ABSTRACT
During the late 1980s, the popular television program "thirtysomething" featured a generation of upscale young Americans struggling with careers, marriages, children, and incipient middle age. As with all myth, "the sixties" has many possible meanings and interpretations. By 1968 radical students had galvanized into "the Movement" spearheading cultural and political change. A generation that was to be cool turned out to be explosive: They broke out of old social mores and explored sexual freedom, drug use, and the so-called "new morality"; they expressed their frustration over a stalled civil rights movement; they opposed an escalating war in Vietnam. Boomers were born in a time of considerable affluence and almost limitless expectations. The 1950s and much of the 1960s were times of economic growth and widespread optimism. Of all the sixties' revolutions, none had a greater long-term impact than the gender revolution. The boomer generation came into adulthood just at the time the gender revolution was in the making.
