The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The era we think of as the sixties began with relative suddenness around the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Americans are right to say that nothing was ever the same after Kennedy was shot. You can hear the change in popular music over a matter of months. A year-and-a-half before Kennedy was killed, “Stranger on the Shore,” a drowsy instrumental by the British clarinetist Acker Bilk, had hit number one. A year-and-a-half after the assassination, the musicians who would form Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and various other druggie blues and folk-rock bands were playing their first gigs together in San Francisco.

The two conflicts that did most to define the American 1960s—those over racial integration and the war in Vietnam—were already visible. In October 1962, rioting greeted attempts to enforce a Supreme Court decision requiring the segregated University of Mississippi to enroll its first black student, James Meredith. The last summer of Kennedy’s life ended with an unprecedented March on Washington by 200,000 civil rights activists. Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized. Kennedy’s death, though, gave a tremendous impetus to changes already under way. Often peoples react to a political assassination, as if by collective instinct, with a massive posthumous retaliation. They memorialize a martyred leader by insisting on (or assenting to) a radicalized version, a sympathetic caricature, of the views they attribute to him. The example most familiar to Americans came in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, when the country passed constitutional reforms far broader than those Lincoln himself had sought: not only a Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery but also a broad Fourteenth Amendment, with its more general and highly malleable guarantees of equal protection and due process.

Civil rights ideology, especially when it hardened into a body of legislation, became, most unexpectedly, the model for an entire new system of constantly churning political reform. Definitions of what was required in the name of justice and humanity broadened. Racial integration turned into the all-embracing ideology of diversity. Women’s liberation moved on to a reconsideration of what it meant to be a woman (and, eventually, a man). Immigration became grounds for reconsidering whether an American owed his primary allegiance to his country or whether other forms of belonging were more important. Anti-communist military adventures gave way, once communism began to collapse in 1989, to a role for the United States as the keeper of the whole world’s peace, the guarantor of the whole world’s prosperity, and the promulgator and enforcer of ethical codes for a new international order, which was sometimes called the “global economy.”

At some point in the course of the decades, what had seemed in 1964 to be merely an ambitious reform revealed itself to have been something more. The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible—and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation. The increasing necessity that citizens choose between these two orders, and the poisonous conflict into which it ultimately drove the country, is what this book describes.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed by Lyndon Johnson in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s death, was meant to deliver the coup de grâce to Jim Crow, and to end the black marches and police crackdowns in Mississippi and Alabama that television viewers were seeing almost weekly. The act banned racial discrimination in voting booths (Title I); hotels, restaurants, and theaters (Title II); public facilities, from libraries to swimming pools to bathrooms (Title III); and public schools (Title IV). But that was not all it did. It also empowered the federal government to reform and abolish certain institutions that stood in the way of racial equality and to establish new ones. By expanding the federal Civil Rights Commission (Title V); by subjecting to bureaucratic scrutiny any company or institution that received government money (Title VI); by laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees; by creating a new presidential agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), with the power to file lawsuits, conduct investigations, and order redress—by doing all these things, the act emboldened and incentivized bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the “eyes and ears,” and even the foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.

Civil rights transformed the country not just constitutionally but also culturally and demographically. In ways few people anticipated, it proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen. It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history. Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil. On top of those conflicts, the United States has had two massive domestic policy programs that mobilized public resources and sentiments so thoroughly that they were presented to the public as what the philosopher and psychologist William James called a “moral equivalent of war”: the War on Poverty in the 1960s and the War on Drugs in the 1980s and ’90s. Both were mere battlefronts in a larger struggle over race relations. The reinterpretation of America’s entire history and purpose in light of its race problem is the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years.

The justices ignored the subject to which they had devoted most of their deliberations: whether the Fourteenth Amendment—drafted in the wake of the Civil War to guarantee “equal protection of the laws”—had intended to permit segregated schools. Instead they asked whether the doctrine of “separate but equal,” used to justify school segregation, was possible in practice. It may surprise readers of a later generation to discover that the justices believed it was possible, not just in cherry-picked cases taken from model schools but in the actual schools that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had chosen to argue over. The justices noted findings “that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other ‘tangible’ factors.” They nonetheless repudiated the separate-but-equal doctrine for primary schools on the grounds that, because of “intangible considerations” and “qualities which are incapable of objective measurement,” segregation “is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.” Even many ardent opponents of segregation were troubled by Brown’s project to rewrite the Constitution on the authority of vague pronouncements about the way things are “usually interpreted.” In an article published at the end of 1959, Harvard Law School professor Herbert Wechsler described Brown as “an opinion which is oft...

The “heart of the matter” with segregation was not equality but the conflicts it created with the implicit First Amendment right of freedom of association. These conflicts were not easily solved, Wechsler showed: If the freedom of association is denied by segregation, integration forces an association upon those for whom it is unpleasant or repugnant. . . . Given a situation where the state must practically choose between denying the association to those individuals who wish it or imposing it on those who would avoid it, is there a basis in neutral principles for holding that the Constitution demands that the claims for association should prevail? Wechsler hoped to find such a basis. But in constitutional terms, the decision was arbitrary and open-ended. Brown granted the government the authority to put certain public bodies under surveillance for racism. Since the damage it aimed to mend consisted of “intangible considerations,” there was no obvious limit to this surveillance. And once the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality, desegregation implied a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether.

Kalven implicitly accepts, lock, stock, and barrel, an argument that back then was usually put forward by Southerners: that much civil rights litigation amounted to barratry, a gaming of the justice system through the creation of stylized cases. Such scruples were clearly on the way out. Today, the “staging” of court cases is such a standard strategy for activist litigators that even many lawyers are unaware that until the 1950s it was widely considered a straightforward species of judicial corruption, and not just in the South.

The NAACP not only staged events, it scripted them. The plaintiffs it hand-picked to carry them out were chosen for their sympathy and skill. One example is Rosa Parks. Over decades, Black History Month has taught millions of schoolchildren to think of her as a “tired seamstress,” whose need to rest her weary legs in the white section of a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus unleashed a storm of spontaneous protest. But she was considerably more than that. Five months before the Montgomery bus boycott began, she had attended the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, an academy that the Congress of Industrial Organizations had set up for training social agitators. She was an organizer of considerable sophistication, one of the intellectual leaders of the Montgomery NAACP chapter.

In the summer of 1963, well before Kennedy’s assassination, one anecdote from the Senate’s debates captured the imagination of the public. Senators skeptical of civil rights legislation hinted that “Mrs. Murphy”—a hypothetical old widow who rented out a room in her house in a northern city—might wind up bearing the brunt of federal surveillance and law enforcement if she got too picky about whom she accepted as a tenant. The legislation’s backers treated the question as ridiculous—of course a boarding house, unlike the hotels that would be covered in any civil rights legislation, was Mrs. Murphy’s “personal” property, with which she could do as she pleased. But the distinction was not as obvious as pro–civil rights legislators claimed, and the certitudes that rested on it proved complacent. In his opening remarks at the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (and of the march itself), warned that “real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin. The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality.” And so it was after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Property simply would not enjoy the same constitutional protection that it had before.

For all their pious sentiments about desegregating the South, whites opposed every single activist step that might have brought desegregation about, and every single activist who was working to do so. In 1961, they thought, by a margin of 57 to 28 percent, that the black students staging sit-ins at North Carolina lunch counters and the “Freedom Riders” occupying segregated buses between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans “hurt” rather than “helped” the cause of civil rights. In 1964, on the eve of the Civil Rights Act, only 16 percent of Americans said that mass demonstrations had helped the cause of racial equality—versus 74 percent who said they had hurt it. Sixty percent even disapproved of the March on Washington, at least in the days leading up to it, while only 23 percent approved.

Most Americans, liberal as well as conservative, saw the race problem as something distant. It had to do only, or mainly, with the exotic culture of the South, where segregation was legal. The problem was almost one of foreign policy. The sociologist of race Alan David Freeman wrote of how, sitting in an all-white fifth-grade classroom in New York City in 1954, he had found out about the Brown decision: “I can recall distinctly the response of my own naïvely liberal consciousness . . . The Law is now going to make those bad Southerners behave.” As white people in the northern and western states saw it, racial harmony had arrived long ago. In August 1962, with the school year about to begin, 83 percent of Americans told Gallup that the blacks in their community had “the same opportunities as white children to get a good education.” Gallup kept asking this question as the 1960s wore on and white Americans’ views changed little. At the end of the 1967–68 school year, 70 percent told pollsters that blacks in their community were treated “the same as whites” and only 20 percent that they were treated not very well or badly. Outside the South, white people seemed to believe it would be a simple matter to get rid of segregation, as if a system of racial oppression so intricate and ingenious that it had taken three-and-a-half centuries to devise could be dismantled overnight—by sheer open-minded niceness, at no price in rights to anyone. The country could solve a problem of instit...

Worldwide, as Malcolm X saw it, white people were panicked that rising incomes in the Third World were leading to rapid population growth, thence to power, thence to revolution. In a speech he gave before a mostly white audience at a forum sponsored by the socialist newspaper The Militant, he treated rights and revolution as part of a seamless whole. “Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee,” he said. “Revolutions are never fought by turning the other cheek. Revolutions are never based upon love-your-enemy and pray-for-those-who-spitefully-use-you. And revolutions are never waged singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Revolutions are based upon bloodshed.” This was not necessarily meant to be a racist doctrine. Malcolm X urged sympathetic whites to turn the civil rights struggle into a struggle for human rights, which “opens the door for all of our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia, who have their independence, to come to our rescue.” Malcolm X made that speech a week after his only meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr. The two bumped into each other in the U.S. Senate while attending the debate on the civil rights bill and spoke for, literally, one minute. It has become common to present the two as having taken opposite approaches to civil rights. The motto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights umbrella group King founded in 1957, was “To save the soul of America.” It summarizes well the role King plays in twent...

Two weeks after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, policeman Thomas Gilligan shot dead 15-year-old James Powell in Harlem. Powell had been either (as police said) attacking Gilligan with a knife or (as Powell’s friends said) caught up in a mostly peaceful protest of a landlord’s anti-loitering policies. The neighborhood exploded in riots, which lasted for six nights, one of which saw 200 police and civilians hospitalized. No sooner had they ended than Rochester, New York, blew up. Jersey City, Philadelphia, and Dixmoor, Illinois, followed.

Many American race riots in the half-century that followed, from Watts in 1965 through Los Angeles in 1992 to Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, would take the form of Harlem’s in 1964. All would have the half-political character best described by the historian Eric Hobsbawm in his work on medieval uprisings and Mediterranean “banditry.” To part of the country the riots were a social movement: a protest against the legitimacy of law enforcement that favored whites over blacks. To the rest of the country, the riots were just crime: a protest against nothing more than the rule of law. In the mid- to late 1960s, that was true especially for whites outside the South. For many, the riots were their introduction to blacks, and brought a change of perspective. It seemed to white people that the country had somehow pressed the wrong button and was now getting the “bad” civil rights movement instead of the “good” one they’d been promised—the burn-down-the-business-district version instead of the shake-hands-on-the-White-House-lawn version.

Starting in the early 1960s, an astonishing spike in crime, in which blacks made up a disproportionate share of both perpetrators and victims, took on aspects of a national emergency. The emergency would pass through various stages: the looting episodes in Memphis that preceded the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, and a new wave of deadly riots that followed it, the Attica Prison Revolt of 1971, the New York blackout of 1977, the crack epidemic of 1986, the Los Angeles “Rodney King” riots of 1992, O. J. Simpson’s acquittal in his 1995 murder trial. After that, crime rates fell in general, but the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal statistics never went away. By 2011, toward the end of Barack Obama’s first term in office, blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, still accounted for 39 percent of the arrests for violent crime.

Americans were by no means opposed to black advancement—but they had accepted the government’s assurance that de jure racism was the main obstacle to it. They were probably surprised when the advance in blacks’ fortunes slowed after 1964, relative to its rate in the two decades after the Second World War. It was not the first such disappointment in American history. In 1914, half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, the historian Charles Beard lamented, “Whatever the cause may be, there seems to be no doubt that the colored race has not made that substantial economic advance and achieved that standard of life which its friends hoped would follow from emancipation.”

The commencement speech Lyndon Johnson gave in front of the Howard University library in Washington on a June evening in 1965 has become a hallmark of civil rights oratory: You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

Two months later, Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act and the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts would undergo race riots that left dozens dead, a thousand injured, and thousands more in prison. There had always been a good deal of bluff about Johnson and other Southern white apostles of civil rights, a whiff of the nineteenth-century Southerner’s claim to know the ways of “our” black folk better than you ever could. Now their reputation for expertise and fine-tuned sympathy was damaged. The country’s political leadership was thrown into a consternation from which it would not emerge for at least half a century.

The American anti-racist regime developed in such a way as to exclude the most obvious race-blind solution to prejudice: neutral civil service, college admission, and hiring exams. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court justices asked whether a power plant in North Carolina could give aptitude tests to its employees. Title VII (Section 703) of the Civil Rights Act had said they could. But Chief Justice Warren Burger and a unanimous Court decided they could not, if such tests disadvantaged blacks in any way: “Good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operated as ‘built-in headwinds’ for minority groups,” Burger wrote.

Second-wave feminism began in 1963. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique a few months before President Kennedy was shot. Her preoccupations were not those of the “first wave” of nineteenth-century abolitionists, prohibitionists, and suffragists. She did not philosophize about the inequalities, incompatibilities, and quarrels that the feminist Robin Morgan called “a five-thousand-year-buried anger.” Friedan was describing something more modest: the ground women had lost since she herself had gone to all-female Smith College in western Massachusetts in the late 1930s.

By the mid-1950s, half the seats in Congress were held by (mostly quite young) veterans. Their domination of Congress would keep rising through the decades, peaking in 1971, when vets held 75 percent of the seats. They dominated journalism, too. “The intimate interaction between press and president in the thousand days of John F. Kennedy’s administration . . . ,” recalled Washington Post journalist Robert G. Kaiser, “depended on the existence of a like-minded cohort of World War II veterans (soldiers and journalists who covered the war) who shared a view of America’s destiny.” It was a manly world knit together socially out of wartime memories and guided in its decisions by wartime rules of thumb. Vets called society’s tune. Their tastes and preoccupations were presented as normal for the whole country. Advertisements from the color magazines of the 1940s and 1950s followed the arc of a GI’s fantasies across the years; they were a mix of technology and animal spirits. Everything was dressed up as rocket science. Oldsmobile had the “Rocket 202 Engine,” while Pontiac had the “Strato-Streak V-8 + Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic.” Post-war women’s swimsuits were as animally sexual as those of the supposedly libertine 1970s would be, albeit in a different fashion idiom (reticulated singlets for the earlier decade, string two-pieces for the later). As the 1950s progressed—as the GIs entered middle age—bust lines rose, hemlines fell, and women loaded up with jewelry.

Weeknight television was made up almost wholly of Westerns and army serials. For the 1962–63 season, ABC showed in its prime-time slot (7:30 p.m. back then) Cheyenne on Monday (followed by The Rifleman at 8:30), Combat! on Tuesday, Wagon Train on Wednesday, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on Thursday, and Gallant Men, a World War II drama, on Friday. (Odd that in later years Ozzie and Harriet would become a symbol of post-war American conformism—at ABC in 1963, it broke the macho mold.) NBC’s Tuesday-through-Thursday offerings in that time slot were Laramie, The Virginian, and Wide Country, with the high-ranking Bonanza as a 9:00 p.m. Sunday-night treat. CBS had less of a Western orientation during the week, confining its 7:30 p.m. shows to Marshall Dillon (Tuesday) and Rawhide (Friday), leaving its main Western programming for late Saturday, with Have Gun-Will Travel and Gunsmoke.

Despite the promise of limited exploration in space, in the early 1960s the Industrial Revolution was no longer producing anything revolutionary. The theorist of management Peter Drucker noted that the world’s markets were beginning to unify, the world’s technology leader, IBM, was now producing an astonishing thousand computers a month, and plastics appeared to be a new industry of major importance. But otherwise the country remained stuck in the age of Edison, Bell, and Westinghouse. Drucker warned that the economy has been carried largely by industries that were already “big business” before World War I. It has been based on technologies that were firmly established by 1913 to exploit inventions made in the half-century before. Technologically the last fifty years have been the fulfillment of promises bequeathed to us by our Victorian grandparents. . . . Almost all the steel mills built since World War II use processes that date back to the 1860’s and were already considered obsolescent fifty years ago. . . . And there is not one major feature on any car anywhere today that could not have been found on some commercially available make in 1913. . . . Measured by the yardsticks of the economist, the last half-century has been an Age of Continuity—the period of least change in three hundred years or so.

As surely as World War II had advanced the integration of blacks into the mainstream of American academic and work life, it had reversed the integration of women. The war done, women were shunted from the jobs they had filled, to make way for the returning heroes. Between 1920 and 1958, women went from a third of college students to a quarter. The GI Bill put universities at the service of millions of demobilized veterans. However storied its contribution to the smooth reintegration of American fighting men, the bill was one of the greatest impediments to working women ever erected. The boom of the 1950s wound up affecting the sexes in different ways. Men became titans of, or at least soldiers in, the industrial economy. Their women were left stranded in empty houses full of high-powered cleaning machinery. This had never been their lot before.

Americans groped their way only slowly toward an understanding of what a liberated woman was. Everyone, no matter what his viewpoint, understood the stakes of civil rights. But the public didn’t get women’s lib. In 1968, the Philip Morris tobacco company brought out Virginia Slims, a brand that would pitch cigarette smoking as a component of the emancipation under way. “You’ve come a long way, baby” was its motto. With a financial stake in figuring out what women yearned for and (just as important) claimed to yearn for, the brand sponsored frequent polls. In October 1971, it asked women how often they felt that “being a woman has prevented me from doing some of the things I had hoped to do in life.” Only 7 percent said “frequently”; 12 percent said “occasionally”; 79 percent said “hardly ever.” As for what women thought of feminists, the results were chastening. Twenty-two percent respected the journalist Gloria Steinem, versus 4 percent who did not. But 65 percent had never heard of her. Sixty-three percent had never heard of the author Germaine Greer, and 64 percent had never heard of the theorist Kate Millett. For most women, the “problem that has no name” was not a problem.

During the Kennedy administration, polls showed no attitudinal gap of any kind, on any important issue, between married and unmarried women. Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried believed in the existence of a superior “women’s intuition.” Sixteen percent of married women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair, versus 15 percent of unmarried women. Fifty years later, married and unmarried women would disagree about almost everything. The conditions for women’s lib, not yet ripe in the 1960s, would be more favorable a decade later. Bureaucratic and judicial procedures first worked out to punish civil rights violations would by then have been analogized into remedies for other grievances. In the 1970s, a generation of women would come of age who could take advantage of them, not having already wagered their happiness on a traditional mating and family-forming system. Universities grew, admitted more women, and insulated a critical mass of elite women from child-rearing expectations. It was they who would mobilize against “sexism.”

The succinct explanation that New York Times war correspondent David Halberstam gave in 1972 for the high-quality work he and his fellow journalists had done in Vietnam was that there had been no women in their lives to mess things up. “Because only one of them was married,” he wrote of his colleagues, “there was no wifely pull to become part of the Saigon social whirl, to get along with the Noltings or the Harkinses, the kind of insidious pressure which works against journalistic excellence in Washington.” Women meant compromise and intellectual mediocrity. If you asked women to name the quality they most admired in women, “intelligence” ranked tops, at 57 percent. If you asked men, the best thing about women was “gentleness,” at 38 percent; only 1 percent of them cited intelligence.

“Maybe the real you . . . is a blonde,” ran a 1966 magazine ad for a Clairol product called Born Blonde. “Often a woman who looks merely pleasant with dark hair can be a beauty as a blonde. How about you?”

Still true today.

There were a lot of reasons why, in the 1960s, eroticism seemed to overflow the levees of tradition. They included the prestige attached to manliness (and even machismo) in the wake of the Second World War, the bringing to market of an almost perfectly effective birth control pill in 1960, and, with the Baby Boom, an unprecedented temporary concentration of people of sexually active age.

When a society is in demographic decline, men outnumber the women they are most likely to marry or pair off with. As a consequence, mores will be more “female.” James Q. Wilson offered the example of female suffrage in the turn-of-the-century United States. All the movement’s prominent theorists and agitators were in the northeast, but all eleven of the states that had given women the vote before World War I were in the west, where the male-female ratio (and therefore male deference to women) was highest.

However inevitable the sexual disruption of the 1960s and 1970s might have been, a variety of sexually enthusiastic and culturally influential men sought to promote it as a “sexual revolution,” as if it had been somebody’s brilliant idea, probably theirs. John Updike, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer—for such novelists, the trend to more open sexual relations offered new opportunities in culture, art, and society. Hugh Hefner felt the same way. In 1953, he had founded the monthly Playboy, a magazine that included ample political and cultural coverage but was known best for its color photo centerfolds of pneumatic nudes.

Women’s rights and male license were traveling on similar tracks. Imagine asking an average Playboy reader during the Johnson administration to dictate a new sexual “constitution” that would replace the old one. His preconceptions and practical demands—on the oppressiveness of marriage, on the availability of birth control, on the desirability of mixing the sexes—would likely have overlapped with those of feminism, even if the ideals in the name of which those changes were sought were alleged to differ. In 1974, Virginia Slims found that women backed “most of the efforts to strengthen and change women’s status in society” by a margin of 2 to 1 (57 to 26 percent) but that men backed them even more strongly—by 3 to 1 (64 to 20 percent).

Feminism was locked, from the start, in an intimate relationship with technology, management, and the market system. The power of feminism rested on advances in contraception and abortion, and on the spread of civil rights principles out of government and into the corporate world. It was, in its essence, an ideology of the innovative, entrepreneurial, and managerial classes, an ally of technocracy, modernity, progress, and wealth. Feminists wanted to integrate the Metropolitan Club, not the Elks. Steinem mocked “the house-bound matriarchs of Queens and the Bronx.”

Feminism offered corporations an excuse (what the political philosopher Nancy Fraser called a “legitimation”) for breaking the implicit contract to pay any full-time worker a wage he could raise a family on. It was feminism that provided, under pressure of the recessions of the 1970s, a pretext for repurposing household and national budgets. Instead of being used for reproduction (understood as both family-forming and investment), those budgets would now be consumed. The increment in the family wage that had been meant for the raising of children was withdrawn. Families were no longer entitled to it—mothers would have to enter the workplace to claim it. But they wound up getting only a small part of it, and their competition drove down their husbands’ wages into the bargain.

Between 1973 and the turn of the century, real income rose by 21 percent for Americans with advanced degrees and fell for everyone else: by 4 percent for college grads, 26 percent for high school grads, and 38 percent for dropouts. Now, getting stuck in a relationship due to an “accident” could mean the difference between an exciting life spent adventurously climbing the social ladder and bottom-rung drudgery.

In 1967, three states had passed laws allowing abortion in the case of a permanent threat to the mother’s health. Two were heavily Republican—Colorado and California, where the new governor, Ronald Reagan, signed the furthest-reaching liberalization of abortion in American history. But North Carolina, which had voted Democratic in the last nine presidential elections, passed similar laws. A presidential task force urged the repeal of abortion laws in 1968. New York, where Republicans controlled the governorship and both state chambers, legalized abortion in 1970; its legislature voted two years later to repeal the law, though the repeal was vetoed by Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller. Notably, there was also a belt of conservative Democratic states with brand-new laws permitting abortion under certain circumstances. They were all in the newly desegregated South. In the 1960s, every coastal Southern state from Alabama to Virginia legislated some kind of right to abortion, starting with a Mississippi law permitting abortion in the case of rape. By the time of Roe, half of the states with at least some abortion rights were south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Polls taken in the days after Roe v. Wade show that Americans had a sense that abortion was bad, but lacked a moral framework that would allow them to think about abortion logically and confidently. They were concerned about dangers to a mother’s health (for which they favored allowing abortion by 91 to 8 percent), rape (they favored abortion by 81 to 10 percent), and birth defects (abortion was okay by 82 to 15 percent). They wanted, it seems, to guard against “risk.” But they understood that doing so could easily upset the rules of courtship, the balance of power between men and women, and what used to be called “the way of the world.” They were divided on how to proceed. Suppose a married woman who doesn’t want more children gets pregnant? Tough luck. People disapproved of abortion in that case, 51 to 46 percent. And a young woman who gets knocked up by her boyfriend? Tough luck to her, too. Forty-nine percent disapproved of abortion in that case, versus 47 percent who approved.

Abortion brought changes in morality because it suppressed certain basic anthropological conditions. Female adultery had throughout history been a more serious trespass than male adultery, not because of any irrational sexism but out of a rational instinct for survival. When a man strays, he risks placing a child in some other household. When a woman strays, she risks introducing a creature with ulterior allegiances into the heart of her own. Such straying was the cause of a good deal of anguish and murder, and many of the best novels in the European tradition. But where contraception had reduced the incidence of such problems, abortion outright “solved” them. There need never be any progeny from an adultery. A certain rein on sexuality, particularly female sexuality, was snapped.

There was a moralism behind Our Bodies, Ourselves: Sex was potentially a source of boundless pleasure for people, but crabby and envious older people, representatives of the old society, were conspiring to hide the truth about it. Those old crabs had to be fought and their mythologies discredited. The chapter on abortion came before the chapter on childbearing, as if the former were the norm and the latter the exception. Having children was an aspect of the quest for sexual pleasure, rather than the other way around. Skeptical about the maternal higher ends that had traditionally been ascribed to sex, the book was guileless and gullible about the hedonistic higher ends it proposed to replace them with.

As early as the 1920s, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell had warned that the establishment of welfare states risked turning not just the economy but everything upside-down, because the state would replace the father as protector and provider. Breaking the traditional family structure might look rational, modern, and sensible. Nonetheless, Russell wrote, if this should occur, we must expect a complete breakdown of traditional morality, since there will no longer be any reason why a mother should wish the paternity of her child to be indubitable. . . . Whether the effect upon men would be good or bad, I do not venture to say. It would eliminate from their lives the only emotion equal in importance to sex love. It would make sex love itself more trivial. It would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition.

This is disquietingly descriptive of my own outlook.

In the late spring of 1962, the Saturday Evening Post had asked women what they thought the ideal age for marriage was. Their answers clustered around age 21, though a fifth believed in marrying younger. What is striking is that 99 percent of women listed age 27 or lower. There is no record in the responses of anyone suggesting a woman might not want to marry.

In the winter of 1976, a convention of the American Bar Association came within two votes of endorsing the legalization of prostitution, while pornography was confined to disreputable red-light districts. It is a measure of how rare dirty movies were in 1978 that X-rated videocassettes sold in “men’s magazines” for about a hundred dollars apiece.

By 2015, 45 percent of the men in Harvard’s graduating class would be watching pornography multiple times a week.

Indeed, as the 1970s wore on, ads began to portray them as sex machines. “For those nights you want everything to be just right” ran a 1974 magazine spread for Electrophonic Stereos. The illustration showed a woman standing on a white shag rug behind various space-age stereo equipment, her head arced back in ecstasy as she is embraced from behind. “You’ll let him know, too, that you’re involved in the ‘today’ sound.” When a shampoo called “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” elicited the eponymous compliment, a young woman’s thought bubble read “Jackpot!” The Mistress Collection, by Funky Fashions, advised sophisticated women to “own at least one pair of strategically cut out bikini panties.” Women were being sold a sexuality more suited to adolescent males.

The title Ms.—a substitute for “Miss” and “Mrs.” that implied nothing about marital status—was introduced into the national conversation when Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine in 1971. (Its ultimate source was a Marxist publication, News & Letters, which addressed its subscriptions that way. Steinem had heard it mentioned by a civil rights worker in a 1969 radio broadcast on New York’s WBAI.)

A proposed Equal Rights Amendment held, quite simply, that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Between 1972 and 1977, it was ratified by 35 of the 38 states necessary to amend the Constitution. Americans backed the ERA in polls, but their support was impressionistic and vague, broad but not deep. When state legislatures dragged their feet and five of them even rescinded their approval, no one particularly seemed to care. Despite a constitutionally dubious congressional extension of the term for ratification—from March 1979 to March 1982—the measure died.

President Richard Nixon, through an ambitious program of internal polling, had already made a discovery of more general application: Americans were happy to run their mouths about all kinds of experimentation, but they did not much like it up close. In this political sense, women’s lib was very much like civil rights. Whenever you personalized the issue, rather than speaking in lofty abstractions, people got suspicious. Whatever pieties they might spout about helping the unfortunate, two thirds of Americans were outraged that “women getting welfare money are having illegitimate babies to increase the money they get.” And although they said they liked the ERA, they had little respect for the people who were bringing it about. By the spring of 1977, Americans agreed (42 percent) as much as disagreed (42 percent) with the hard proposition that “advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment are mainly women’s libbers who would totally change the traditional role of women, and that is wrong.” They had come to identify the constitution-changers as a class—a new elite that had been formed in the crucible of protest against the Vietnam War.

The war in Vietnam began in an act of presidential deceit. Lyndon Johnson hustled the country into the conflict at the height of the 1964 presidential campaign, winning congressional consent to bomb Vietnam in retaliation for a naval confrontation with North Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. That confrontation had been provoked, as Congress would discover only years later, by U.S. and South Vietnamese naval incursions into the North. The bombing, rationalized as an alternative to sending ground troops, made ground troops necessary, once the elections were over, in order to protect the perimeter of the South Vietnamese airbases from which the bombers left. But then those troops were attacked. The “perimeter” was gradually extended to most of South Vietnam, which over the next decade became the temporary home of 2.7 million mostly non-college-enrolled American youths.