Customer Reviews

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

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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.