How the Hippie Movement Changed America

Major Social Movement

The Hippie Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a countercultural movement that opposed the traditional norms and values of American society. It professed views of free love, peace, and non-violence. It began mainly as a youth movement in response to the turbulent era of the 1960s. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy all figured into the turbulence and upheaval of the decade; but other factors, such as the onset of the Vietnam War, the draft, and the emergence of a “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” culture led by musical groups like The Doors and The Beatles, all contributed to the rise of the Hippie Movement as well (Segui & Vela, 2020). The Hippie Movement protested the war in Vietnam, the draft, embraced women’s liberation, and condemned the abuses of big industry and finance (Nugroho, Firdaus & Wijaya, 2020). To some degree, it was a melting pot of other movements, as there was a great deal of overlap between it and other social groups that emerged during the same time period. Second wave feminists often mixed within the Hippie Movement; the anti-war movement, which began on college campuses also mixed with the Hippie Movement; and the Eastern religious movement and Bohemian lifestyle of the vagabond artist all found a home in the Hippie Movement.

The Hippie Movement was a grassroots movement that began in California and transmigrated across the US and into other countries. Hippies embraced the usage of recreational drugs like marijuana and LSD and rejected the typical family values of the 1950s and the ideal of having a job, a house, a wife and kids. They were influenced by the Beat Generation of poets, who questioned the norms of American life and revealed some of the disturbing underbelly of Americana (Chapman, 2019). Many hippies sought to live in communes for a time, believing they could adhere to a utopian vision that was ungoverned by materialistic ambitions or classical structures of philosophy.

The movement did not end well, as the materialism of the 1980s displaced the direction and position that many Hippies had taken in their youth. The Charles Manson story (Sharon Tate murders) scandalized much of the American public, and in other cases the youths of the movement simply faced the fact that they had to grow up and get a job. Many former hippies became enmeshed in the establishment that they had once railed against.

The lasting effects of the Hippie Movement, however, were that it helped to completely upend a social way of life in America. Up to the mid-1960s, people dressed more formally, often with coats, ties, hats, and dresses; but after the Hippie Movement, a casual dress style became the norm and men and women no longer donned the same formal garb of previous generations; men often went hatless, coatless and tieless; women dress without distinction.

Other ramifications of the Hippie Movement were that it assisted in reshaping the family unit; the idea of marriage as sacrosanct was challenged, and in the decades that have passed, marriage has been both redefined and reduced. Blended homes, single-parent homes, divorce, and common law marriages are all norms now that were not common in the 1960s and 1970s when the Hippie Movement began. Recreational drug use was also normalized by the Hippie Movement, as was the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” culture—at least until the AIDS scare of the 1980s reversed the course in social politics that the free love ideology of the Hippies had taken. Overall the Hippie Movement transformed the social fabric of America by displacing Old World norms and values for revolutionary doctrines and countercultural ideals.