SOURCE: Breines, Winifred. “Whose New Left?” Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (September 1988): 528-45.

In the following essay, Breines compares several histories of the 1960s and claims that Gitlin's narrow male viewpoint in The Sixties overlooks the accomplishments of the women's movement and the gay rights movement.

Most former participants who write about the movements of the sixties consider themselves wiser now than they were then. And most who write about the sixties are former participants; almost all are men. Certainly many are more cynical. James Miller freely acknowledges this: “Analyzing Rousseau, Marx and the French existentialists. … has left me profoundly skeptical of the assumptions about human nature and the good society held by many radicals; and a decade of covering the music business has left me cynical about the ‘revolutionary’ potential of youth. The New Left was obviously in some respects a dead end.”¹ It is not the...