Two different “cultural revolutions”
The phrase “cultural revolution” has two common meanings, and 1967 saw both. In China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a political campaign launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, directed from above, in which students and workers were encouraged to attack supposed enemies of the party. It involved purges, factional violence and the closure of schools. It was about power and ideology and had little in common with what happened in the West.
What took place in Western Europe and North America in 1967 was a looser change in habits and attitudes. It had no leader and no central plan. Governments mostly reacted to it rather than directing it. This article takes the second meaning and organises it by theme rather than by date. The word “revolution” is a convenient shorthand, but most of the change was gradual, and large parts of the population were barely touched by it.
A young generation with money and numbers
The first theme is demographic. The postwar baby boom meant that by the late 1960s there were unusually large numbers of teenagers and young adults, many of them in school or university and with more spending money than their parents had at the same age. Businesses noticed, and a youth market grew up around records, clothes and magazines. This was the setting in which youth styles could spread quickly, and it explains why so much of 1967’s change is linked to music and fashion.
Backlash was also part of the story. Many parents and older politicians found long hair, loud music and open disrespect alarming. The idea of a “generation gap” became a common phrase around this time, and, as with most such labels, it hid as much as it described: plenty of young people were conservative, and some older people sympathised with the new styles.
Sexual morality and the law
A second theme was sex and family. The contraceptive pill, widely available in the West since the early 1960s, had begun to change expectations about relationships, though how far and how fast varies by country and social group. In Britain, 1967 brought two notable laws. The Sexual Offences Act, passed in July, partly decriminalised homosexual acts between men over twenty-one in private in England and Wales. The Abortion Act, passed in October and coming into force in 1968, allowed abortion under certain medical conditions. Both were limited by modern standards, and both were hotly debated.
In the United States, the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision struck down bans on interracial marriage. Public attitudes were slower to move than the law in each of these cases.
Drugs, spirituality and the counterculture
A third theme was experimentation. LSD was still legal in much of the United States until it was made illegal in California in late 1966 and later elsewhere, and a small but visible group promoted it as a route to spiritual insight. Interest in Eastern religion, meditation and communal living grew. The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco became the best-known centre of this culture in the Summer of Love, and Time magazine ran a widely read cover story on hippies that summer. Public enthusiasm and public fear fed each other, and both were exaggerated by the press. Many of the young people who headed to San Francisco found overcrowding, poor housing and, by autumn, a place that had lost much of its early optimism.
Questioning authority
The fourth theme, and arguably the most lasting, was a decline in automatic deference to institutions. The Vietnam War did more than anything else to feed it. But it also showed in the way students challenged university rules, in the growth of the underground press, and in the way satire and music mocked official positions. Television comedy such as the Smothers Brothers’ programme tested what networks would permit. In Europe, the student unrest that would explode in 1968, including in France, was already stirring on campuses.
Art, theatre and media
Culture itself changed shape. The new rock albums treated the studio as an artistic space. Underground film and theatre experimented with form, and the musical Hair, which opened Off-Broadway in October 1967, brought hippie culture, nudity and antiwar themes to a paying audience. Mass media played a double role, spreading these ideas to millions while also shaping how the public saw them, often through the simplified image of the “hippie”.
A note on scale
It is easy to overstate 1967. Most Americans and Europeans lived ordinary working lives, voted for established parties, and had conventional views on many things. The cultural change of the year was real, but it started among a minority and reached the mainstream over the following years, often in diluted forms. It is more accurate to see 1967 as a point at which changes already under way became visible to everyone, than as a sudden break.