The signs are everywhere, and proliferating. Some of them are trivial but telling; others seem to reflect yet another shift in the national mood and the social mode. If the signs are to be believed—and sociologists are sure to debate their significance—the cool-hip chic that has held sway since the 1960s, with its scorn of sentiment and its do-your-own-thing code, is giving way gradually to something suspiciously like a new romanticism. Says Psychologist Sol Gordon, professor of child and family studies at Syracuse University: "Americans no longer want to be cool; they want to be hot."
The pronounced American yen for romanticism and sentiment has surfaced intermittently in one place or another for several years now, but it is finally blooming in virtually every zone of the social spectrum, in folkways and cultivated appetites, among middlebrows and highbrows alike. Take America's dance floors—often a useful symbol of how people view themselves.
Partners are touching each other again, and dancing to music that is meant to have them do just that, such as the marvelously variable hustle. Extraordinarily, the oldfashioned, dress-up tea dance has returned from oblivion to become a popular mixer all over the country—a departure, to say the least, from the meat-market atmosphere of the singles bars. The disco scene has grown generally less barbarous, and is now in retreat from the narcissistic solo gyrations that became fashionable in the early '60s. The most phenomenal pop-song hit of the season? That saccharine hymn to a sweetheart, You Light Up My Life.
In fact the relationship between the sexes, so buffeted by the feminist movement, seems once again to be taking on some subtlety and civility. Men are sending women flowers in greater numbers, the florists say, than at any time in the past decade and are regaining some of the manners that they felt superfluous when faced with militant wives or sweethearts. Women today are less apt to dress like sodbusters on a holiday, and frilly dresses, flouncy skirts, ruffled underskirts, lace, gauze blouses—all as feminine as possible—have returned to everyday fashion. Advertisements heralding coming spring fashions ooze lyricism, and sentimental trinkets and totems are booming. "Everyone is into hearts," says a Chicago shopkeeper, "the same way they were into peace symbols a few years ago."