“I see suffering all around me,” she wrote. “These are realities which exist and which you have chosen to ignore in your life. These realities exist because some people insist on being rich regardless of whether they must utilize the blood and sweat of others. I do not see my freedom and happiness as something that comes when I grab as much as I can from someone else. This means that I can no longer relate to the aspirations you have for creating a comfortable life for yourselves because they ignore the tortured lives that others lead in an attempt to survive.”

The final paragraph of Harris’ letter is illuminating of the chasm of inter-generational understanding:

“I love you because of the independence you gave me in the past to get to the point where I am now, but I realize we are headed in totally opposite directions and we can never hope to turn those around and go back towards a point in the past where we had something in common.” She concludes: “My love for you has not changed, it’s just that my love for other people and purposes has far exceeded it. Goodbye with the past, forward with the future.”

For the activists of the New Left, the past was irredeemably tainted by oppressive forces: society has to be reconstructed from the bottom up. The new egalitarian community would be free of hierarchy, patriarchy, racism and the ‘false needs’ of consumerism and organised religion. The ‘replacement society’ would eliminate alienation and provide community for young people who, like the teenager in She’s Leaving Home, felt they were “living alone for so many years”.

In with the new

At the heart of this vision was an unprecedented attack on the nuclear family – as an incubator of oppression in the name of social order. The philosophy of ‘free love’ was not mere libertinism: it expressed a rebellion against the ‘chains’ of monogamy. As consumerism created envy, so monogamy repressed desire, created neuroses, and enslaved women in the home. Rather than inheriting social bonds, the communes imagined creating their own identities.