Abstract
This chapter deals with period of the 1960s. It first addresses the sudden reversal of the baby boom demographic trends and the trends of falling fertility and rising divorce. The chapter shows how some explanations for these trends can be found in the fact that the baby boomers started to hanker after a new society—one with greater freedom, especially sexual freedom, and sought to move beyond the narrow confines of traditional family life. Particular attention is given to the rise of protest movements in France and the events of May, 1968. For some baby boomers, the family, especially the couple, was public enemy number one and many needed to escape its clutches in order to invent and experience new, freer and more egalitarian forms of communal living. Some of these movements represented a challenge to very basis of family life.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Alain Norvez (1990), Alfred Sauvy suggested changing the expression “Thirty Glorious” to “Twenty Glorious”, arguing that the demographic surge ended in 1965.
- 2.
We can associate this with the fear of remaining single and the attendant, unflattering image of the spinster (Bard 2001; Le Bras 1983).
- 3.
The divorce act of 1792 recognised spousal equality and the right to divorce by mutual consent. However, it was repealed in 1816 and only re-enacted in 1884. As mutual-consent divorce was regarded as a threat to the institution of the family, it was only legalised in 1975.
- 4.
Until 1975, divorce was only allowed under three conditions: adultery; a penalty involving loss of civil rights; and violence or serious injury or slander. However, wives could only ask for a divorce on the grounds of their husbands’ adultery if it was committed in the conjugal home. With the 1975 act, adultery was depenalised, mutual-consent divorce was brought back and irretrievable breakdown became ground for divorce, even without the consent of both spouses (see Arnaud-Duc 1991). English legislation also distinguished between husbands and wives when it came to adultery (Stone 1990).
- 5.
Thus, in 1970, more than one bride in four was pregnant. This proportion started to fall in 1973 (Daguet 2002b).
- 6.
At least until 1980, or until the 1960 generation, for France (Léridon and Villeneuve-Gokalp 1994). Conversely, in Britain, nonmarital cohabition appears to have staunched the decline in union formation by 1983 (Lelièvre 1994).
- 7.
In May 1968, greater tolerance and sexual freedom were openly demanded, in an attempt to include sexuality in the general current of liberalisation and banalisation. The 1972 Simon Report on sexual behaviour in France, sometimes viewed as the French version of the Kinsey Report, revealed a degree of indulgence towards sex before marriage, providing it took place within a stable, loving relationship. There was, however, less indulgence towards women than towards men (Roussel 1975).
- 8.
In 1967, the contraceptive pill was legalised in France and made available to unmarried women in Britain. In 1974, free family planning was introduced in both countries.
- 9.
1968 in Britain (1967 Abortion Act) and 1975 in France (Veil Act).
- 10.
In France, they represented 11.6 % of all households in 1956, 20 % in 1962 and 32.8 % in 2005.
- 11.
This term expresses the idea that women could now enter a state of permanent sterility, which they could interrupt as and when the couple wished to have a child, such that contraception now came before and not after procreation (Régnier-Lollier 2007).
- 12.
In Sweden, for instance, all women over 21, both married and unmarried, were given the right to vote in national elections in 1919, and exercised that right for the first time in 1921, the year in which no-fault divorce was introduced. Contraceptives went on open sale in 1946. Abortion in special cases was legalised in 1938 and the scope was gradually widened, culminating in the Abortion Act of 1974.
- 13.
These protests concerned issues ranging from civil rights to women’s liberation, and mobilised community organisers, members of the revolutionary Weather Underground and the left-wing New America Movement (NAM), early environmentalists and gay rights campaigners.
- 14.
Notably the Free Speech Movement in autumn of that year.
- 15.
The students protested for peace but also, more concretely, against the draft. The summer and autumn of 1967 were to see violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
- 16.
In 1967–1968, there were some 3,463 recorded demonstrations at Columbia University (Granjon 1985).
- 17.
Even if many scholars, including Michel Crozier (1970), Alain Touraine (1972), Edgar Morin (1970) and Raymond Aron (1968), have since questioned this notion of a revolution in France, in that it did not fundamentally challenge the political system.
- 18.
A particularly significant event was the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Penguin Books in 1960.
- 19.
Mary Quant opened Bazaar, her first clothes shop, on the King’s Road in London in 1955 (Marwick 2003).
- 20.
Christopher Booker (1969) counted some 350 groups in the city of Liverpool alone.
- 21.
In his foreword, Victor Margueritte wrote, “Let us grant our daughters, our wives, both legal and common-law, and all mothers (including teenage mothers), the freedoms we can no longer allow men despotically to monopolise”.
- 22.
According to Christine Bard (2001), “there was an immediate scandal, but feminist organisations remained silent. […] this book radically denouncing male domination disturbed people. As did its emphasis on sexuality. Even so, they heralded future struggles.”
- 23.
On 21 March 1968, on the occasion of a lecture given by Mme Revault d’Allonnes in Nanterre on the sexual revolution, Reich’s manifesto entitled “What is sexual chaos? What sexual chaos is not!”, which was first published in Sexpol in 1936 was reprinted and handed out by members of the Nanterre Cité Universitaire residents’ association (source: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/mai_68/chronologie.asp). As M. Jaspard (1997) emphasises, with hindsight, the publication of The Sexual Revolution in France in 1968 seems to have been prophetic.
- 24.
In the INED survey Attitudes of different generations to marriage, the family and divorce in France, conducted in 1969, 41 % of female respondents deemed that sexual relations between fiancés were “regrettable but desirable” (Roussel 1975).
- 25.
Women students are assumed to have taken a backseat. As Christine Bard (2001) makes clear, “The way the students themselves symbolised the movement left very little room for women. […] revolt tends to be a male concept in the collective imagination, pitting men against men, sons against fathers, and the students made believe they were Resistance workers fighting the ‘CRS-SS’”.
- 26.
The recollections of sociologist Michel Marié (1989), who was born between the two wars, is highly significant in this respect. “I began to take the measure of this generational phenomenon at the end of the 1960s. The new generation burst onto the scene far more noisily than my own one had done…. Probably better trained, more specialised, and much more concerned with theory, it wasn’t long before they spoke out loud and clear (May 1968)…. Up to then, we had always held our elders in great respect. We had to put up a good show in front of our juniors, but just as we were beginning to find our voice, we were drowned out by that of the soixante-huitards.”
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Bonvalet, C., Clément, C., Ogg, J. (2015). The Family in Perpetual Motion. In: Renewing the Family: A History of the Baby Boomers. INED Population Studies, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08545-6_4
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