1968 - Mark Kurlansky [111]
Ed Sanders, whose Fugs sang much about fugging, called the mid-sixties “the Golden Age of fucking,” which was as close as his plotless 1970 “novel of the Yippies,” Shards of God, set in 1968, came to a theme. Many couples were made and unmade in the course of the movement. Tom Hayden’s marriage to Casey Hayden, Mario Savio’s to fellow Free Speech Movement activist Suzanne Goldberg, and Mary King’s marriage to a fellow SNCC worker are just a few of the many marriages formed in the movements that did not last.
The attitude toward sex created an even deeper gap between generations. It was as though two completely different societies were cohabiting the same era. While Sanders was having his golden age in the East Village and Rudd was up at Columbia being saved by penicillin, City Councilman John J. Santucci, a Democrat, successfully pressured the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968 to remove from subway cars posters for the film The Graduate, because they showed Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in bed together.
The change in sexual mores was not just American. Young women in the Mexican student movement of 1968 shocked Mexican society by carrying signs saying “Virginity Causes Cancer.” The 1968 demonstrations in Paris began with a demand for coeducational dormitories. According to French myth, when President de Gaulle was told that the students at Nanterre wanted coeducational housing, the General, looking confused, turned to his aide and asked, “Why don’t they just meet in the cafés?”
In the United States, only a few progressive schools such as Oberlin had mixed dormitories. Many universities allowed more freedom for men than women. The Ivy League had separate universities for women with completely different rules. Columbia men certainly had far more privileges than Barnard women, who were not allowed to live anywhere other than the women’s dormitories for their first two years. It is strange to think of a nationwide controversy over an unknown coed’s living arrangements, but that is what unfolded for several weeks in 1968 when a New York Times journalist decided to report on the life of college women—just one of hundreds of articles on “the new lifestyle.” One sophomore bragged to the reporter, on condition that she not be identified by name, of how she had lied to the Barnard administration in order to be able to live off campus with her boyfriend.
Though the reporter respected her anonymity, Barnard, determined to weed out this public disgrace, followed the details and was able to identify the offender as a student named Linda LeClair and called for her expulsion. Students protested this treatment, many protesting that this could be happening only to a woman. But, strangely, the struggle of Linda LeClair—to cohabit or not cohabit—was not only covered on the front page of The New York Times for weeks, but it was also covered by Time, Newsweek, Life, and other national publications. Day after day the drama unfolded in the Times—how the Barnard School Council granted her a hearing, how hundreds went, how she argued for the rights of individuals, and finally how she was “wearing a bright orange shift and beaming brightly as she read the final verdict: no expulsion but banned from the school cafeteria.”
In the Times coverage, it was also mentioned that many of the students questioned “shook their heads in amusement.” To the outside press, this seemed an important story about a radically changing society. To the 1968 student, as to most of us today, it seemed hard to believe that such a petty affair would even make the newspapers.
Two days later, the Times was