The 1960s constituted a mentality crisis for both the older and younger generations. Staring from their own pasts and backgrounds, everyone suddenly had to respond to an overwhelming series of changes. And this time the crisis was caused not by an economic depression, as it had been in the 1930s, but by its opposite: unparalleled economic growth throughout Western Europe; a striking increase in leisure time and mobility; an endless series of technological innovations; the mass availability -- for the first time -- of cars, motorbikes and other luxury articles; a contraceptive pill that 'liberated' sexuality from the burden of reproduction after 1962; a decline in the ideal image of America as a result of the war in Vietnam, and the enormous rise of the television and the transistor radio, making young people from San Francisco to Amsterdam feel united in the same rhythm of life. (p. 637)