I think you may be pointing at something important, Jennifer. The greater pressure to conform, that is what I heard from my ten year younger sister when she was in her late teens and early twenties. She simply said to me: "The way you and K (my one year younger sister) acted - not trying to fit in at all, that simply won't work anymore."
I did think she was exagerating a bit, but could also see that she were right. When I talked to her about it we were in the middle of the feminist backlash of the 'nineties. My sister also confirmed my impression that it wasn't just a question of a "feminist backlash". It's a general question of social pressures to conform.
There may in fact, I think, have been some advantages to growing up in the late sixties, and in the seventies.
“To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty: to be a poet at forty is to be a poet”
-- Eugene Delacroix
. Nah, it's not all in my head, someone somewhere will always read me at some point, but most of the time I don't think people do, unless I give myself away acting like a nervous spaz. I do run into people from high school alot since I live in my home city and high school wasn't all that long ago, that's always interesting 
