Fifty years ago during the Summer of Love, the emerging hippie subculture captured the attention of the nation. Young people outraged their elders with unconventional haircuts, clothes, and music; skeptical attitudes about property and traditional religion, and, perhaps most shockingly, belief in free sexual expression outside the bounds of marriage. Public opinion polling from the time indicates that the counterculture position on free love was indeed antithetical to the majority view of marriage as a morally necessary precondition for sexual activity. But the poll questions themselves also reveal an increasing openness about sexuality in the 1960s that preceded and anticipated major changes in public attitudes.The shifting landscape of polling on sexuality in the sixties, from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research archives:

Something Wicked: Polling on Sex Pre-1960

The language of the archives earliest polling question on sexuality has not aged well. A 1939 Roper/Fortune survey first broached the subject of morality of sexual relations by asking if it was all right, unfortunate, or wicked for young men and women to have sexual relations before marriage. Interestingly, the question about young girls was posed only to men, and that about young men only to women. More importantly, these questions were only asked of respondents of the same sex as their interviewer. The subject of sex was seemingly too delicate to be discussed between the sexes, even in a research context.

In 1943, Roper revisited this question, asking only women their perceptions of sex before marriage for both sexes. A slightly larger proportion said it was wicked for young girls (46%) to have premarital sex than said the same about young men (37%).