Free love: Was there a price to pay?

Money was looked down upon by many hippies, but women sometimes served as a replacement currency.

“Women were used as an inducement to get new members into a commune or crash pad,” Smith recalls. “If you joined, you got to have sex with the girls.”

The girls were young, cute and free, an irresistible combination for both hippies and non-hippies.

“We would go collect free food from the San Francisco produce market a couple of days per week,” recalls Susan Keese, who journeyed from Ohio to join up with The Diggers, the anarchist group comprised mainly of artists and actors who helped create the original Council for the Summer of Love. “The guys at the market would give us food because of how we looked. We traded on that.”

Hippie women were expected to be just as available to the men in their own crowd.

“There was this ethic that it was good for you to have as much sex as possible ... and you were uptight and hung up if you did not,” says Keese, who was 20 years old and living in San Francisco during the summer of ‘67, and later in the Black Bear commune further north. “Some women seemed to be comfortable with that, but I was not. Years later I found out many of the other women did not want to do it, either. We felt like we had to work on ourselves if we didn’t like it.”

‘Love without responsibility’
Nascent feminists in cities across the country saw how males dominated both the political “New Left” and hippie culture (the two were often at odds) and began to protest.

“Women discovered, to our surprise and dismay, that despite the New Left change in head, shape, hip action and buttons — most of all buttons — that the position of women was no less foul, no less repressive, no less unliberated, than it had ever been,” wrote three early Chicago-based feminists in a famous 1967 essay titled “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.”

For many of the guys, free love really meant free sex.

“I think there was a general feeling that the whole idea of free love was a very attractive idea to men because it meant love without responsibility,” Evelyn Goldfield, one of the essay’s authors, recalls.

So women decided they were going to have to mount their own revolution. Modern-day feminism took to the streets and helped raise a generation of assertive women who not only agitated for political parity, but erotic parity as well.

“The long-lasting reaction was to create the conditions for a vision of sexual liberation that includes women, and if anything, allows women to take the lead” in sex, suggests Ellen Du Bois, feminist history professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

The age’s radical feminist notion of eliminating marriage never materialized, but demand from 40 years ago to have “the freedom to love, to chose whom to love and how to love,” written by Goldfield and her essay collaborators Sue Munaker and Naomi Weisstein, is taken for granted by the young women — and men — of the MySpace generation.

Goldfield now is a prominent university chemistry professor with children and grandchildren. Though she now seems somewhat chagrined at some of her theatrical language, the key word in that essay is “freedom.”

Ethan Miller / Getty Images file The Summer of Love helped contribute to today's cultural freedoms, from dirty dancing teens to talking about sex in ways that were virtually impossible before the 1960s.

Freedom is the true legacy of the Summer of Love era, according to Eli Coleman, Director of the Program of Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota and editor of the International Journal of Sexual Health.

“They made sex a central focus of their lives,” and popularized the idea “of sex as fun” that has now become a mantra of the younger generation, Coleman says.

From the excesses of the free-love movement came a less self-destructive, yet more open-minded approach to relationships, both for the baby boomers and their children.

“Some [people] are monogamous, but they are choosing to be, rather than following some script. Maybe they are not having sex with 10 people at a time, but now they are following their own script,” says Coleman.

Studies support his assertion. Among women born between between 1933 and 1942, 93 percent had their first union with a man when they married, according to the University of Chicago's landmark 1994 study of American sex by professor of sociology Edward O. Laumann and his colleagues. Among those born between 1963 and 1974, only 36 percent did, meaning that 64 percent formed a non-marital cohabitation unit before marriage.

Though the Summer of Love collapsed on itself by Labor Day of 1967, leaving many damaged people in its wake, its lingering contribution has been the freedom to choose one’s own sexual path through life, with all the possible pitfalls and joys that freedom suggests.

Baby boomers are chucking down Viagra and sticking on hormone patches so they can still enjoy sex, Coleman says. And their children — in some cases, their grandchildren — are dirty dancing in school gyms, making pornography as a statement of feminist power, using condoms at increasing rates and most of all, talking about sex in ways that were virtually impossible before the 1960s.

Brian Alexander is MSNBC.com's Sexploration columnist and a contributing editor to Glamour magazine. His latest book, America Unzipped: In  Search of Sex and Satisfaction, will be published by Harmony Books in January.

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