ThumbWars: Hitchhiking, Canadian Youth Rituals and Risk in the Twentieth Century.

The "coolest thing" about hitchhiking in the 1970s was "that total sense of freedom." Hitchhiking emerged in Canada the 1930s and grew in tandem with the use and reliability of cars and with road construction. In 1935, the Globe observed, "One could not go very far along the highway without meeting scores of people standing by the roadside vigorously waving their thumbs to secure lifts." Inspite of adult's warnings against taking rides from strangers, thumbing was always popular with youth, especially in the late-1960s, when the hippies linked hitchhiking on modern new motorways with participation in the youth scene. This paper examines the changing perception of hitchhiking in the twentieth century. For most of the time picking up a hitcher was perceived as an act of charity or paternalism or, in the case of females, of chivalry. A successful hitchhiking exchange is a ritual that required trust, boundary negotiation and control. However, one never knew the true identity of the hitchhiker nor the motives of the motorist, and therefore, in tandem with exciting road stories, a counter-narrative appeared in the press that challenged the commonsense assumption that rituals create social cohesion. By the 1970s, civil society's anxiety about hippies, dropouts and youth unrest, cast a dark shadow over hitchhiking, especially for girls on the road. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]