do it, either. We felt like we had to work on ourselves if we didn’t like it.”