Flower child originated as a synonym for the children of Billy Ray Williams and his then wife Hazel Payne Williams who made and sold paper flowers while living on Haight Street, starting in the early 1960s. The two older daughters, Charlotte and Victoria, wore flowers in their hair while selling the paper flowers to tourists visiting the Haight Ashbury neighborhood. It eventually became a synonym for the idealistic young people who gathered in San Francisco and environs during the 1967 Summer of Love. It was the custom of "flower children" to wear and distribute flowers or floral-themed decorations to symbolize altruistic ideals of universal brotherhood, peace and love. The mass media picked up on the term and used it to refer in a broad sense to any hippie. Flower children were also associated with the flower power political movement, which originated in ideas written by Allen Ginsberg in 1965.
Read more about Flower Child: San Francisco, Summer of Love, Flowers and Politics
Famous quotes containing the words flower and/or child:
“Who comes into this country, and has come
Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
And beauty-drunken by the water
Glittering among grey-leaved olive-trees,
Has plucked a flower and sung her loss....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)