What ended the hippie era?

The short answer is that the hippies won.

It's hard for people to remember just how constrained and conformist 1950s America was. All white collar men had to wear a suit and tie to work. Women's clothing was demure and they were expected to be "ladylike." It was both legal and the norm to exclude blacks and Jews from living in "white" neighborhoods. Segregation was the law of the land in many states.

​The Ray Conniff Singers

The hippies demanded an end to that. They brought about a new freedom in dress, hairstyles, music, and social and political thought. They got a reputation for being scruffy and long-haired, but that was only in comparison to what had gone before. In fact, they look a lot like people the same age now:

​​Kids near Woodstock, 1969

The hippie era achieved many of its aims, and young people began to have other concerns that needed to be met in a different way.

Here are a few critical dates:

• Date of the Civil Rights Act: July 2, 1964
• Free Speech Movement at University of California at Berkeley campus, which ended in students being given the right to political activity (yes, really!): 1964-65 academic year
• Year of the Fair Housing Act, prohibiting race discrimination in the sale or rental of a dwelling: 1968
• Founding of the Environmental Protection Agency: December 2, 1970
• Year of the Clean Air Act: 1963, major expansion 1970
• Ratification date of 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18: July 1, 1971
• Year of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (major expansion): 1972
• Title IX of the Education Amendments, ending sex discrimination in education: June 23, 1972
  
• Date of Roe v. Wade decision permitting abortion: January 22, 1973
• Date of the end of US draft: Jan. 27, 1973
• Capture of Saigon and effective end of the Vietnam War: April 1975

Hippies alone did not achieve these things. But they were the most numerous and vocal activists in favor of them, much inspired by Martin Luther King and Gandhi. 1965 to 1975 was the critical period, and as I said, they achieved most of their aims. If you can live with your partner without being married, or wear a T-shirt and jeans to work, thank the hippies.

Judging by the snide tone of many other answers to this question, a lot of Quora readers have only learned about the free love, drugs, and other social experiments the hippies tried. Most of these were abandoned as they got older because they weren't really compatible with raising a family. But the hippie movement was first and foremost a political movement to free American (and European too) society from suffocating conformity and legally-enforced racism and sexism, and in that, it succeeded very well.

Source : Earnest W. Adams