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:
“So the soul, that drop, that ray
Of the clear fountain of eternal day,
Could it within the human flower be seen,
Remembering still its former height,
Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green;
And, recollecting its own light,
Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express
The greater heaven in an heaven less.”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
“A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)