The Supreme Court Decision Returning Women to Status of Property Is Part of a Program to "Take America Back" to Before 1964
Lesley Gore—who had risen to the top of the charts only eight months earlier with a musical pronouncement of female powerlessness in which she had cried helplessly at her party when Judy stole her boyfriend—would reach number two at the end of 1964’s first month, blocked from the top spot only by the Beatles attaining that position for the first time that same week. Gore’s startling song would remain right behind the Beatles for three weeks. This song’s protagonist wasn’t having any of that hand-holding stuff. The lyrics contained ideas that at least bordered on—no, let’s revise that—that were revolutionary:
You don’t own me
I’m not just one of your many toys
You don’t own mw
Don’t say I can’t go with other boys
And don’t tell me what to do
And don’t tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don’t put me on display, ’cause
So just let me be myself . . .
I’m young and I love to be young
I’m free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please.
The song was written by two men, John Madara and Dave White, but here was a woman—a girl, for god’s sake; she was “just seventeen, you know what I mean” —proclaiming her freedom from male domination, her independence, her refusal to be an object. This was something new—and, in the early weeks of 1964, second only to the just-arrived Fab Four in popularity.
“You Don’t Own Me” burst forth as a supernova of freedom out of a genre (songs by young female vocalists) that had been populated over the preceding two years by such sentiments as “I wanna be Bobby’s girl” and “I will follow him wherever he may go.”
Freedom was what the Long 1964—from the JFK assassination late in 1963 through mid-1965—was all about. It was then that a political, cultural, social, and sexual revolution burst forth and the United States became for the first time a full democracy.
Everything the rightwing extremists who have seized control of the No-Longer-Republican Party over the past several years seek to do is about taking the nation back to before 1964, when it was still a white man’s country.
The outrageous decision by six Republican “justices” on the Supreme Court to return women the status of property owned by men is but one among the numerous examples of what these neofascists seek to do in turning back the calendar.
If the vision of America set forth (though certainly not achieved) in 1776 is to survive, these misogynist-racist-homophobic authoritarians must be defeated in the November elections.
{This piece is adapted from my just-published book, The Times They Were a-Changin’ - 1964: The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn (Arcade, distributed by Simon and Schuster.}
