During the 1960s a sexual revolution occurred in the United States that reshaped Americans’ understanding of sexuality, the acceptance of artificial contraception and premarital sex, and the increased visibility of the gay and lesbian community. These trends combined to cultivate a wide-ranging ethic of sexual pleasure by further complicating the relationship between sexuality and reproduction, pleasure, and identity.
Sexual behavior became more associated with pleasure than with reproduction. Growing access to birth CONTROL reinforced the message that sex and reproduction were not necessarily connected. By the early 1950s a significant number of women used the diaphragm, the method most widely recommended by birth control advocates. The availability of oral contraceptives in 1960, and the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision that legalized the sale of contraceptives nationwide in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 precipitated a contraceptive revolution. By the 1970s, the birth control pill, diaphragms, voluntary sterilization, and, in 1973, legalized ABORTION were widely available to most women regardless of race or class.
Another development that brought the ethic of pleasure into prominence was the youth rebellion of the late 1960s. As the baby boomers filled the college campuses, they fomented a counterculture centered on cultural radicalism, political and social protest, and a challenge to traditional sexual mores. They joined the Civil Rights and ANTIWAR movements and advocated such practices as the distribution of contraceptives by university health services and the institution of coed dorms. Some young Americans rallied around their guru, Timothy Leary, a Harvard University research psychologist, who promoted a drug-oriented, sexually free, and antimaterialistic lifestyle. A clear manifestation of the relationship between youth and the ethic of sexual pleasure occurred in August 1969 when several hundred thousand young adults gathered near Woodstock, New York, for a three-day festival to enjoy popular music, drugs, nudity, and sexual encounters. The reorientation of sexual attitudes also found expression on Broadway, where musicals such as Hair and Oh! Calcutta that contained nudity and sexually explicit language proved hugely popular.
The increased visibility of the gay and lesbian community during the 1960s and into the 1990s contributed to the restructuring of American sexuality in two ways. First, it underscored the message of the contraceptive revolution that sex was not necessarily linked to reproduction. More important, the homosexual community legitimated the possibility of constructing an identity predicated on one’s sexual preferences rather than just one’s race, class, or gender. In the 1950s public displays of homosexuality were repressed, and in many states homosexual sexual relations were illegal. Some gays and lesbians actively resisted the discrimination that threatened their livelihood and even their lives. Gay men formed the Mattachine Society and lesbians formed the Daughters of Bilitis. With the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, some gays began demanding equal rights and treatment. In the summer of 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, resisted a police raid and touched off demonstrations in New York City. The Stonewall Riot, as it became known, served as the touchstone for the GAY AND lesbian rights MOVEMENT that received much media attention and made “coming out of the closet” a more realistic possibility for many homosexuals.
The contraceptive revolution and the emergence of the gay and lesbian community as a powerful cultural force emphasized the declining power of the reproductive ideal. Concurrently, the mass media stepped up its promotion of the ethic of sexual pleasure and desire and helped make sexuality a central component of public discourse. Advertisers used sexual images and innuendo to sell their products. In the late 1960s MOVIES showed nudity and couples having sexual relations, although these depictions were not graphic. In the wake of the sexual revolution, the sex industry expanded enormously, with pornography entering the realm of mainstream entertainment during the 1970s with such films as Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1973). In the 1980s and 1990s videotape and the Internet helped make pornography a multibillion-dollar industry. television programs also became increasingly explicit. In the 1970s television programs showed couples sleeping in the same bed. By the 1990s, such prime-time shows as NYPD Blue contained glimpses of partial nudity, and virtually all prime-time shows were rife with sexual innuendo.
In the 1960s and 1970s sexual manuals appeared on the best-seller lists. Such titles as The Sensuous Man and The Sensuous Woman were sold in significant numbers. By the end of the 20th century, most women’s magazines contained some information on how to improve one’s sex life in virtually every issue.
The emergence of the ethic of sexual pleasure from the sexual revolution of the 1960s seriously complicated the question of transgression. Much of what Americans had previously considered immoral, illegal, or abnormal, late 20th-century Americans viewed as acceptable or even desirable. American society began to celebrate the public expression of sexuality and the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior expanded well beyond marriage and reproduction. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s helped rein in the unmitigated pursuit of sexual pleasure and forced the drawing of ethical lines for those who subscribed to the pleasure ideal. This applied not only to the gay and lesbian communities, who, with intravenous drug users, experienced the terrors of AIDS first, but to all sexually active Americans. Although some moralists claimed that AIDS was divine retribution for the sin of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity, this view was not widely accepted. Gays and lesbians, however, focused on the responsibility they had to one another and mobilized to care for those who had contracted the disease and to increase awareness of the disease among mainstream American society. Within the context of the pleasure ideal and the specter of sexually transmitted diseases, transgression was defined as failing to care for oneself or for one’s partner. A cross section of American society, from college students to the federal government, initiated efforts to educate sexually active Americans about the importance of using protection and being responsible to their partners.
Largely as a result of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and of the continued evolution of Americans’ understanding of sexuality, the meaning of sexuality and the parameters of sexual behavior continued to be the focus of highly contentious debate. Americans disagreed, essentially, about the relationship between sexuality and reproduction, identity, and pleasure. Through the legal system, the media, and sometimes by violence, Americans attempted to promote their particular view on issues such as abortion, homosexual marriage, and pornography. America’s diversity necessarily produced ambivalence about sexuality that continued to exist alongside the traditional, but still present, uneasiness with sexuality. It is true that at the end of the 20th century sexual imagery was pervasive in American public discourse, a fact that presents a distorted image of American culture as “oversexed.” However, sexuality in behavior, and in its representation, continues to be regulated and controlled, thus creating a conflicted environment in which NYPD Blue, a popular television show, is more criticized for portraying sexual intercourse between two people in a relationship than for very graphically depicting a police officer being shot in the head. If any conclusion can be made, it is that the sexual revolution enabled an explosion of discourse about sexuality that has catapulted the debate over sexual attitudes and behavior into one of the most prominent positions in American culture and society.
See also ADVERTISING; birthrates; CENSORSHIP; FEMINISM; MORAL MAJORITY; WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND STATUS.
Further reading: John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Sharon Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
—William L. Glankler
Shriver, Robert Sargent, Jr. (1915- ) Peace Corps director, government official
Sargent Shriver is best known for his work in the Lyndon Johnson administration and its War on Poverty, and his selection as a vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in 1972.
Shriver was born in Westminster, Maryland, in 1915. A graduate of Yale University (1938) and Yale Law School (1941), Shriver went on to serve in World War II as a naval officer. Shriver briefly worked as an editorial assistant at Newsweek magazine after concluding his military career. He then joined the management of the Chicago Merchandise Mart, owned by Joseph P. Kennedy. In 1953 he married Eunice Kennedy, a sister of John F. Kennedy. The couple had five children.
Shriver was politically active, heading the National Conference on Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency, in Washington, D. C., serving as president of the Chicago Board of Education, assisting his brother-in-law in his presidential campaign efforts. His most notable activities were his work with the Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), and Head Start. From 1961 to 1966, Shriver served as the organizer and first director of the Peace Corps, where he developed and coordinated volunteer activities in more than 50 countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In 1964 Shriver created Head Start and VISTA, under President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. In 1972 Shriver was nominated by the Democratic Party as a candidate for vice president with Senator George S. McGovern in the presidential race against Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. In 1994 President William J. Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Shriver.
—Michele Rutledge
Souter, David (1939- ) associate justice of the Supreme Court
Justice Souter replaced retiring associate justice William J. Brennan, Jr., the liberal driving force on the Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist Courts. Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, on September 17, 1939, Souter grew up in New Hampshire on a farm left to his parents by his grandparents. His father was a banker in Concord, New Hampshire, and there David Souter attended public school before entering Harvard University, where he would graduate magna cum laude in 1961. He received a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, and while there, he completed another B. A. and an M. A. degree. He returned to New Hampshire to take up private practice and become involved in civic affairs. In 1968 he was asked by the new state attorney general, Warren Rudman, to serve as his assistant, which he did from 1968 to 1976. When Rudman left the position, Souter was appointed state attorney general by Republican governor Meldrum Thompson. As attorney general, Souter opposed legalized gambling and protests at Seabrook, a local nuclear plant.
From 1978 to 1983 Souter served on the state superior court, before John Sununu appointed him to the state Supreme Court. In 1990 Souter was appointed to the U. S. Court of Appeals by George H. W. Bush. Five months later, William J. Brennan, Jr., retired from the U. S. Supreme Court, and Souter was nominated for his seat. He was confirmed by the Senate on October 2, 1990, by a 90-9 vote.
From the outset, Souter assumed a moderate position on the Court. This was reflected in his first major decision, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992). Writing with Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, Souter’s opinion permitted several state regulations on abortion to stand, but declined to overturn Roe v. Wade. His concurrence in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), the so-called “partial birth abortion” case, reaffirmed his defense of abortion. In Lee v. Weis-man (1992), Souter was the swing vote resisting changes in public school prayer.
In other areas Souter gained a reputation for his independence. In 1992 he wrote the majority opinion for Norman v. Reed, invalidating on constitutional grounds portions of the Illinois election law that unduly burdened access to the ballot by new political parties. He also concurred with a decision in a capital case, concluding that information about a murder victim can be presented to a sentencing jury.
Until the election of 2000, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter formed what appeared to be a centrist block on the court, but in Bush v. Gore (2001), Souter joined the minority in the 5-4 decision ending the ballot count in Florida. Souter wrote a passionate dissent and in doing so, joined what most people perceive as the liberal block on the Court. This decision might prove to be this Court’s legacy, as well as Souter’s.
Justice Souter retired from the Court in June 2009.
See also Bush, George W.; Gore, Albert, Jr.
Further reading: The Oyez Project. Justices. David H. Souter. Available online. URL: Http://www. oyez. org/jus-tices/david_h_souter/. Accessed January 8, 2009; Melvin I. Urofsky, Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court (Washington, D. C.: CQ Press, 2006).
—Christopher M. Gray
World History
