The young people who gathered at the Woodstock music festival in August 1969 symbolized the counterculture movements and changes occurring in American society at the time. One commentator described the three-day event as “an open, classless society of music, sex, drugs, love and peace.”
The “open” display of these activities at Woodstock was a direct challenge to the relatively conservative social views of the time. Fifty years later, Gallup outlines how American norms have changed.
1. My attachment to religion has weakened.
Americans’ attachment to religion, as measured by the percentage of Americans who say religion is very important to them, remained high and stable from the 1950s to the mid-1960s. However, after that, religiosity sharply declined during the Woodstock era.
Although Gallup did not measure religiosity in 1969, its two measurements for Woodstock, in 1965 and 1978, indicate that this period was a period of rapid decline. The percentage who said religion was very important to them decreased from 70% to 52%.
Reported church membership and church attendance declined gradually during the 1960s and 1970s, but both numbers have declined sharply over the past 15 years.
2. Marijuana legalization is gaining support.
Despite public drug use at Woodstock, it would be decades before the American public supported the legalization of marijuana. This figure rose from 12% in 1969 to just 16% in 1973 and 28% in 1977. However, support recovered in the 2000s, rising from 31% in 2000 to 66% in 2018.
3. Interracial marriage is becoming more accepted.
Some of the biggest changes since the Woodstock era have been related to racial tolerance, especially interracial marriage.
In 1968, 20% of Americans said they approved of marriage between blacks and whites. By 2013, this figure had risen to 87%, according to Gallup’s latest measurements. However, as Gallup has previously discussed, widespread acceptance of interracial marriage was long in coming, with majority approval first recorded in 1997.
4. A majority of people currently believe that abortion in the first trimester should be legal.
1969 — Before the Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark Roe vs. Wade The decision removed state restrictions on abortions in the first trimester, with 40% of Americans in favor of making it legal for women to have an abortion “at any time during the first three months.” In 2018, 60% of Americans thought abortion should be legal during the first three months of life.
Americans’ views on abortion in certain situations haven’t changed much. In both 1969 and 2018, a majority of U.S. adults supported legalized abortion if the mother’s health was at risk or if the child was born with serious medical problems. did.
5. Americans are now more willing to vote for a female president.
In 1969, when Princeton and Yale first admitted women, women were just beginning to break through the glass ceiling in higher education. Some other Ivy League schools didn’t follow suit for years.
This is a cultural phenomenon; in 1969, just half of Americans said they would support their party’s candidate who was “generally qualified to be president” if she was a woman; itself improved from 33% in 1937. Today, it is almost universal that Americans express their intention to support a female president, reaching 94% for her.
6. People are more willing to vote for a black president.
In 1969, two-thirds (66%) of Americans said they would vote for a black presidential candidate, more than those who said they would vote for a woman at the time. This sentiment is nearly universal today, 10 years after America’s first black president took office and 20 years since he first crossed the 90% mark. Masu.
7. Americans now prefer smaller family sizes
Many of the political movements of the 1960s—demands for reproductive rights, demands for women’s equality, concerns about global population growth—confronted large numbers of Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Woodstock. This may have contributed to a decline in family orientation. .
In 1967, 7 in 10 Americans said it would be ideal to have three or more children in a family. In Gallup’s next measurement in 1971, this number dropped to 52%, and in 1977 it was 36%. After hitting a bottom at 28% in later years, Americans’ preference for large families has risen to 41%, but it still hasn’t reached pre-Woodstock levels.
8. Premarital sex is no longer taboo
The expectation that couples wait to consummate their relationship until marriage was so ingrained in American social norms that Gallup may not have investigated the issue until 1973. Even back then, fewer than half of Americans (43%) said they supported sex before marriage.was do not have “Having sexual relations before marriage” is wrong. Currently, that number is 71% for her.
9. Housework is no longer a woman’s occupation
In 1974, five years after Woodstock, a poll conducted by the Roper Organization found that a majority of American women (60%) said that if given the choice, they would “stay at home and take care of their home and family.” . work outside the home. ” Roper’s update 10 years later found that women’s opinions were more evenly divided on this question. Three years ago, Gallup found that a slight majority of women prefer to work outside the home.
10. Support for gay rights becomes mainstream
Gallup hasn’t had a measure of support for gay rights since the 1960s. The first scale was in 1977. But since then, there has been a major shift in how Americans view the issue, arguably reflecting an even bigger change since the Woodstock era. .
The percentage of Americans who say gay or lesbian relationships between consenting adults should be legal has increased from 43% in 1977 to 73% today.
conclusion
Woodstock wasn’t so much a catalyst for change as it heralded change. The Vietnam War, the women’s and civil rights movements, the environmental movement, medical advances in contraception, and the widespread use of home television are just some of the factors that contributed to social change in the 1960s. However, Woodstock showed signs of major social changes underfoot.
According to Gallup trends, in 1969 the majority of Americans were deeply religious, opposed premarital sex, and frowned upon interracial marriage. Half oppose first-trimester abortion, and many appear to think same-sex relationships should be illegal. Furthermore, prejudice against women and black people who might run for president was widespread, and the majority of women would rather be housewives than work outside the home.
Since then, Americans’ positions on all these issues have changed, in some cases significantly. But aside from a decline in religiosity and a preference for smaller families, these changes did not suddenly occur after Woodstock, but evolved over several decades.
In retrospect, social changes are generational, as the Woodstock youth are now the youngest generation of the elderly, and most of today’s American society is made up of the Woodstock generation and their descendants. Perhaps it was unavoidable from that point of view.