The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sexual intercourse outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships, primarily marriage. The legalization of "the pill" as well as other forms of contraception, public nudity, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, masturbation, alternative forms of sexuality, and abortion all followed.
The term "first sexual revolution" is used by scholars to describe different periods of significant change in Western sexual norms, including the Christianization of Roman sexuality, the decline of Victorian morals, and the cultural shifts of the Roaring Twenties. Sexual revolution most commonly refers to the mid-20th century, when advances in contraception, medicine, and social movements led to widespread changes in attitudes and behaviors around sex. The sexual revolution was influenced by Freud's theory of unconscious drives and psychosexual development, Mead's ethnographic work on adolescent sexuality in Samoa, Unwin's cross-cultural studies, and the research of Kinsey and later Masters and Johnson, all of which challenged traditional beliefs about human sexuality.
The widespread availability of contraception from the early 20th century onward empowered individuals with reproductive choice, spurred legal and cultural shifts such as Griswold v. Connecticut, and influenced later landmark rulings on privacy, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights. "Free love" is a related social movement advocating for the separation of the state from sexual matters like marriage and birth control, emphasizing personal freedom in relationships, though it faced decline in the 1980s due to the AIDS crisis.
By the 1970s, premarital and non-marital sex had become increasingly accepted in the United States due to the rise of birth control, later marriages, declining stigma around divorce, and the normalization of casual and non-monogamous sexual relationships.
Origins
First sexual revolution
Several other periods in Western culture have been called the "first sexual revolution", to which the 1960s revolution would be the second (or later). The term "sexual revolution" itself has been used since at least the late 1920s. The term appeared as early as 1929; the book Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do by James Thurber and E. B. White, has a chapter titled "The Sexual Revolution: Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene". According to Konstantin Dushenko, the term was in use in Soviet Russia in 1925.
When speaking of the sexual revolution, historians make a distinction between the first and the second sexual revolution. In the first sexual revolution (1870–1910), Victorian morality lost its universal appeal. However, it did not lead to the rise of a "permissive society". Exemplary for this period is the rise and differentiation in forms of regulating sexuality.
Classics professor Kyle Harper uses the phrase "first sexual revolution" to refer to the displacement of the norms of sexuality in Ancient Rome with those of Christianity as it was adopted throughout the Roman Empire. Romans accepted and legalized prostitution, bisexuality, and pederasty. Male promiscuity was considered normal and healthy as long as masculinity was maintained, associated with being the penetrating partner. In contrast, female chastity was required for respectable women, to ensure the integrity of family bloodlines. These attitudes were replaced by Christian prohibitions on homosexual acts and any sex outside marriage, including with slaves and prostitutes.
History professor Faramerz Dabhoiwala cites the Age of Enlightenment—approximately the 18th century—as a major period of transition in the United Kingdom. During this time, the philosophy of liberalism developed and was popularized, and migration to cities increased opportunities for sex and made enforcement of rules more difficult than in small villages. Sexual misconduct in the Catholic Church undermined the credibility of religious authorities, and the rise of urban police forces helped distinguish crime from sin. Overall, toleration increased for heterosexual sex outside marriage, including prostitution, mistresses, and pre-marital sex. Though these acts were still condemned by many as libertine, infidelity became more often a civil matter than a criminal offense receiving capital punishment. Masturbation, homosexuality, and rape were generally less tolerated. Women went from being considered as lustful as men to passive partners, whose purity was important to reputation.
Commentators such as history professor Kevin F. White have used the phrase "first sexual revolution" to refer to the Roaring Twenties. Victorian Era attitudes were somewhat destabilized by World War I and alcohol prohibition in the United States. At the same time the women's suffrage movement obtained voting rights, the subculture of the flapper girl included pre-marital sex and "petting parties".
'Silent' sexual revolution
Contrary to popular belief, the common perception that there was far less out-of-wedlock sex in the United States between 1940 and 1960 than in later years was discredited by 2005. U.S. Census Bureau statistics collected by University of Florida history professor Alan Petigny showed that single motherhood among even white women in fact increased from 3.6 to 9.2 newborns per 1,000 unmarried out-of-wedlock pregnancies during this period in time. Single motherhood among all women also rose form 7.1 to 21.6 newborns per 1,000 unwed women from 1940 to 1960 as well. According to Petigny, World War II would in fact mark the start of a "silent" sexual revolution, where higher levels pre-marital took place, but were merely less openly discussed. As Petigny further noted, "Between the beginning of World War II in 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled," while noting that this higher level of sexual activity was not publicly disclosed as much, stating "after 15 years of Depression and war, there was also a desire on the part of Americans to live in the moment and enjoy life, and they were accordingly less likely to defer to traditional restraints on their behavior," and that "the silent generation may have been silent about what they were doing, but they weren't all that complacent." A study conducted by the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law that was published in 1958 also acknowledged the lack of prosecutions for fornication in the United States'
Indicators of non-traditional sexual behavior (e.g., gonorrhea incidence, births out of wedlock, and births to adolescents) began to rise dramatically in the mid-to-late 1950s. It brought about profound shifts in attitudes toward women's sexuality, homosexuality, pre-marital sexuality, and the freedom of sexual expression.
Psychologists and scientists such as Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Kinsey influenced the changes. As well, changing mores were both stimulated by and reflected in literature and films, and by the social movements of the period, including the counterculture, the women's movement, and the gay rights movement. The counterculture contributed to the awareness of radical cultural change that was the social matrix of the sexual revolution. Communism had little to do with it.
The sexual revolution was initiated by those who shared a belief in the detrimental impact of sexual repression, a view that had previously been argued by Wilhelm Reich, D. H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud, and the Surrealist movement.
The counterculture wanted to explore the body and mind, and free the personal self from the moral and legal sexual confines of traditional American values. The sexual revolution sprung from a conviction that the erotic should be celebrated as a normal part of life, dodging religion, family, industrialized moral codes, and the state.
The development of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women access to easy and more reliable contraception. Another likely cause was a vast improvement in obstetrics, greatly reducing the number of women who died due to childbearing, thus increasing the life expectancy of women. A third, more indirect cause was the large number of children born in the 1940s and throughout the 1950s all over the Western world, as the "Baby Boom Generation", many of whom would grow up in relatively prosperous and safe conditions, within a middle class on the rise and with better access to education and entertainment than ever before. By their demographic weight and their social and educational background, they came to trigger a shift in society towards more permissive and informalized attitudes.
The discovery of penicillin led to significant reductions in syphilis mortality, which, in turn, spurred an increase in non-traditional sex during the mid-to-late 1950s.
There was an increase in sexual encounters between unmarried adults. Divorce rates were dramatically increasing and marriage rates were significantly decreasing in this time period. The number of unmarried Americans aged twenty to twenty-four more than doubled from 4.3 million in 1960 to 9.7 million in 1976. Men and women sought to reshape marriage by experimenting with new practices consisting of open marriage, mate swapping, swinging, and communal sex.
Academic influences
Freudian school
Sigmund Freud of Vienna believed human behavior was motivated by unconscious drives, primarily by the libido or "Sexual Energy". Freud proposed to study how these unconscious drives were repressed and found expression through other cultural outlets. He called this therapy "psychoanalysis".
While Freud's ideas were sometimes ignored or provoked resistance within Viennese society, his ideas soon entered the discussions and working methods of anthropologists, artists and writers all over Europe, and from the 1920s in the United States. His conception of a primary sexual drive that would not be ultimately curbed by law, education or standards of decorum spelled a serious challenge to Victorian prudishness, and his theory of psychosexual development proposed a model for the development of sexual orientations and desires; children emerged from the Oedipus complex, a sexual desire towards their parent of the opposite sex. The idea of children having their parents as their early sexual targets was particularly shocking to Victorian and early 20th century society.
According to Freud's theory, in the earliest stage of a child's psychosexual development, the oral stage, the mother's breast became the formative source of all later erotic sensation. Much of his research remains widely contested by professionals in the field, though it has spurred critical developments in the humanities.
Two anarchist and Marxist proponents of Freud, Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich (who famously coined the phrase "sexual revolution"), developed a sociology of sex in the 1910s through the 1930s in which the animal-like competitive reproductive behavior was seen as a legacy of ancestral human evolution reflecting in every social relation, as per the Freudian interpretation. Hence, the liberation of sexual behavior was considered by them to be a means to social revolution.
Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa
The 1928 publication of anthropologist Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa brought the sexual revolution to the public scene, as her thoughts concerning sexual freedom pervaded academia. Mead's ethnography focused on the psychosexual development of adolescents in Samoa. She recorded that their adolescence was not, in fact, a time of "storm and stress" as Erikson's stages of development suggest, but that the sexual freedom experienced by the adolescents actually permitted them an easy transition from childhood to adulthood.
Mead's findings were later criticized by anthropologist Derek Freeman, who investigated her claims of promiscuity and conducted his own ethnography of Samoan society.
Unwin's Sex and Culture
Sex and Culture is a 1934 book by English social anthropologist J. D. Unwin concerning the correlation between a society's level of "cultural achievement" and its level of sexual restraint. The book concluded with the theory that as societies develop, they become more sexually liberal, accelerating the social entropy of the society, thereby diminishing its "creative" and "expansive" energy.
According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous, it becomes increasingly liberal concerning sexual morality. It thus loses its cohesion, impetus and purpose, which he claims is irrevocable. Unwin also stated that absolute monogamy required legal equality between men and women.
Kinsey and Masters and Johnson
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Alfred C. Kinsey published two surveys of modern sexual behavior. In 1948 Kinsey published the book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He followed this five years later with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. These books began a revolution in social awareness of, and public attention given to, human sexuality.