What better way to learn about a lifestyle than by looking at the children it produced? How successful were the hippies at insulating themselves from mainstream culture, and what influences could they not escape? How have the children of the hippies taken up their parents’ legacy of rebellion? What aspects of the counterculture have these children embraced as adults, and what have they rejected?
As children of the counterculture, we faced constant negotiation between home life and outside influences. We learned to live between two worlds: the one our parents created and the straight one that surrounded us. Our parents couldn’t shield us from mainstream culture-though many of them tried. They could simply do their best to pass on their values and beliefs about a difficult, corrupt world. Many of us still struggle with this dichotomy, vainly attempting to be true to each world and betray neither. We may be hippies at home and yuppies in the office. We might want to make pottery and grow organic vegetables and still be drawn to cell phones and Jettas. We struggle to retain the truth of who we are, which many of us find rooted in our childhoods, even as we live in a world that may eschew our alternative beginnings.
Our parents offered us a rare freedom to create our lives as we chose. It was part of a larger commitment to freedom that came to define the hippie counterculture. Free love, free speech, freedom from societal restraints. Those of us who felt safe in this freedom reveled in it, those of us who did not feel safe pined for structure, curfews, limits. Freedom without a safety net can have dire and lasting results. In collecting these stories, I wanted to explore what hippie kids had learned about freedom from coming of age in an environment that valued it so highly yet may not have considered all of its consequences.
I have chosen to focus on girls, because I think that raising a girl ‘outside’ of society has particularly radical implications. These hippie girls were raised in an era that was just beginning to liberate girls from the expectations that accompanied generations of social and sexual repression. They were being raised by young women who had rejected the roles prescribed to them, for the promised liberation of the counterculture. I was interested to see what type of feminism this would spawn. How would that early empowerment affect their gender politics? The writers in this book all have strong independent voices; they are the daughters of mothers who were courageous or desperate enough to walk away from a lifetime of gender roles and boundaries. For many of these women, the promised liberation of the counterculture proved to be an empty one, as traditional gender roles followed them to the communes and the farmhouses. For their daughters, the promise was to prove more fruitful.
I started this project in an effort to understand my own experience, through the experience of my peers. Of my values, beliefs, propensities, quirks-of who I am today-what do I owe to my upbringing, and what is simply a result of my own inevitable peculiarities? Yet, this anthology has taught me much more than that. Its lasting value will not be only in the anecdotal memoirs themselves, but in their collective insight on the unique impact that this specific social experiment had on its children, and how that impact, and its implications on child rearing, has not yet finished reverberating.
This anthology begins with a birth and ends with another. We come full circle, from girl-child to woman to girl-child. To begin, Zoë Eakle writes of her home birth to hippie expatriates on the Canadian island of her childhood. To end, Suzanne M. Cody writes a letter to her infant daughter about her own girlhood, and what she would and would not change. In between, Ariel Gore laments what was lost when the world, the counterculture and her childhood changed. Poet Paola Bilbrough remembers her New Zealand counterculture girlhood in poetry that is evocative of the strange magic particular to her hippie outback home. Elizabeth She describes the darker side of free love run amok. For a perspective of another sort, Angela Lam writes not of her own girlhood in the counterculture, but of her friend, Summer, and how a brief encounter with Summer’s family challenged Angela’s sheltered world. These and the other essays recount a particular American childhood in ways that shed light not just on their parents’ choices, but on the radical implications of attempting to raise children outside of mainstream society.
A social experiment only becomes revolutionary when its implications transcend the moment, when it pervades and changes the society, when it ripples through the generations. The legacy of the hippie trip is not merely in its children, but in the fact that we are still working through the lessons of our upbringing, the successes and the failures. What we take from that experience, what we incorporate into our own lives-that is the legacy. We are sex-addicted, atheist, communist artists, after all. We are the people our grandparents warned us about. And we are having children. It can only lead to more ‘uncivilized’ behavior.
Our parents laid down their weapons long ago, but the hippie kids in this anthology, and all the hippie kids I know, still struggle with questions: questions like when to take on society, and when to go along; when to live in the straight world, and when to abandon the rat race and take a summer off to follow Phish; when to march against clear-cutting-animal-testing-ozone-destroying-pro-life-legislating-poor-people-exploiting-fundamentalist-special-interests, and when to stay home and watch The Road Rules on MTV.
If there is anything that these essays teach us it is this: There is just no way that you can escape being influenced by a childhood designed specifically to influence you. We were raised in a culture intended to teach us to challenge everything everybody else was telling us-to subvert the dominant paradigm. No matter that this sentiment has more currency as a bumper sticker than as a core cultural value of the nineties. You can take the girl out of the counterculture, but you can’t take the counterculture out of the girl.
Chelsea Cain
Portland, Oregon
August 1999
Wild Child
Water Baby
I guess my folks were trying out something new, but me, I never knew the difference. By the time I showed up they were already in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. I was born in Sointula, the island of their destination.
Faded color photos create patchy images of who my parents were then. Snapshots of Dad with grown-out hair and thick dark beard, his jeans tucked into his gum boots, posing with home-grown hemp plants as tall as he is or sitting at the kitchen table pitting cherries from the tree in our backyard.
My mom’s hair was long and straight and parted in the middle like a smooth dark stream around her freckled face. She said she didn’t know what hard work was until they left the city. Pictures usually catch her in the middle of something, her sparkly eyes half closed from blinking at the camera. She is bending over a baby, or the dishes, or a row of weeding in the garden. Sometimes she is singing with a band on the front porch with a beer in her hand. Like my father, she is younger than I am today. Her long neck curves gently down into her back. She is beautiful.
And there’s me, too young to remember myself, naked except for a hand-knit cardigan, crumbs or dirt on my face-it’s hard to tell. I’m gazing earnestly into the camera. Staring up from a past turned to myth by memory and this word, ‘hippie,’ which apparently encompasses my childhood.