In the summer of 1967 young people poured into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco: long hair, flowered shirts, bare feet, strangers holding hands. Behind the social phenomenon called the “Summer of Love” lay the approval by the US Food and Drug Administration of the oral contraceptive Enovid in 1960, and with it the arrival of an age in which women could choose sex without the fear of pregnancy. Premarital sex, homosexuality, contraception, abortion, pornography: every subject of sex that had been shut in private rooms spilled at once into the space of public debate. The sexual revolution reworked the body and the shape of relationships far more deeply than any protest movement or musical fashion.

The sexual revolution is the large-scale shift in sexual norms that unfolded chiefly in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. Against the spread of the contraceptive pill, the liberalisation of sexual expression, the rise of feminism and the counterculture, the social standing of premarital sex, homosexuality, contraception, abortion, prostitution and pornography was transformed. This article covers that process.

Origin of the term

The phrase derives from the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), whose Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (1936, later translated as The Sexual Revolution) fused Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis, argued that repressed sexuality forms the psychic base of authoritarianism and fascism, and placed sexual liberation at the core of social change. Heterodox in its day, Reich’s theory was rediscovered in the 1960s counterculture and re-evaluated as the theoretical source of the revolution. The term itself settled into the mass media of late-1960s America, where magazines such as Time and Life used it repeatedly to describe the rapid change in the sexual attitudes and behaviour of the young.

The contraceptive pill

The material base of the revolution was the arrival of the pill. Developed by the biologist Gregory Pincus and the gynaecologist John Rock, Enovid was approved as an oral contraceptive by the FDA in 1960. The Supreme Court secured the contraceptive right of married women in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and of unmarried women in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972).

The spread of the pill created, for the first time in history, a situation in which women could detach the possibility of pregnancy from the choice of sex. The material ground of the traditional norm, mediated by the “fear of pregnancy”, was dismantled, and the standing of premarital sex, contraception and abortion shifted rapidly. Japan’s approval of the pill came only in 1999, the latest among the developed nations, and the question of how the “second wave” of the revolution played out in Japan remains a subject of debate.

The going-public of pornography

After the US Supreme Court’s Roth v. United States (1957), the narrowing interpretation of obscenity advanced and the legality of pornographic expression in books and film expanded by stages. In the “porno chic” era of the early 1970s, hardcore films such as Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) were shown in general cinemas to a broad audience that included the wealthy and the intellectual. For detail see the history of American pornography. In Europe, Denmark’s 1969 legalisation of adult pornography was the world’s first, followed by Sweden (1971) and West Germany (1973). In Japan too the institutional opening proceeded by stages with the rise of the pink film from 1962 and the start of the Nikkatsu Roman Porno line in 1971.

Second-wave feminism

In parallel with the revolution, the second-wave feminist movement rose. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) offered successive critical analyses of the power structure surrounding sex.

Second-wave feminism was at once the twin of the revolution and its critic. It marched with the revolution in asserting sexual self-determination and the rights to contraception and abortion, while it criticised the way “liberation” was consumed on male-centred terms and the marginalisation of women in pornography and prostitution. The “porn wars” of the 1980s, the clash between the anti-pornography position of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and the pro-sex position of Ellen Willis and others, is the typical case of this internal split.

The LGBTQ+ liberation movement

The Stonewall riots in New York in June 1969 are recorded as the starting point of the sexual-minority liberation movement. When the police raided the Stonewall Inn, its gay, lesbian and transgender regulars resisted, and the event accelerated the organisation of gay liberation. The revolution and LGBTQ+ liberation advanced together on the shared ground of a critique of the norms surrounding sex.

The course in Japan

Japan’s sexual revolution advanced in synchrony with the West but to its own rhythm. The founding of the women’s weekly Josei Jishin in 1965, the student movement and the rise of women’s lib in 1968, the start of the Nikkatsu Roman Porno line in 1971, and Tanaka Mitsu’s To My Fellow Women in Their Lives (1979) accumulated over the decades. As the late approval of the pill (1999), the survival of the criminal abortion provision, and the dispute over separate married surnames show, Japan’s law on sex remained at a more conservative level than the Western revolution, and its aftermath continues today.

See also

• Sex symbol
• History of American pornography
• History of European sexual culture
• Postwar sexual culture
• Pink film