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Boomer men chose to grow their hair long in the 1960s and 1970s in defiance of their parents. Boomers chose to have sex before marriage despite growing up in a time with prohibitions against it. Boomers chose to experiment with drugs when drug use was (at least at first) seen as morally questionable.
While previous generations of youth learned social norms from adults in their communities, Boomer children were the first to experience a world outside their neighborhoods via TV, showing them there was more than one way of doing things.
Technology and individualism worked together to form a generation whose needs and wants would change dramatically over their lifetimes but who would always be guided by the idea of placing one’s own views and choices first—a concept that led to both greater acceptance of others and more self-centeredness.
Over the course of the 2020s, for the first time since the earliest of their number arrived in the 1940s, Boomers will begin to cede center stage in business, politics, and education.
American culture began the 1960s as a collectivistic culture (focused on social rules and group harmony) and ended it as an individualistic one (focused on the needs of the self and thus often rejecting traditional rules).
By the 1970s, Boomer individualism was infused with a different flavor, moving more toward self-fulfillment, enlightenment, and spirituality—an individualism that turned inward.
It was the beginning of the Boomers’ New Age fascination with a polyglot combination of alternative medicine, Eastern spirituality, and navel-gazing.
Boomers pioneered the idea that everything was worth discussing out in the open, discarding previous notions that depression, sex, or domestic abuse could not be spoken of in public.
Jobs was a Boomer taken to its logical extremes. He spent much of his adulthood rejecting the conventional, trying various vegetarian and vegan diets, walking around barefoot in offices, and refusing to buy furniture for his house
In turn, the technology introduced by Jobs and his fellow tech entrepreneurs would transform nearly every aspect of life from work to social interaction, often in a more individualistic direction.
Another intriguing way to document the cultural shift toward individualism is in the names parents give their children.
In the 1880s, almost half of boys were given one of just ten names, and nearly 1 out of 4 girls received one of the ten most popular names.
By the time Boomers were naming their Millennial children in the 1980s, only 1 out of 5 received one of the ten most common names. Common names faded from there, with Gen X and Millennial parents choosing progressively fewer common names in the 21st century.
Parents no longer worried about giving their child a name that was too unusual, but worried about giving their child a name that was too common.
Boomers were the first generation to mount a significant challenge to the centuries-old rule that sex should wait until marriage and instead argued that it was a choice up to the individual.
It was a trend that would reverberate throughout subsequent generations, especially as the average age at marriage rose and staying a virgin until marriage became increasingly untenable.
Well into the 1960s, when a girl got “in trouble,” a shotgun marriage usually followed. When that wasn’t an option, some girls and young women were sent to brutal maternity homes away from their families.
Even the language was punitive: Babies born to unmarried mothers were called illegitimate. Or, as one unmarried mother was told, “our children would be called bastards on the playground.”
Boomer women in their 30s single-handedly kept the fertility rate stable and even slightly rising in the 1980s and 1990s. The slow-life strategy was beginning, with Boomer women waiting longer to have children.
More and more college-educated women were building their careers before becoming mothers, leading to concern among medical doctors and worry among mothers-in-law.
Boomers continued the upward trend in divorce that Silents started in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the divorce rate began to decline in 1981, it stayed at historically high levels long enough to produce a significant generational shift in divorce.
In less than a decade from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, drugs went from counterculture to mainstream. By the 1970s, drug use was no longer a way to rebel—it was a way to fit in, and it had spread widely.
Drugs lost some of their cool once Boomers reached their 30s and 40s and had settled into careers and parenthood, and as Boomers went, so did the cultural messages.
In the Boomer lexicon, using drugs wasn’t just about getting high: It was about not being told what to do. If I want to get high, the thinking went, that’s my personal choice.
From Boomers’ perspective, the dire predictions about marijuana use had failed to come true. Their parents told them pot would make them crazy or addicted. It didn’t, and many began to value the therapeutic uses of cannabis as well.
Boomers have also continued drinking alcohol into their elder years, including possibly drinking too much.
During the 1950s to the early 1970s, when most schoolchildren were Boomers, the racial segregation of schools finally began to break down.
The language of race also evolved as attitudes changed, with the labels signaling that things were different—at least somewhat different. As Gates Jr. said, “My grandfather was colored, my father was Negro, and I am Black.”
Child poverty had already been falling in the early 1960s, and then dropped even more, with much of that decrease driven by a huge drop in poverty among Black Americans.
The income gap is also dwarfed by an even larger gap in owned wealth, partially because many Blacks were barred by redlining from getting mortgages or buying houses well into the 1980s, leaving less wealth to pass down to the next generation.
Black adults’ happiness changed little during the 1970s and 1980s, but made substantial gains between the 1990s and 2000s as Boomers rose to prominence
The section on employment, he proposed, should not only outlaw discrimination based on race and religion, but also on sex. That, he was convinced, would kill the bill—plus, he could have a little fun.
In the end, the amendment on sex discrimination passed, and so did the bill as a whole, to the elation of both civil rights activists and feminists.
The bill created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), tasked with enforcing the employment provision. Except it didn’t—almost immediately, the EEOC was overwhelmed with cases, making enforcement weak at best.
The New York Times editorial board found the law ridiculous, writing, “it would have been better if Congress had just abolished sex itself.” For one thing, they said, there’s the “bunny problem”: What if a man wanted to work as a Playboy bunny?
In the years to come, feminists worked on issues across the legal, educational, and personal spectrum to call attention to sexism and advocate for equal opportunities for women.
Not only did more women earn college degrees, but women were becoming doctors, lawyers, and professors at unprecedented rates. Only 3% of new lawyers were women in 1965, but 30% were by 1980
Gender segregation in jobs affected men, too. When Celio Diaz Jr., a married father of two from Miami, applied to be a flight attendant in 1967, Pan American World Airways rejected him for being male.
Before long, “stewardess” became “flight attendant,” and by the 1990s it was no longer unusual for both men and women to be flight attendants.
While growth in the number of women in Congress was slow during the 1970s and 1980s, it shot upward once Boomers began to enter middle age in the 1990s
Who takes care of the kids when both parents are working? Well into the 1970s, there were few childcare centers or full-time preschools. That slowly changed through the course of the 1980s, though childcare remained expensive and often difficult to obtain.
Change takes time to proliferate—it’s a mistaken perception that most Americans embraced feminism in the 1970s and then rejected it in the 1980s. If anything, it was the other way around.
The media might have been panicking about working mothers, but the public at large was increasingly supportive.
Although certainly not universal, this seems to be a common attitude among Silents and Boomers: Just put up with it; that’s how men are.
Not all Boomer women agree; many were happy to see the change #MeToo accomplished.
Campus protests began just as the first class of Boomers arrived on college campuses in the fall of 1964.
Thus began an unprecedented time of unrest on campus, with students occupying administrators’ offices, fighting with police, and setting buildings on fire.
Campus protests would fade after that, but Boomers’ interest in politics continued, with many apparently deciding to work inside the system instead of outside it.
Boomers’ enthusiasm for political involvement would not be equaled by the generations who followed them—which is especially surprising given that the internet made writing to public officials substantially less time-consuming.
Boomers talk change, but don’t always change things as much as younger generations might want.
