MME Designs's Weblog

“San Francisco was where children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies’.” Observation by Joan Didion, 1968; design by Meredith Eliassen, 2016.

The Hippie movement directly impacted a minority counterculture group, but had tremendous implications for the entire American society. Benign neglect, drugs, open and alternative sex practices, young parents, new communal family configurations, and no discipline shaped a generation. Events during the Summer of Love in 1967 were fluid, loosely organized around the music and drug scene. Marijuana was the common drug of hippies while LSD was used on special occasions as a catalyst for mysticism. Well-educated men cultivated this environment by creating a mystique about drug-culture as a rite of passage for Flower Children. Oregon-born Ken Kesey (1935-2001) spread a drug gospel, claiming that under the right conditions LSD made users feel like they were in the Garden of Eden. For Leary and Kesey who were mature, the use of LSD was a social experiment, but for naive Flower Children, drugs became an initiation or opportunity to surrender self.

The Summer of Love was a youth movement that presented history with ironic dichotomies of childhood. Intellectuals may have organized the events, but uneducated youths gave it life and fuel. Folk and electric rock musicians fostered the image of the “Hippie” and the “Flower Child,” while the Scott McKenzie and John Phillips song, “San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair),” beckoned disenfranchised teenagers and college students to leave their families and come to San Francisco. The Summer of Love was supposed to be the dawning of a new era of youth and virtue, but it also brought venereal disease and infections for thousands of transient youths searching for a substitute for familial love.

From its inception, the Summer of Love was intended to be a rainbow-ing event full of color and heightened senses. It was actually a male-driven, male-dominated movement that placed young females outside of familiar boundaries, and changed the familial dynamics for a generation. Art posters depicted voluptuous earth goddesses, while photographs by Gene Anthony and Elaine Mayes recorded women in subservient positions sitting on mattresses (sometimes holding babies) on the floor with men standing in the foreground. The Summer of Love also presented a volatile stage for exploring gender and sexuality – a Vanity Fair for runaway youth. Hippie children, often the offspring of young parents, suffered with the benign neglect, no safe boundaries, and no inhibitions when parents refused to take on adult roles and transient adults created ambiguous situations that could be opportunities predatory sexual behavior.