Extreme transition
“If anybody asks what was the most momentous year of the 1960s, 1968 is the answer you always get,” said Chester Pach, an associate professor of history at Ohio University who specializes in the era.
It was 22 years after the start of the baby boom, a post-World War II demographic explosion that made the nation younger. And, thanks to a post-war industrial expansion, many also were joining a middle class that was sending a growing number of young adults to college.
As the 1968 school year began, Ohio State had barely completed twin, 24-story dormitory towers just south of Ohio Stadium to try to accommodate them all. The towers had a modern look and they had a radically modern feature: co-ed housing.
“The parents were just aghast,” said a chuckling Pam Conrad, who lived on one of Morrill Tower’s upper floors for women in 1968. She said the towers were dubbed “Sodom and Gomorrah,” even though men’s and women’s floors were reached by separate elevators and women’s lives were governed by a strict code of conduct — including curfews. “It would have been hard to engage in hanky panky in Morrill and Lincoln because of the way it was structured. But it was a symbol.”
Marilyn Cozad, who also was on campus in ‘68, remembers that maids cleaned men’s dorms while women were expected to clean their own — a notso-subtle reminder of the roles men and women were expected to play in their later lives.
“It was an entirely different world,” Cozad said.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved the birth-control pill only eight years earlier, and abortion remained illegal in Ohio. University rules seemed intent on maintaining that world by restraining women’s behavior, Conrad said.
But she and many others on campus in 1968 were determined to change that, and after a few years of activism, the special rules for women were gone.
“That whole era is when women got ‘woke,’” she said. “That’s when we started to realize how much subtle oppression there was. That’s when the Women’s Movement finally got legs.”
Still the good guys?
Americans exited World War II with a broad sense of being a force for good. The country had just put down a genocidal autocrat in Germany and a ruthless Japanese empire that had attacked without warning. The U.S. took the lead in rebuilding bombed-out Europe and Japan, and it (mostly) promoted democratic principles around the world.
The United States also sought to challenge what it saw as monolithic communist expansion across the globe. It fought a bloody war in Korea to a stalemate in 1953 and it tried to prop up an anti-communist regime in Vietnam. The “domino theory” — that if one country fell to the communists, its neighbors soon would follow — held sway.
In 1964, Johnson committed ground troops to Vietnam and the Selective Service was again drafting American men into a foreign