Word: sexuality
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Yankelovich's study, published in 1981, captures the theology of the revolution at its peak. Future historians of the movement, in fact, may set the years of sexual revolt at roughly 1965 to 1975. Since the mid-'70s, according to some small surveys, the revolution has decelerated or reached a plateau. One such study shows that rates of premarital intercourse for students at the University of California at Davis rose sharply to 62% by 1977 and then increased to only 64% by 1981. Said Ann Clurman, a vice president at Yankelovich, Skelly & White: "In the latter part of the decade...
Polls on nonsexual attitudes trace the same trajectory during the '70s, suggesting that the softening of support for the sexual revolution owes something to the softening of support for liberalism in general. The National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, which has been surveying liberal and conservative attitudes since 1972, reports that the dominant social views in America are still liberal, but not so solidly as they once were. Tom W Smith of N.O.R.C. writes that in most categories, liberal sentiments "either leveled off or slowed their rate of increase around 1973-75. Instead of a conservative tide, the period since...
Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset of Stanford's Hoover Institution thinks the "destabilization of belief systems" wrought by the Viet Nam War helped propel the sexual revolution along. The end of the war and the onset of a recession, he says, brought "a movement back to more stability" and a turn away from far-out sex in the mid-'70s. British Journalist Henry Fairlie, an astute observer of the American scene, thinks the tinkering with personal life-styles that characterized the '60s and early '70s inevitably bred distaste for further social change. "Endless questioning of all aspects of life from food...
...uncertain economy may also have helped quiet the sexual scene. Though no one can demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship, sexual caution and money troubles seem to go hand in hand, in the '30s as in the '80s. A common saying among sex therapists is "sex goes up with the stock market." The free spirits of the '60s are the busy careerists of the '80s, hustling for a dollar in a competitive job market. "The students you talk to want to do well," says retired Harvard Sociologist David Riesman. "They want to do more than pass their courses, and they...
...more conservative. Caroline Stewart, 34, a Philadelphia journalist, managed to juggle both the new morality and the old during the '70s. As she grew up in Pittsburgh, her father blinked the message "Stay a virgin at all costs." She headed to Washington and became a grudging conscript in the sexual revolution. After her first romance broke up, she recalls, "I was wild, for me. Many people had a great smorgasbord of relationships. You had them without giving thought to what you needed instead of what you wanted...