Hippy Women

Women Of The Hippy Generation Are Emerging As The Primary Sacred Feminine Change Agents
By Marlowe Aster

Below is an extract of an article written 28 years ago in 1985, foreshadowing the ongoing role of Baby Boomers in shaping an ideal world.  The highlighting is mine.  I found it noteworthy that the power of the Baby Boomer generation was still evident even as it lay dormant, embedded in mainstream culture.
Baby Boomers have always been a powder keg of change. The mantras of “Make Love Not War” and “Peace” haven’t changed.  But now, instead of being channeled into free love, it is being channeled into the Sacred Feminine movement, still trying to balance a hyper-masculine society, but this time from a Grandmother’s – the Wise Woman – perspective.  The urgency is for their descendents, rather than for themselves.  Another piece of evidence that altruism is more powerful than selfishness.
The brash, rebellious energy of raw youth has been tempered with “insider knowledge” of the very mainstream society the Boomers originally sought to change, through clumsy aggressive ways.  The Wise Women of today are bringing an elegance and sophistication to their cause, as well as being armed with a wealth of experiences and professional skills.
Accusations of “selling out to the man” can be truthfully leveled at most of that young idealistic generation.  In Australia, we have a situation a few years ago, where one of our leading eco-warrior rock icons, Peter Garrett from the music band “Midnight Oil” became a mainstream politician. It’s hard not to get cynical when things like that happen.  We can but hope that he will re-emerge with stronger experiential knowledge on how to change the system from the inside.
However, I believe that most of the hippy generation are like “sleepers” in our society, just waiting for a cosmic clock to tick over to the time when they are roused once again to their idealistic visions, except this time, they will have power, money and influence on their side, all of which were sorely lacking in their struggles during the sixties and seventies.  And the lead seems to be coming from the women of that era.

I stumbled across this quote by Dierdre LaPin, Author & Activist, which seemed to sum it up very well:
    “I feel in my soul a powerful resurgence of ’60s fire. The world is in a disastrous state, The trend toward greed and profit has overtaken all interests, and we need to reassess how we share world resources. Do we need CEOs earning $10,000 a day and being rewarded for laying off hundreds of thousands? It’s insane. The people most disturbed by this are women. Here and also in the developing world, women are more aware of the inequities. Women are leading the second wave of boomer idealism.”
Baby Boomers May Revert to Idealism of the 1960s, Consultant Says 
March 19, 1985| From United Press International
Those ubiquitous baby boomers–the war babies, the Spock babies, the TV generation, the love generation, the Me generation and, now, the Yuppies–are on the verge of yet another transformation.
Daniel Yankelovich, an authority on social change, says that generation soon will let its idealism become a driving factor, replacing goals oriented more toward financial success.
Boomers have broken demographic patterns ever since their birth, and changes in their values and habits are of vital interest to marketers. The 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 have proven to be a fickle but lucrative group ever since millions were made on the hula-hoop, coonskin cap and Barbie doll.
Yankelovich, founder of Yankelovich, Skelly and White Inc., a New York consulting firm specializing in examining social change, spoke recently at a baby boomer seminar sponsored by People magazine, the self-styled Boomer Bible.
He said idealism lies “just below the surface of the pragmatism and calculation” that have come to characterize the post-war baby boom.

That generation will increasingly turn to the nonconformity of the 1960s, searching internally for new “symbols and yardsticks . . . of personal success,” he said.
 “There was a very large element of idealism inherent” in the past of most boomers, he said. “It has gone underground; it is submerged.”
He said the idealism articulates itself as a “nameless yearning,” and within the next few years it will again become a factor in the demographic segment, replacing its quest-for-success attitudes.
 “It will break out,” said Yankelovich. “In what form, I don’t know.”
He predicts the result will be “the emergence of a new popular philosophy of life.”
Many demographic factors make boomers special. The predominance of the two-earner household, smaller families, a high level of education and premiums on autonomy and independence set them apart.
Companies that have capitalized on those traits have profited mightily.
For boomers, the definition of success is highly personal, as opposed to the more social values of earlier and later generations. And that individuality, Yankelovich said, will continue to grow.
Yankelovich said the single most important distinguishing feature of boomers is that they are “unwilling to give up either the old material values (of their parents) or their own expressive values.”
The idea of “sacrificing personal fulfillment for economic security” seems futile to them, he said. They reject the “nose-to-the-grindstone, sacrifice-for-the-children, save-it-for-a-rainy-day” attitude of their Depression-generation parents.
And because it is a generation for whom luxuries have become necessities, it provides business with a vast market for expensive items. But marketers must keep abreast with changing tastes and attitudes for the pace-setting boomers.
 “I believe we’re at an unstable point in the boomer psychology,” Yankelovich said, noting that the next few years will move the bulk of the boomers “toward more of a balance, as idealists have a chance to come to the fore.”
So in the spirit of this article, why don’t you pull out some of your Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell,  Bob Dylan or Arlo Guthrie music, and hear their songs in a new way, hailing a new world era, bringing in the Sacred Feminine.
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