Hippie Chicks: A Different Feminism
Jun. 4th, 2025 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithHippie Chicks: A Different Feminism
Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo’s Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (2009) is the only monograph to date that has given these women a place in the history of feminism. Instead of portraying them as stereotypical earth mothers, nymphs in peasant dresses, or strung-out domestic drudges—the antithesis of feminism—the author demonstrates how these women broke with both the middle-class housewife and the rising career woman to recover the value of women’s productive labor in rural America. They rejected both liberal feminism’s insistence on state-guaranteed rights and radical feminism’s rejection of gender binaries to forge their own version of female empowerment.
This is the feminism that I grew up with. I found it more impressive than the feminism I studied in college. it was a lot more diverse, too. There were the earth mothers, the free lovers, the farmers, the crafters, the musicians, the ball-busting bitches, the blythe spirits, the radical activists, the wanderers -- so many girls and women who didn't fit the mainstream mold and weren't interested in academic feminism.
Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo’s Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (2009) is the only monograph to date that has given these women a place in the history of feminism. Instead of portraying them as stereotypical earth mothers, nymphs in peasant dresses, or strung-out domestic drudges—the antithesis of feminism—the author demonstrates how these women broke with both the middle-class housewife and the rising career woman to recover the value of women’s productive labor in rural America. They rejected both liberal feminism’s insistence on state-guaranteed rights and radical feminism’s rejection of gender binaries to forge their own version of female empowerment.
This is the feminism that I grew up with. I found it more impressive than the feminism I studied in college. it was a lot more diverse, too. There were the earth mothers, the free lovers, the farmers, the crafters, the musicians, the ball-busting bitches, the blythe spirits, the radical activists, the wanderers -- so many girls and women who didn't fit the mainstream mold and weren't interested in academic feminism.
