Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I asked my mother (you know who you are)...1959 really wasn't the year everything changed. But, like so many college students (even then!), she was oblivious to contemporary events at that time, so I needed to read this book to see if she was indeed right.

However, the author sets up 1959 and the late 50s in general as the set up years for the 60s movement. Movements never come in nice neat decade-long packages. The reality is that the 50s lasted through 1963, the 1960s through 1974 and so on. The set up events include the beatniks culture, new jazz interpretations (Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis), 1957 (watered down) Civil Rights Act, the "pill" and scientific discovery spurred on by Sputnik. All these events challenged conventional wisdom. Of those, the single most important one, the author intimates, was the pill, as it liberated women from having a primary role as mothers and not employees. While its importance can not be discounted, the women's movement was surely going to happen without it (was it not?).

Seminal years of the 20th century included 1914, 1929, 1938, 1963, 1968 and 1974; I would not put 1959 in that category but certainly the activities of the 1950s in general did set up the larger movements and social changes which lasted through the 1970s.