Come to think of it, the sixties were a little startling: Loose Change

I didn’t pick up LOOSE CHANGE by Sara Davidson as a follow-up to THE FIFTIES but it works well for that purpose. Reading it makes me appreciate why so many people saw the 1950s as a calm sea compared to the upheavals the next decade unleashed.

Sara Davidson started college at Berkeley in the early 1960s. When she ran into one of her college friends, Tasha, a decade later, she started to think about how their lives had taken such different turns and how the decade itself had gone places they never imagined. Eventually she convinced Tasha and Susie (both pseudonyms) to talk with her about their lives through the decade. Their stories, combined with hers, makes up the book.

Davidson, by the time she wrote the book, was an accomplished writer with stories in the Boston Globe, New York Times and other major markets. Susie had gone radical, one of the protesters and activists convinced the revolution was coming and their generation would be the midwives. Tasha became an art dealer, working for galleries and for herself at different times, moving in NYC among the “Beautiful People.”

Focusing on three people rather than a generation or on the big events makes this more effective than a lot of Decade That Changed Everything books. In Berkeley the women were initially focused on things like grades and getting into a good sorority. Their lives changed and twisted, though, as they dealt with campus protests, free love, unsatisfying sex, revolutionary politics, feminism, frustrating marriages, Eastern mysticism, copious quantities of pot, the Vietnam War (and the angry protests against it) and the decade’s deaths — JFK’s assassination, then Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy a few years later.Much of this could easily have happened a few decades later: crappy unsatisfying sex for women is still a thing and men can still be jerks. Though there are definitely differences: Davidson doesn’t make a big deal about her husband disrespecting boundaries (not rape from the way she describes it but far from best consent practices) and someone writing today would probably treat it differently.

The book also does a good job capturing the dismay as the 1960s moved into the next decade. They’d been confident, as Davidson puts it, that the center could not hold; it did. High-school students she talked to as the 1970s started showed little interest in revolution or reform (though I’d lay pay that plenty of students in the 1960s didn’t either). But Davidson says at the end that she no longer believes, as she did for several years, that “the sixties had blown it.” The draft ended in 1973. Women had the right to an abortion. Women’s liberation had massively changed the dynamic between the sexes. It hadn’t all been for nothing.

It was definitely worth a read.

#SFWApro. Cover by Ron Becker, all rights to images remain with current holder.