I have just started to come into contact with what Hobsbawm would describe "twilight zone" of history, which for me would be through the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s. I find it hard to grasp the whole essence of the "revolutionary sixties" both because I, for some reason, had the perception that the revolutionary sentiments of the decade were a parenthesis in the 20th century for the west and because in Greece, where I live, grew up, and study, the "sixties" don't have the potency that they do in France or the US, thus not engraving the same sentiments in the collective memory.
What I mostly ask here is, what aspects of everyday life did the "revolutionary 60s" influence and altered drastically? More specifically I would like somebody to elaborate regarding the feminist movement, women's emancipation and sexual freedom through contraceptives, as well as the breaking of the naked body as a taboo.
I hope my questions are not totally inaccurate, although if they are please tell me what I don't seem to comprehend.
Thank you.
In a way yes, in a way no.
The "hippies" et al are labeled "counter-culture" movements for a reason. They were prominent currents within the broad popular culture of the time, but they weren't the dominant ones. The mainstream of the 1960s was still very similar to that of the 1950s, but change was occurring. "Liberal" and "progressive" forces were slowly penetrating into the mainstream in bits and pieces, and some aspects became properly mainstream. Civil rights, for example, gained ground through the '60s even though they never had the degree of popular support at the time that we imagine from our perspective today. Popular support for interracial marriage did not exist in the US in the '60s, for example, nor in the '70s, nor in the '80s, but only in the mid '90s. But the legal foundations for civil rights (such as the supreme court ruling allowing interracial marriage in Loving vs. Virginia in 1967) began to be laid with a strong plurality of support before there was widespread public support. The same is true for support for gender equality in schools and in the workplace (the passage of Title IX in 1972).
As the edge of the culture changed rapidly the center started to shift slowly as well. In many ways it was not the '60s but the '70s and the '80s where the progressive shift of culture started to hit its stride. There was an outright widespread rejection of the ideals and goals of the earlier generation. You see this with demographic changes as people start to move back to the cities, as blue collar jobs lose their cachet (as, of course, blue collar jobs lose their stability as well).
The overall result was a culture of the '70s, '80s, and later that was very different from that of the '50s and earlier. This is why there's a lot of media focusing on that jump. From the period after the jump the culture before feels like an alien world. So you have Back to the Future exploring 1955 from 1985, The Wonder Years exploring 1968 (and after) from 1988, The Sandlot exploring 1962 from 1993, A Christmas Story looking back on 1966 (the 1930s) from 1983, and so on. Looking at today's media, there aren't nearly as many shows or movies set in the '80s or '90s, especially not ones that are solely concerned about ordinary activities in daily life.
Anyway, there's a lot going on here and I don't have enough time to cover it. One of the other big aspects of the progressive movement of the period was in changes to colleges and universities, especially brought about by student organizing and student protests and uprisings. Many of these occurred across the globe in the late 1960s (particularly in 1968). They took many forms: anti-war, anti-colonialism, pro-civil rights, pro-workers' rights, etc. Several of these movements even bordered on full-scale revolution, and several of them were responded to with brutal authoritarianism. Which is what happened in Greece. A student uprising at Athens Polytechnic in 1973 against the Junta that had controlled the country since 1967 was brutally suppressed with dozens of civilian deaths. Prior to 1973 free political expression had been severely curtailed, and only after the fall of the Junta in 1974 did Greece experience a shift toward liberalism. Greece's very different experience from the US during the mid-20th century may be why you have a different view on the "sixties" than those in the US.