ABSTRACT
In discussing changes over time, it is important to remind ourselves of the enormous stability of social forms. The modal or typical segments of a population show great inertia; they change slowly. The modal or typical college girl today is not astonishingly different from her counterpart of the 1940s—or even the 1930s or 1920s. What does change, and rapidly, is the form which the nontypical takes. It is the nontypical which characterizes a given time; that is, the typical, which tends to be stable, has to be distinguished from the characteristic or characterizing, which tends to be fluctuating. When we speak of “the silent generation” or “the beat generation” or the “antiestablishment generation” we are not referring to the typical member of any generation but to those who are not typical. To say, therefore, that the characteristic issues for young women of the 1960s are rights to privacy, to contraception, or to greater sexual freedom is not the same as saying that the typical young woman actively espouses these issues.
