II.
For part two, I thought it would be fair to describe my own part in this history. This part of the article may seem sort of harsh, and perhaps it is too critical towards feminism and Baby Boomers in general, but I am part of a generation of skeptics, I guess you could say–we have been left hungering for something more. I will get a little Juvenalian later in this piece, but I also am trying to be lighthearted about all the crumbs. To be fair, this is largely a gathering of observations from growing up as a child of the 1970’s and 80’s and from reading many books through that time from different perspectives and tastes, and from listening to others when they spoke during that time, even when their mouths were full. And since it turned out to be so dastardly long, I decided to add some pictures to spice it up:)
If Labels and Categories Help You…
If you prefer categorizing me, let me categorize myself by saying that I am an American, raised in a suburb type area, small town in the middle of the 48 contiguous states, from German, Austrian, Scotch-Irish, Scandinavian, Spanish, Cherokee descent…let me see…am I forgetting anybody?….maybe…well, if you go back further, it gets even more complicated and then it gets easier again, but we’ll just start with that. It is highly likely that I am related to you, brother, sister, in some way. Most of my relatives were immigrants that came around the turn of the 20thcentury. While growing up, it was really difficult for me to pick a race that described me because I wanted to claim so many since I came from so many. One of my grandmas did not speak English until she went to First Grade. I was brought up Roman Catholic with a post-Vatican II-shock religious education (that means I learned how to eat Oreos and drink Kool-aid with my friends at Catechism class). My grandpa on my mom’s side was Lutheran but became Catholic because he fell deeply in love with my grandma and wanted to marry her as a Catholic. My other grandpa was just baptized a few years ago because his parents just really didn’t do a particular religion—he was crying with joy through the whole ceremony and so was everyone else–and my grandma on my dad’s side, well, she’s the one who taught me to pray the Rosary.
Her mom, who died when she was very young, taught her to pray the Rosary. This part of my family was the first group of homesteaders in the Plains of Colorado. The first couple to come here built a nine foot by nine foot house and had to prove that they could take care of several acres–they did it. Other parts of my family were part of the group of Irish who built the railroad that crossed the United States. Another part came with a whole town that decided to move from Austria to Kansas. And the Cherokee? My great-grandma, who just passed a couple of years ago, was half Cherokee. Small, quiet and determined, she married my great-grandfather who was a very tall Scandinavian (think Viking). My grandpa and all of his sons ended up being tall, broad built with Cherokee features. Striking! As you have probably guessed, there are several pieces of cultures that came together through the decades to create my history.
To finish off my categories, I will say that I was educated in a public school—a secular education (will get into that later) and come, for the most part, from the middle class. In the middle class, I get to experience people from the middle, the rich, and the poor. I am and have always been a female, am now a mom, was always a sister and daughter, too. I was the middle child in my family. Before you run the other way thinking I have some sort of syndrome, let me explain. I try to understand multiple perspectives because rather than seeing my position as a middle child in the family as a syndrome or disease, I see it as a perfect opportunity to learn peacekeeping, to learn how to be with different kinds of people at different times no matter what their age, to see more than one side of the story, and to even sometimes be a bridge. I fail at it sometimes miserably, but that is the position I am in. As far as my aspects of being an American, I live in the middle of that too. I am neither from the East nor from the West, North or South, so I get to experience a little bit of everything that’s “American.” And being a lame housewife, I have most of the responsibilities of a marriage but am not married–it gives you that sort of rock and hard place sort of feeling for anyone who wants to know.
How on earth did I find my worldview? Was it just lying on the ground?
My global view (worldview) gained from my secular education was limited historically to an Anglo/Puritan perspective that did very little to treat the history of the Southwest and Spanish, Irish, Italian, German, French, Romanian, African, etc….influence. Growing up in this tradition, I learned from school that the Catholic Church was the root of all evil, that all men were mean because of patriarchy, that King Henry and his daughter did nothing violent after he divorced his wife and the Church, that Great Britain did everything right as well as the Puritans who left them, and that women should have the right to an abortion. Huh? It was quite a mix. In the end, I couldn’t understand why Americans went through a Revolution. Perhaps that had to do with Post-WWII diplomacy or something like that? Who knows?
Today, some historians call this a post-Imperial education, an education that has all the imperial prejudice of its former keepers but puts a new name on the information. It also had the strong influence of feminism that identified patriarchy as the root of all problems because they saw how Puritans treated women, ironically, so assumed that all Christians had the same view of women; thus, the history was created by going through the vein of the Puritans, the English, and the feminist perspective. Don’t worry, I still like you, my British friends, Puritans, and girl friends. It just happened to create a history that was limited, under the microscope of “politically correct” for that day, so there wasn’t much left to offer after that kind of filter.
Anyway, until a few years ago, I thought the Puritans were the first people from Europe to come to the United States. I didn’t learn American History until I went to college! In college, I had to read original documents from the first people who came to this area. Until I actually sat down and read original writings, I thought the Puritans were all peaceful, non-prejudiced people and that every Spaniard who came to the United States was a barbarian. And the French? Who were they? Christopher Columbus was Italian? That’s new to me. What about Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln? I also didn’t know there were so many different tribes of Native Americans. There still remains a lot of gaps, but at least I know now that these gaps exist.
How did this happen, you might ask? Didn’t my family try to help me learn something about American history since the school gave me so little to go on? What about World History? How did their information shape my education, my worldview?
Now some of you may be asking about the education from the TV. TV was definitely in my home. Was my poor academic education from the TV? My parents grew up with TV, but shows were seemingly harmless for them. Perhaps not aware how television was changing, they thought TV would be the same for their children. It wasn’t. An education here? Nope. At least not one that could give me an idea where we came from and what was happening in the world.
How about Church? Well, after priests and nuns turned away from their vows in the 60′s, there was hardly any one left to teach anything about the Church. My parents grew up with priests and nuns who taught the Catechism. Thinking their children would be taught by the Church, too, they didn’t intervene when it didn’t…at least, not until a nun told my sister that it was okay for women to have an abortion. Screech! A little lost on how to proceed, we probably went through our darkest period as a family because we stopped going to the Church. Not a surprise. Today, we hear so many stories of mass confusion when nuns returned to parochial schools with mini-skirts or when priests returned married with children or when priests who had left began having nude retreats, etc., etc., etc. Quite an abrupt change from the 1950′s. Praise God, He sent the Catechism so that lay people could actually find out what the Church actually taught in 1994! Before that, it was every man for himself with no information to be found. Keep in mind, the internet was not available. To show you the depth of my Oreo/Kool-aid education, I didn’t even know the Pope was a part of our Church until he came in 1993. That gives you a little more sense of what kind of religious education the average middle class American was getting in the 1970’s and 80’s–shocked parents who didn’t know what to tell their kids about the Catholic Church.
Now to history. Thinking the history classes in the U.S. still had original documents in it, my parents didn’t worry about teaching history. They were taught the Gettysburg Address, and had to read a whole host of other original documents. I wasn’t. Their parents lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, so they grew up with people who lived this history, and they learned a lot about perseverance, frugality, and posterity; my parents grew up in prosperity relative to how their parents grew up, but they accepted in part these strong virtues of responsibility. Historical events taught their parents; their parents passed on the knowledge they gained from those experiences with them. When my grandparents parents came at the very beginning of the 20th Century, they came with a deep desire for religious freedom and for land. They also had no experience with the tragedies of slavery. They were, for the most part, poor farmers and railroad workers. This knowledge clashed with the education of my secular history where I was told that, first, I was white and that all white people had African slaves. The authors of this history blamed my forefathers for some egregious things. The majority of my forefathers and mothers were not even here during the time of American slavery. And white? That means something different every quarter of a century.
Anyway, my parents in shock from the changes from the 1960′s and unwilling to be too suspicious of society didn’t know they would have to intervene with the TV, religion, and the education of history, so we grew up with even more comfort but probably far less learned about our history. In turn, we learned hardly anything about our identity. One remarkable thing that happened in the late 1960′s–the identity crisis of many began!
To which generation did this identity crisis fall? Generation X. We were the ones who were given no idea as to who we were, where we came from, and where we were going. We got bits and pieces here and there. But with so much scattered and thrown in the wind, it was hard to catch authentic information.
With that, I have tried to fill in the gaps created by a tremendous turn in our human history that occurred in the 1960’s. Why did these gaps occur, and what gaps are these? Before I can fill that in, I need to look at why it happened in the first place because it is easier to see where those pieces are going if we can see where those pieces hurled began. Thus, this is my assessment of what I think happened in the 1960’s, from what I have learned in the past and from my present, to find the connections, fill in the gaps, and see the missing pieces, including some thoughts on the feminism that began in the 1960′s. It gained a tremendous upswing around the time I was born. You could almost say, we grew up in the same neighborhood of time, feminism and me. In some ways, not all, she feels like my evil twin sister.
Here is what fills in the gaps of my history and worldview–my mom was a stay-at-home mom and my dad was, and still is, a doctor. My mom received criticism from a lot of her friends because she didn’t work outside the home. She was insulted for not getting a degree. She could not find a lot of support from women—they wanted her to be what she did not want to be. But she did it anyway.
She volunteered countless hours to the school in helping children learn math and reading. She helped create fundraisers that would bring professional musicians to play at our school, new pianos for the band, and uniforms for some sports. She made a safe haven for kids after prom. She drove us to all of our activities. She made our world run smooth. And she was never mean or mad about it. At least, not to me or to my knowledge.
All this time, she would hear from the TV, from other women, from some men that she was wrong for doing what she was doing, that she was backwards, old-fashion, a slave. But none of those women asked her why. They looked down on her.
As a child, I saw a mom who was there. I didn’t have to worry where I was going after school. I didn’t have to wonder who was going to pick me up. I didn’t have to do chores while she was away doing something else. She was right there with me. I am not going to say it was perfect because it wasn’t, but, man, it was pretty darn sweet. I felt sorry for my other friends. They hated their moms. But my mom, I just felt like she loved me.
And none of those women who were her age asked her why she did what she did. She would try to tell them, and they would call her a bigot. She tried even harder, but they said she didn’t know what she was talking about. She was told that she was trying to take away their rights to be women. She lost many friends. They didn’t know. But I did. I knew why my mom stayed at home.
Her mom had to work. Her mom was never home, and when she was, she was too tired to take care of my mom and her sister. My mom’s older sister cooked, cleaned, and took care of my mom, but they fought. My aunt was angry–angry that she had to always take care of her kid sister. My mom didn’t know that this was why her sister was angry when she was growing up. She would run to her best friend’s house just to get out of the anger, the smoke, and just to get a warm smile. Her best friend’s mom stayed at home. My mom made a promise to herself when she was a little girl. She made a promise that she would stay home and take care of her children because she knew what it was like to have a mom work outside of the home. And she knew she wanted it better for her children, for my brother and sisters and me. She knew what she wanted for her future, so she found the man who would support her in doing just that. That guy is my dad. And guess what? They are still married.
My mom would not agree with the society, and, oh! I cannot tell you how much that had an impact on me. I wanted to be a non-conformist right along side her.
Why? I could see it in the difference between my home life and my friends’ house life. They were always anxious. I didn’t mind just being at home. My sister-in-law, who happened to notice this too, she came from a broken family. She watched our family, and that’s where she wanted to be. That’s how she wanted to be. She’s followed my mom, too, because she married my brother and manages an entire household as a stay-at-home mom, too.
I learned more from her example than any class in American history, well taught or not. She learned it from my dad’s mom. My grandma taught her how to cook when she married my dad. It was a tough decision to make in the late 1960’s–to want to stay at home. The direction of the society was definitely not going in the same way. What kind of history was my mom working from? Her experience and her will to want it better for her own children.
Enough about my background. I just wanted to make sure you knew, so that you could see if it tainted my worldview. We are all a part of history. You, dear reader, can help me by sharing your perspective with me.
An Interpretation of the 1960′s Based on My Worldview
So with all that information that I learned from my life and various other sources, here is my observation of the Baby Boomers or those who were teenagers or older in the 1960’s. Again, this is not an exhaustive, over-arching look but is more based on my personal experiences, observations, and research.
So what qualities did the Baby Boomers have?
1. They had a lot of FEAR.
They feared overpopulation.
They feared religion/tradition.
They feared nuclear war, and most importantly death.
They feared discomfort and unpleasant problems, even unpleasant emotions.
They were naïve about what technology can do.
They were naïve about how healthy relationships work.
They were naïve about what an authentic education looked like in regards to other cultures, their own bodies, and the progress of the sciences.
They were naïve about how to sustain prosperity and how to approach the future with the prosperity they were given.
3. In their fear and naiveté, they developed some derogatory terms because this sense of things being beyond their control made them ANGRY!
Housewife!
Man!
Chivalry!
Pregnant!
Baby!
Patriarchy!
Roman Catholic Church!
which would later drift into all of Christianity!
Aquinas!
Poor people!
Suburbs, no middle class, no prosperity, no comfort, no!
Rich people!
No, everybody!
4. To distract themselves from their fear, they made new terms that felt positive.
Teenager, natural rebels…
Youth, staying young…
Free love…
Search for self…
Atheism/ New Age…
The power of woman to be a man…
Birth control, sterilization…
Wealth…what, no, that came a little later.
Success…that drive came later, too.
“Me”…can you hear me?! I AM SPEAKING!
Because of their fears and naiveté, this generation felt compelled to change their culture, but this generation was largely protected by prosperity and a society that kept corruption under the rug, so they may have not known the consequences of that decision. They were protected from many things because their parents were so quiet. But then, there was the threat of nuclear war. Was it the threat of nuclear war? Did that freak them out? Had they started a new form of Naturalism, that sense that reality is too scary and overwhelming? Was it Vietnam? Was it the bloody pictures from there?
Baby Boomers brought evil out from under the rug, but they ended up calling it good. And when I say this, I am talking about drug use, abortion, premarital sex and adultery. Was this because it was too horrid for them to accept and that was the only way they knew how to forgive, or was it because they didn’t know any better. Did they really think those were good ideas, that adultery didn’t hurt hearts? Or were they in shock when they started bringing this stuff to light?
Instead of using the lie of silence, as they perceived their parents had done, they used the lie of renaming the problem into a non-problem. As long as their voice was heard, nothing else mattered. Was the generation before them trying to avoid gossip? I don’t know. Were the Baby Boomers really trying to solve problems by bringing them into the light? I don’t know that for sure either. But there were definitely problems and certainly some of these things had to cause tremendous fears. But seriously, isn’t a lot of this stuff that they began to promote in the 1960’s really grotesque? Brutal? Barbarian? Killing babies? Drugs that destroy your body? Sex with multiple partners who carry disease? I mean, seriously? That’s an accomplishment? It almost feels like they fell into a massive conspiracy to kill the American state of well-being…
And yet, these are the things they seem to have done to allay their fears, and in a certain sense, bring about their new order or worldview. Here are the Baby Boomer traditions that were started to support their worldview based on fear, naivete, anger, and distraction:
The 11 New Traditions
1. Teenagers as rebels. It was generally promoted from the time of the Baby Boomers that teenagers should rebel, so adults should let them be. It wasn’t so much that their parents let them rebel, but this was an idea that they wanted for their children. Teenage-hood took on a whole new dimension in the 1960’s. The age of marriage began to increase. High school and college? Well you know the deal. Good or bad, it’s still a tradition we have today.
2. Trying to stay young forever. Cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, medicines, exercise, choosing young clothes, hairstyles, hanging out with the kids, all in an effort to stay young.
3. Free love. Love that is free from responsibility. It means that women don’t need to expect anything in return for sex. It means that men and women can sleep around with several people. It means striving to keep the feeling of “in love” and when it disappears you move on.
4. “I’ve got to find myself” which means I need to wander whenever I feel like it. I need to do things for myself. I need to think of “me”.
5. “I need to find a spirituality” if it really exists, but I want to do it my way. Mine. Mine. Mine. If I don’t like this one, I’ll just try another one.
6. Women discriminate women. Since women hate me so much, and I am a woman, I need to become a man. I need to become as evil as the man who hurt me or my friend. This is the only way I will become equal–if I try to overpower him and anything connected to him. Any woman who does not do things like me is stupid.
7. Choose sterility, not purity. Birth control was given to control these teenagers and university students. With that mentality, they started feeding into a fear of losing comfort and the possession of things, so they developed an eager hunger for material things which in turn became a waste of material things. They feared overpopulation, so they bought into the idea that there were too many people.
8. Wealth and success. They didn’t share their parents frugality, but with their wealth, they did not spend more on having children; instead they had less babies. In a word, they became stingy which is not frugal by any means. Baby Boomers had less than half the children their parents did and on the whole concentrated on success and money with the added idea that women couldn’t get ahead if they had children. Control. Control. Control. Trying to get a sense of control.
9. Erase history. The ever famous phrase throwing out the baby with the bathwater works so well with this generation in so many ways. In attempt to throw out what they thought was bad, they got rid of everything, even the good. With that, they rid themselves of their parents’ traditions, education, history, and religious ideals, thinking that tradition and religion were the problem. Their naivete was in believing either of those are the problem. In essence, they just created their own tradition making sure to bring not even the good from the past to build on. They wanted to get rid of all history!
1o. Blame. They tried to discover, like Virginia Woolf had before them, where the tendency to be war-like came from. They wanted someone or something to blame. Was war from evolution? Was it from the inability of a civilization to progress? They blamed superficial things, like the manifestation of culture, tradition, and religion because their new spirituality would be based on the next thing that even today still has a lot of growing up to do–psychology.
11. They developed a spirituality heavily dependent on psychology. Psycho babble gave them fuel for their anger at their parents. They consumed the type of psychology that tries to categorize unpleasant behaviors, feelings, and realities into mental illness categories to bring order to the disorder they were feeling, and this allowed them to be critical of others in a whole new way. With that disorder and the fears they felt, they had to create something to take away the pain, the pain in their mind. Optimism is the only pure goal, the new virtue while real virtue is oppressive; self-reliance gives way to people thinking that they can interpret everything without the help of anyone else, so we arrive at several different and often opposing views on how to live together. Everyone uses their own definitions for the same words so that language has become almost ludicrous in some disciplines. What things mean changes from week to week because people are taught to follow opposing recommendations and research done for various reasons, paid by various patrons, interpreted by various views, and given as the “newest” news.
So what are the effects that we see today from their new vision of the world they began to create in the 1960’s? Teenagers, control freaks, throwing out everything, blame, limited spirituality? How could they be at once so out of control and yet trying so hard to control everything? Isn’t there a word for this?
The Upkeep of Their New Traditions
1. Instead of religion being the opium of the people [which it never was, by the way], opium is the opium of the people. We still are taught to hate religion because it might hold us back, according to them, but prescription drugs and illegal drugs are prominent for both physical and mental illnesses, in an attempt to solve all our problems or non-problems. Drugs, drugs, and more drugs because science and psychology aren’t living up to their expectations. They can’t prevent death. They can’t make people happy. They are limited. But people keep trying to make them work…Try, try, try again?
2. Women are under reproductive control by large pharmaceutical corporations and doctors who won’t tell them the grim details; these corporations have enough money to keep advertising, to keep making money, to keep their program going. They can afford commercials. They can afford to sell their products everyday. Thankfully, many women are beginning to snap out of this sordid vision and contraption for women. But since women are expected to be just treated as a sexual thing, outer beauty has become the most important thing a woman can offer sexually; she has become a product and so have her children; we can keep women and children or we can throw them away. Years of this abusive relationship with men has moved women to want children on their own since many men don’t know how to be a part of a family.
3. Materialism is another new medicine for our social ills encouraged by the Baby Boomers. Was it to make money? Was the push to sell products? The focus now is on trying to obtain bodily comfort, no matter the cost. It’s to pretend we can keep buying when we don’t have any money. Debt to feed our materialism.
4. With that push for materialism, holidays have lost their depth. Easter, Christmas and other holidays focus on profit, toys, and commercialism; consumerism begins to define how people treat God and each other, more like products, investments, and commodities to be bought and sold or thrown away; prayer is just a luxury, for “me” time, for those who can afford spiritual direction and retreats. Instead of spirituality, it’s a run for the most toys, gadgets, books, experts, or labels.
So what caused this new order? This new tradition?
What caused them to lose control of their fear and their anger?
What caused them to be so naïve?
Was it really something their parents had done or not done?
A Theory
Perhaps it was a malformed prayer life…
As soon as authentic prayer is given up, the person will fall into despair or pride; the proud will want to fix the despairing by telling them their self-esteem suffers from a want of pride after the proud have injured them; the despairing will think that something is wrong with themselves because everyone wants to fix what is not really broken about them; since neither of them can alleviate the true cause of their pain, the despairing take drugs and the proud try to gather more material possessions, more rest, more honor, more, more, more to stave off the emptiness that is growing inside.
Would authentic prayer have helped them identify when pride or despair were setting in?
Their traditions are leaving us all in debt and empty.
There must be a better way to deal with fears, anger, and naïve ways. There must be something better than what we are doing.
More Theories Based on the First Theory
The Baby Boomer’s primary problem: FEAR. Fear of what? I think it was a fear of death. But they avoided that issue and ran away from their fears by doing some really strange things in order to get a sense of control. But, the problem does not lie in the fear that they tried to escape. The problem lies in what causes the fear and what allows fear to get out of control.
The Moby Dick Syndrome—turning fear into vengeance!
Some will seek to control others so that they don’t feel that fear. They get vengeful and angry because they feel like something they had has been taken away. Is this what happened to the Baby Boomers? Did they become artists of manipulation by rebelling so that they would stop feeling the fear? Was this their attempt to control their parents? External things were beyond their control, like the threat of nuclear war, so they sought to change their environment to help their psyche. But, fear is an internal thing that must be fought interiorly by each individual.
You can have the best scenario, the most suitable environment for growth and still be overcome by fears; you can have the worst scenario, an environment for stifling, and overcome fears easily. Changing the environment can hardly change the interior abilities of the soul. Some people control others so that they can feel happy and free from fear, but what they end up doing is living a tyranny. Is this what the Baby Boomer did? In an effort to control their fears, they tried to control their environment and everyone else? To change it? To change the rules so that they would no longer have to feel fear for things that were beyond their control?
The Macbeth Syndrome—commit the crime and try to run from your conscience.
Our cause of fear is not God. God is love. Our cause of fear is evil, death, separation from happiness; evil is a loss of freedom, a separation from all that is good; death is that final loss that is beyond our control; our second fear, then, is our loss of freedom. Sin is a loss of freedom. In an attempt to keep freedom, we blame the innocent for our fear and get caught by the captor; when evil gets closer, we feel more fear; when we feel more fear, we may become more desperate because we had intended to get rid of that which we fear (losing freedom); instead of going to the Author of freedom, we try again to get freedom from something that is not free—evil, making our fears compound once again. It is a classic Macbeth story.
Are the Baby Boomers like Macbeth who went crazy and his lady who became unsexed?
It seems to me that people from the 20th century, especially here in the U.S., became slaves to their fear of death. Since they thought the root cause was in systems of religion and tradition, they had no way to repair their injured consciences. After that, they tried to medicate according to the wrong diagnosis. They thought systems were the cause of evil. But the choices a person makes are what make an action evil or not. People make systems good or evil. Systems are just systems. Some are more helpful to the fruits of goodness, but that system cannot happen unless there is a general consensus to work for the same good, the authentic good.
The Gaslight Syndrome—greed and manipulation will make things better!
So what causes war? Could MEN AND WOMEN’s proclivity to be selfish and sinful be the cause of war? Could MEN AND WOMEN’s tendency to not want to use self-control be the cause of promiscuous choices and war? Could MEN AND WOMEN’s inability to live love because of sin be the cause of war? Can the avoidance of root problems help us to change that? If we avoid that there is a reality of sin, a reality of death, a reality of evil, will we able to work for authentic love? If we don’t know the real cause or the real goal how can we know what to avoid and know where to head? Baby Boomers who suffer from the Gaslight syndrome cannot see that greed and manipulation are big problems because they don’t want to believe there is such a thing as sin.
But for something like sin, this inability to love rightly, who has the cure? Is there a God? If there is, can He really help?
The Cure for All Three
If we try to avoid the One Person who can help us with our most significant problems, then the medication we take will never be enough because sin cannot be cured with physical medication, with other people talking it out, with violence, with dictatorship, with mind manipulation, with a new social system, etc., etc, etc. Either we face the reality that we, humanity, have a problem with sin or we get stuck on insisting that there is nothing to forgive. If there is nothing to forgive, then we must make a heart of stone to bear the pain because this life hurts when people sin. With a wrong diagnosis, how will we find the CURE?
We will progress no further if we don’t admit that we have a problem with sin.
Finally a Conclusion to this Incredibly Long Post!
In closing the 1960’s and its ramifications…some Baby Boomers remember it as the best time of their lives. They think they were the only ones capable of making change. They feel proud of that time. Feminism was a roar that both men and women wanted to participate in! I am always more skeptical with the man who wants to be a feminist, by the way, since the 1960′s feminist has created an unending cycle of abuse against authentic femininity. Feminism needs a new direction because vengeance, sin, and manipulation brings out the worst in women. Women can do far better!
There were Baby Boomers, who went against the flow, and didn’t give into these new, or regurgitated, and faulty traditions. They cried as they watched their brothers and sisters do many hurtful things. They sat in shock as they wondered where things were going. They worked hard to not conform to this revolution on all aspects of society. They were people just like my mom. She represents to me where the new feminism should be. It should be in respecting women who stay at home. It should be in allowing that position to regain its dignity. It should see what a tremendous impact love has on real people in a family. World changing? Absolutely!
So, any thoughts as to why the Baby Boomers in general were so angry? As I said in my previous article on Reconstructing Feminism, I pointed out that Dorothy Day observed the tremendous anger in this generation of people. What’s your take?
Would love to hear your thoughts, and remember, I didn’t try to offend anybody, I just wanted to relate to you my own version of history!
–
Resources:
Edith Stein, Woman
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being (compiled by Sally Fitzgerald)
Thomas Aquinas or someone who can explain his theology on “act and potential…”
Augustine, “On Free Choice of the Will”
John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem
Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and American Slave, Written by Himself
Henrik Ibsen’s “Dollhouse”
Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”
Shakespeare’s Macbeth
The Anne Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Mary Klages
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills”
Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids”
Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Baudelaire
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and “Everyday Use”
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind
Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being compiled by Sally Fitzgerald
Sylvia Plath
Virginia Woolf and other writers from the 20th century
Books on History:
lamehousewife
You can read some of the encyclicals by the Popes regarding true feminism which contradicts this so called “angry” time in the culture. It brings us back to true feminism. Especially what John Paul II wrote of course. Im sure you have read some of it but for other readers I wanted to mention this point. For true feminism we point to Mary the Blessed Mother whose fiat said, “Yes” when she was asked to give birth to the Savior of the World. That was and is true feminism then, now and tomorrow I think. God Bless anyway.
I agree. John Paul II did an amazing job with this topic. I always try to introduce women to his thought with his “Letter to Women,” and I am positive his best ideas came from Our Lady:)
this was exciting! to read about a person i have confided in with my own life’s drama. i feel like i know you so much better. i am usually a pretty good judge of people’s character, even online, and i know now for certain, that i was not wrong about you. You are a great person!!!!! thanks for sharing
Thank you, Terry! I am glad you enjoyed it!
I was in high school and college during this time and young people were very confused to say the least. Contraception was available cheaply and the stigma of using it was disappearing as was the stigma of getting an abortion although it was yet to become legal. Drugs were everywhere as once the youth decided that life was about their happiness (mostly feeling good) and the moral virtue of patriotism was almost extinguished due to the war in Vietnam. So rebellion was the name of the game and once Pandora’s Box was opened there was no putting it back. We have been suffering the consequences ever since.
Thank you for sharing your insight. It sounds like there were multiple factors at play at this time–once everyone decided to rebel or to actually buy into the idea of contraception and other things, then several other different things began to fall apart. Interesting…
I have my share of sins in regard to this degeneration of society as do most people of my generation. We prided ourselves in being smarter than our parents and our forefathers before us. Pride is always the progenitor to these rapid declines in a culture. Rome might be a good reminder to us about what slothful people, proud of their Roman citizenship and all the perks that went with it, and their love of pleasures simply annihilated that once great empire.
But see, that’s so beautiful that you admit it! That is a blessing! I think there are still so many from the Baby Boomer generation that don’t admit fault, which means the problem will continue. I get so much hope when people admit that things were not done so well at that time. It means people are becoming open to a healthy change. Thank you so much!
May God forgive us: we knew not what we were doing. We were just a bunch of dumb kids who lost our way. I think God has retrieved a good deal of us from those twisted lives. But it is sad to see the sins of the fathers being inherited by our children.
Well, at least we know our mission, huh?:)
Indeed.