TY - JOUR TI - Countercultural communes DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T31R6NM6 PY - 2014 AB - This thesis utilizes a gendered analytical lens and a feminist framework in order to explore if the sixties countercultural communards of Colorado’s Drop City, Tennessee’s The Farm, and Virginia’s Twin Oaks achieved liberation from the mainstream gender roles that characterized post-World War II America. This study complicates the common assumption that communes represented spaces of liberation for individuals who wished to escape an oppressive and inequitable post-war society. Overall, this thesis found that men at Drop City, The Farm, and Twin Oaks were not only freed from their contemporary gender roles, but they were also able to remake meanings of masculinity within the communal context. This thesis also demonstrates that new meanings of masculinity tended to perpetuate traditional assumptions about male dominance and female domesticity. Additionally, this thesis discovered that incorporation of structure in communes, a facet of mainstream America that communards sought to escape, ironically furthered gender liberation and contributed to feminist growth in Twin Oaks in the 1970s and 1980s. KW - History KW - Nineteen sixties--Social aspects--United States KW - Sexual division of labor KW - Gender expression KW - Sex role KW - Feminism LA - eng ER -