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In a sense, life-styles (a very '70s preoccupation) were the distinguishing characteristic of the decade. Social Critic Tom Wolfe, in a 1976 essay, called it the Me Decade, a term that caught the epoch's dreamily obsessive self-regard. The '70s were given over to building private, not public morale. Younger people at the end of the '70s, says Theologian Martin Marty, "have a beleaguered sense in their bones that the old order is dying. Very few want a radical alternative, but few also are working to develop a rationale for the system we've got."
The idea of self-respect (a quality that Americans collectively may have felt was slipping) was injected like hormones until it turned into truculent self-assertion; Robert Ringer's bestseller Looking Out for No. 1 was part of an entire I'm-terrific library of aggressive narcissism. Waves of self-awareness disciplines—est, Arica, Transcendental Meditation, Esalen, transactional analysis—set about fumigating, refurnishing and redecorating the inner space of the American psyche. A procession of shamans and gurus filled the air with earnestly fatuous vocabularies of psychobabble and mellowspeak that were the linguistic equivalent of artificial coloring in foods. It sometimes did not even avail to scream at the blissful; they would reply serenely: "Thank you for sharing your anger with me."
More sinister impulses flourished. While organized religion revived, the decade also felt insistent tremors of a low-grade chronic religious insanity:'young men and women were swallowed up by cults, a few then kidnaped back and "deprogrammed." This darker strain of American religious enthusiasm reached a culmination at Jonestown, where 912 of the Rev. Jim Jones' followers drank cyanide with Kool-Aid (or, a few of them, had death injected) and lay down to die with him in what looked like a Satanic summer camp. The Manson killings were emblems of the '60s' evil reaches; Jonestown had a similar black inexplicability in the '70s.
If much of the Me Decade's awareness crusade became a satire upon itself, the women's movement was serious about self-fulfillment, and had substantive results. The Equal Rights Amendment foundered three votes short of becoming law, but women went far toward transforming their roles in American life. They became miners, priests, jockeys, West Point cadets, ship captains and astronauts. They flocked to medical, law and business schools, and as they started to rise in their fields they began to change the sexual balance of power.
Some skeptics predicted a backlash against the women's movement, but it is yet to come. Abortion, which the Supreme Court made legal in 1973, became a bitter moral issue that provoked a powerful "right to life" movement. But other changes brought by the movement met less resistance, partly because they meshed with new economic necessities. Fifty-nine percent of U.S. women 18 to 64 now work, either because they wish to or have to in order to keep the household going.