AHC: Earlier Sexual Revolution

To start this discussion off, why don't we see how much sooner it can happen with PoDs after February 1961. I'm thinking if Poe v Ullman could* have become the Griswold decision four years earlier, in which case married women will have guaranteed access to the pill that much sooner. Would that be enough for, say, some kind of "Summer of Love" equivalent in 1963?

My thinking for the thread is, once we've got a feel for that answer (making the SR come just a few years sooner), we can slowly move the PoD line back...

*say if Brennan hadn't agreed that the law wasn't ripe
 
The Sexual Revolution started in the 1920s, man.

IMO, the car did more for sexual freedom than did the pill, because it allowed people to go off and have sex, or move away from the conservative, tight-knit small towns at a faster pace. Just have the automobile come about sooner, or mass use come about sooner, and you have an earlier sexual revolution.
 
IMHO the Sexual Revolution started building in the 20s, got a big kick with penicillin and then the pill, and reached critical mass in what we know as the Sexual Revolution. But Griswold had almost nothing to do with it. Access to contraceptives was already extremely widespread (including in Connecticut--the Griswold case was a test case where state officials had cooperated by nominally denying contraceptive access) and Griswold was an effect of changing attitudes and mores, not a cause.

So if you want an early full-flowering of the Sexual Revolution, I think you just need an earlier discovery of antibiotics and an earlier discovery of birth control.

If you specifically want the 30s not to abate the momentum for the sexual revolution, then get rid of the Great Depression--people always hunker down when times gets rough.
 
Well, on that note, then how do you keep said revolution going into the 30's (the way the evolution of the 60's continued into the 70's)? Aside from the common answer of "no Great Depression" that is (which is itself a tough nut to crack)?

I think the Depression put the sexual revolution pause. During WW2 the revolution was back until 1948 or so when the pent up demand for traditional family's back until the early 1960's.
 
Well, on that note, then how do you keep said revolution going into the 30's (the way the evolution of the 60's continued into the 70's)? Aside from the common answer of "no Great Depression" that is (which is itself a tough nut to crack)?

Well there's no way you're going the avoid the Great Depression if World War I and the 1920s go as they did IOTL, so there's that. In a lot of ways the 1930s represented a general social revolution in mores and norms, and society as a whole was a lot more liberal than it was in the 1920s (which was full of open antisemitism and powerful, revived Klan, as you'll recall). I don't think it's too much of a stretch to make the 1930s slightly more socially liberal, but you have to figure out just how to do it. The New Deal ran a big campaign against syphilis. Maybe have that turn into a general sex education program early on?
 
But Griswold had almost nothing to do with it. Access to contraceptives was already extremely widespread (including in Connecticut--the Griswold case was a test case where state officials had cooperated by nominally denying contraceptive access) and Griswold was an effect of changing attitudes and mores, not a cause.

Well there goes that theory then. Just out of curiosity then (the exact "how" aside) what would an slightly earlier Griswold mean? Could that, ironically, lead to the Sexual Revolution being more "managed" if governments are trying earlier to keep the pill in the hands only of married couples?

I think the Depression put the sexual revolution pause. During WW2 the revolution was back until 1948 or so when the pent up demand for traditional family's back until the early 1960's.

Then that's another question -- how can the SR continue resuming into the 1950's?

What would that do to STDs? There would be a lot more for sure

But even more so, it depends on how public health policy reacts.
 
Then that's another question -- how can the SR continue resuming into the 1950's?

IMHO, it did, among the appropriate age groups (the young) and demographics (the unmarried). And among inappropriate age groups and demographics too. The 50s weren't a hotbed of vice, but the shift in attitudes and mores continued.
 
The 50s weren't a hotbed of vice, but the shift in attitudes and mores continued.
Then how did it becomes the squeaky clean era everybody seems to remember it as? What could get vice out in the open and accepted?
 
Then how did it becomes the squeaky clean era everybody seems to remember it as? What could get vice out in the open and accepted?

It was remembered for that because that was how a lot of the prominent people making things later on who where kids in the fifties remembered it. This is especially true today because now the only people alive from the fifties where born then or where teenagers then.

Also keep in mind this is the era that created the beatniks.
 
Several possible scenarios:

1: Ernst Graffenberg is taken seriously within his lifetime.

2: The Tobriand Islanders are studied by a more sympathetic anthropologist than Branislaw Melenowski.

3: The revelation of Korean, Filipino, and Indonesian "Comfort Women" is revealed to the West much earlier, and/or the Japanese drive up the Aleutians all the way to Anchorage, or at least Dutch Harbor, and pull the same stunt there, leading to greater socially accepted research in hormonal contraception, and even a Norplant analogue early.

4: Brazil makes more than a pro-forma effort earlier on in WWI making its shipping more of a target by the Germans, or else joins the Central Powers, leading to the development of synthetic rubber and/or polyurethane early.
 
One possible scenario for the West would be an earlier liberalization on birth control by Lambeth. Sets a cascading effect where one establishment faith allows birth control, which leads to most of the others doing so, with the well-known exception of Rome.
 
One possible scenario for the West would be an earlier liberalization on birth control by Lambeth. Sets a cascading effect where one establishment faith allows birth control, which leads to most of the others doing so, with the well-known exception of Rome.

??? Ah. Lambeth Palace, as in the Anglican HQ. It took me a sec to figure that out, and Im Anglican. I'll bet most American readers had no clue what you meant.
 
Here's a tough challenge -- how, with no PoDs prior to 1928 and without preventing the necessary subsequent events*, develop the US gay rights movement to the point that during WWII they can put up a sizeable, significant movement in the US where homosexuals publicly protest not being able to openly serve their country (something akin to the OTL protests against the military's segregation)?

*the war still breaks out pretty much as OTL -- so the Nazis still come to power, Japan still attacks Pearl Harbor when it does, etc
 
Then how did it becomes the squeaky clean era everybody seems to remember it as? What could get vice out in the open and accepted?

Part of that is retrospective propaganda by the huge youth bulge in the Baby Boom, who were protected when they were kids in the 50s and who like every generation of the young, liked to think in the 60s that they invented sex and misbehavior.

I'm not saying that sexual mores were the *same* in the 60s as in the 50s. I'm saying that the sexual mores of the 60s (really, the late 60s, early 70s) built on trends that were ongoing in the 50s.
 

katchen

Banned
J. Edgar Hoover gets killed in the line of duty by Alvin Karpavics (Alvin Karpis) during the 1930s). Hoover is one of the most underrated Americans when it came to generating repression on a wide variety of fronts from Communism to homosexuality. And because of the files he had on Senators, Congresspeople and Presidents, he was good at getting his way.
 
why this late?

certain events could actually cause puritanism etc to happen.
Before the onslaught of the plague, but also still in later ages people were sexually quite liberal. So maybe think of a POD that causes puritan ways of thinking about sex to be stillborn?
 
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