People's Century: 1900-1999

The baby boom produced a cohort of children in the affluent and secure post-war world who for the first time would question established trends, culture and authority. Young adults were denied the right to vote, and lived in a paternalistic society that discouraged them from interacting with authority. Their rising disposable incomes were channelled into new music and fashions that helped provide them with a new common identity. Greater student populations, disillusionment with conformist trends, identification with civil rights issues and concern about the Vietnam War (where some youth were at risk of being drafted to) led to widespread protests in the West. A counterculture of drugs and hippies also emerged amongst the less engaged. Protests against authority emerges across the world with varying results – the May 1968 student uprising in France is curtailed by pragmatic workers not wishing to become involved, while crackdowns at the Chicago Convetion and Kent State University radicalise previously peaceful demonstrators in the United States. From the 1970s, following the end of US involvement in Vietnam, tighter employment conditions and the emergence of a more consultative culture in the West, youth find less reasons to protest.