Sociologists distinguish the terms subculture and counterculture and highlight the differences between them. The main distinction is that members of subcultures are involved in the life of society. In contrast, counterculture representatives separate themselves from the larger community and live by their own norms and rules. As such, this work will describe a group that falls under one of the categories. It will also explain why this group can be referred to the category and give its main characteristics.
Keirns et al. define counterculture as “a type of subculture that rejects some of the larger culture’s norms and values” (62). It should be noted that its members may strongly oppose rules and norms which exist in the rest of society. Sometimes, they create communities and live separately. World history has seen a number of such examples, and I would like to highlight one of them. In my opinion, American suffragists can be classified as representatives of the counterculture as they fit the category’s description.
The suffrage movement appeared in the USA and consisted of women who “agitated on behalf of women’s voting rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Misiroglu 692). There were more radical activists in England who were known as suffragettes. At the time, women were shorn of the many rights that men had, and some of them formed groups that aimed to attain equal rights. Today one would say that those women were feminists as their demands and ideas had much in common with the feminist movement. To my mind, suffragists fall in the counterculture category because they separated themselves from greater society, had a set of firm ideas, and were strongly opposed to the existing order.
Works Cited
Keirns, Nathan J., et al. Introduction to Sociology. 2nd ed., OpenStax College, Rice University, 2017.
Misiroglu, Gina. American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in US History. Routledge, 2015.