Wow, it was very similar for me. Even when they started allowing girls to wear pants to school, I just almost couldn't.
Re: the sixties, looking back, everyone was so poor compared to today. I've often wondered if it was because of how relatively recently WWII had ended. When I think back on the homes of people who were considered relatively well off, they hardly had anything compared to now.
WWII was still big in the 60s. In the early 60s, they always played war movies on TV and at the movies. We went for a long time without a TV in my house. Well, we had a huge one that didn't work. Those big ones, called "consoles," were made to look like pieces of furniture, about 5-6 feet long, nearly 3 feet high, with ornate woodwork on the front. In the early 60s, before the hippies came into being, beatniks were the people who thought they were cool and that everyone else was "square." I admit I only saw them on TV. They would act very angry and intense, recite bad poetry in coffeehouses, and wear pedal-pushers (the girls) and turtlenecks (the guys). Pipes were in and considered cool. After the poem or other intense performance was finished, the audience members would snap their fingers instead of clap.
Of course, real life was not like that at all. Life was still pretty straight for most people. Toward the later part of the decade, the beatniks were replaced by protesters angry against the Vietnam War. I was a kid during the 60s, and I remember that every day on the radio they would announce how many Viet Cong had been killed versus how many U.S. soldiers had been killed. Somehow, there were always about three times as many of them killed versus us. There were lots of riots, too, by these angry types. Being a kid, I just thought that's the way life was, i.e. wars and riots.
Even though people on TV and in magazines would talk about liberation from old-fashioned values, real life was still straight for most people, as I said earlier. At least most everyone I knew. There was usually one or two "bad" girls and wild boys, but they were considered out of the mainstream and not acceptable.
And everybody know who "they" were and what they were supposedly doing (smoking marijuana etc). But no one was really sure because no one had first-hand knowledge.
The year was 1969. One of our high school's reputed druggie counterculturists was a student with me in second-year French. One day the teacher put on an instructional LP, and we slapped on those plasticky headphones and commenced to drone our way through repitition drills. The teacher left, as she always did, for about 20 minutes. Our long-haired druggie counterculturist, wearing square pink lensed glasses waited until she was gone, walked nonchalantly up to the teacher's console, removed the instructional LP, and replaced it with an album by the group Spirit. Suddenly we all heard the psychedelic pulsations of the song "Fresh Garbage" (Look beneath your lid one morning, see the things you didn't quite consume, the world's a can for your fresh garbage . . ."
Yeah, he lived up to his legend.