Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (Culture America) [Hardcover]

Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo (Author)

Book Description

Series: Culture America | Publication Date: April 2009

It was a sign of the sixties. Drawn by the promise of spiritual and creative freedom, thousands of women from white middle-class homes rejected the suburban domesticity of their mothers to adopt lifestyles more like those of their great-grandmothers. They eagerly learned "new" skills, from composting to quilting, as they took up the decade's quest for self-realization.

"Hippie women" have alternately been seen as earth mothers or love goddesses, virgins or vamps--images that have obscured the real complexity of their lives. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo now takes readers back to Haight Ashbury and country communes to reveal how they experienced and shaped the counterculture. She draws on the personal recollections of women who were there--including such pivotal figures as Lenore Kendall, Diane DiPrima, and Carolyn Adams--to gain insight into what made counterculture women tick, how they lived their days, and how they envisioned their lives.

This is the first book to focus specifically on women of the counterculture. It describes how gender was perceived within the movement, with women taking on much of the responsibility for sustaining communes. It also examines the lives of younger runaways and daughters who shared the lifestyle. And while it explores the search for self enlightenment at the core of the counter-culture experience, it also recounts the problems faced by those who resisted the expectations of "free love" and discusses the sexism experienced by women in the arts.

Lemke-Santangelo's work also extends our understanding of second-wave feminism. She argues that counterculture women, despite their embrace of traditional roles, claimed power by virtue of gender difference and revived an older agrarian ideal that assigned greater value to female productive labor. Perhaps most important, she shows how they used these values to move counterculture practices into the mainstream, helping transform middle-class attitudes toward everything from spirituality to childrearing to the environment.

Featuring photographs and poster art that bring the era to life, Daughters of Aquarius provides both an inside look at a defining movement and a needed corrective to long-held stereotypes of the counterculture. For everyone who was part of that scene--or just wonders what it was like--this book offers a new perspective on those experiences and on cultural innovations that have affected all our lives.

This book is part of the CultureAmerica series.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Author and history professor Lemke-Santangelo (Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women in the East Bay Community) examines the history and impact of the "hippie women" of the 1960's and 70's counterculture, whose contributions to the second wave of feminism "have been shrouded in popular misconceptions and stereotypes." Using memoirs and interviews (eight new), as well as extensive analysis and personal photos, Lemke-Santangelo illuminates the way figures like author Lenore Kendall and beat poet Diane DiPrima "altered the social, political, economic and cultural landscape" and brought everything from "natural childbirth and mothering to New Age spiritual beliefs, eco-feminism, holistic health, and sustainable agriculture" into the national discourse (sowing seeds for the current "green" movement). Though most were white and "children of prosperity," Lemke-Santangelo addresses and dispels stereotyped notions of "earth mothers" and "love goddesses"-an oppressive vision promoted even in the (male-dominated) counterculture press-to present an unobstructed view of their day-to-day lives, finding a lifestyle at once progressive and strikingly similar to that of their hard-working great-grandmothers. Filling a gap in the scholarship of feminism, this history presents (and preserves) stories from a wide range of counterculture women with lively, populist prose and little academic posturing.

Review

"A welcome contribution to the study of the American counterculture of the 1960s and its evolution into New Ageism thereafter." --The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas (April 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0700616330
• ISBN-13: 978-0700616336
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #400,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Topic that Needs Exploration, September 12, 2009

By 

Loves the View "Louise" (Hawaii) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (Culture America) (Hardcover)

I don't know why I expected a more academic work. I re-read the cover and the fly leaf, and see that it did not promise to be so. Perhaps my unwarranted expectations (and some knowledge of the counterculture) led to my disappointment in this book.

The book is a collection of narratives arranged by topic. Unfortunately they are very sketchy. Some raise more questions than they answer. While the individual anecdotes might be new to those who pick up a book like this, the concepts they illustrate are not. The occasionally used statistics are limited. For instance, data from Connecticut is used to show that female runaways were punished more than males. I was surprised to read that counterculture women had children later than their peers, but there was no data to back it up.

The author defends counterculture women against the charges that they were not feminists. The defense is not a focused. There are no bullets, points or clearly defined arguments. The defense is in how she portrays the women through their individual stories. From interviews and published writings, she presents stories of women helping one another in childbirth, organizing the domestic work of group living siutations and developing alternative careers in crafts and food. She portrays strong women who root extended families as the men philosophized, crashed cars and "split". While sexual liberation is attributed to them, she shows how this was a dubious liberation. In the end she presents anecdotal evidence that the children of these women are considered brighter, more imaginative and more mature than their peers in school.

The counterculture women are clearly not their pre-feminist mothers. Was their assessment of options (pre-feminist jobs, living with parents and/or conventional marriage) and rejection of them rational for the times? For those that had a feminist awakening, did it come before or after (chronologically by age or year) their peers? I'd like to know overall, and not through a selected vignettes, what are they doing now, and how they view their experience. A better description of the children, some now parents themselves would be good.

I'd like to see the solid academic work on this topic that I thought this book might be.