Hippies

By the time my two ‘Women in the Sun’ novels* are set, 1968 and the beginning of 1969, hippies were part of the culture. I have had characters use the term—mostly older characters and in a derogatory sense, admittedly. But true hippies, true young counter-cultural sorts, were exceedingly rare in a rather conservative southern town like Naples.

This, of course, didn’t keep the clothes from showing up! Fashion goes everywhere and television helped spread it more quickly than ever. Hair grew longer. Flared jeans replaced narrow-legged ‘mod’ trousers. Paisleys and flowers appeared on shirts, and both sexes took to wearing beads.

Do any of my characters embrace the hippie lifestyle? Not really and not yet; things may and probably will change if I continue the story of my ‘triumvirate’ of young women. They are not quite the hippie generation, in truth. Older brothers and sisters who had moved on to other places would have been more likely to adopt the hippie culture. By the time of my tales, the world was already leaving the Sensational Sixties behind and slipping toward the Cynical Seventies.

Peace and love and optimism were becoming the casualties of the changing times. Nixon had been elected president in the USA. Things seemed grimmer than they had a year or two before, during the ‘Summer of Love,’ during the height of the counter-culture. The ’68 riots at the Democratic convention Chicago pointed the direction things were going.

And in ’69, Woodstock shared the summer with the Manson murders, while the war in Vietnam ground on. But hippie culture lingered on, lingered at least through the first half of the Seventies, though not with the vigor and freshness of the previous decade.

Will any of my characters become, in any sense, hippies? I think we can see that James embraced some of what was going on. He was the one who traveled, who got away from the narrower world the others inhabit. It is just possible he will be the one to ‘drop out.’ Or not! We shall simply have to wait and see what happens to him and his friends.