Photograph Source: Yaffa Phillips – CC BY-SA 2.0

Since the nation’s founding, those in authority have sought to promote a morality of “family values” anchored in a belief in the patriarchal, heterosexual, monogamous nuclear family, the celebrated “Ozzie & Harriet” TV family of the 1950s.

Free Love

For much of the 19th century, “free love” advocates and other sexual radicals battled with what was known as the “social purity” movement over sex and the nature of the family. Between 1852 to 1890, about 20 to 30 percent of Mormon families, members of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint, practiced a form of polygamy they called “plural marriage.”

In addition, among other notable free love communities were: New Harmony, a secular utopian community in Harmonie, IN, founded by Robert Owen; the Brook Farm community in West Roxbury, MA, founded by George Ripley; the Oneida community in NY founded by John Humphrey Noyes; and the interracial Nashoba community in eastern Tennessee founded by Frances Wright, her sister, Camilla, and Robert Dale Owen.

A second wave that challenged traditional family values emerged during the 1920s. This threat was represented by the “new woman” who symbolized the modernization that threatened social purists. And the Prohibition-era speakeasy was the nexus of this new erotic experience. Having a drink at a speakeasy was an act of transgression: One was committing a crime. When one entered a speak, one crossed the line between the socially acceptable and the illegal and, for many, the immoral. Prohibition also gave rise to the “sex circus,” infamous venues of alcohol consumption and sexual liaison, be it heterosexual and/or homosexual erotic indulgence.

Counterculture

The 1960s forged a counterculture that challenged – and changed! — American values. It was the decade characterized by the oral contraceptive pill, the mini skirt, rock-&-roll, long hair and the growing use of marijuana, LSD and other “psychedelic” drugs. It sparked a “sexual revolution” involving premarital sex and “free love,” often involving mate swapping, group sex and........

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