Alternative Life-Styles

From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality

During the 1960s and 1970s frequent references to alternative life-styles were made in the popular media and on American college campuses. The term was used very loosely to refer to a wide range of living arrangements, ranging from living alone as a single person by choice to large communes, where as many as hundreds of individuals lived as one family, sharing all income and child rearing responsibilities. In a few extreme communes sexual sharing of members by the leaders or by all members was practiced. For some groups of people, the merging of two or three families into a “corporate family” was attempted, and in some of these families the sexual sharing of spouses, by choice, may also have been a facet.

This experimentation with alternative sexual and familial living arrangements and relationships was seen as a reaction to an idealized but often unrealistic portrayal of the American family during the 1950s and early 1960s. It was in keeping with the ideologies of many antiauthority and liberation movements in the late 1960s, especially the antiwar movement, the hippie and drug cultures, the feminist movement, sexual liberation, and the civil right movements.

While there are still small pockets of persons who cling to the 1960s versions of alternative life-styles, today the term generally refers to the reality, not the social experiments, of family life in America. Therefore, it is applied mainly to single parent families, single motherhood by choice, childless (by choice) couples, gay and lesbian couples and parents—in short, stable couple and family relationship structures other than the traditional model of a heterosexual mother, father, and two or more children occupying a single family dwelling.