1950s AMERICA: SOCIAL ASPECTS

« 1950s AMERICA: SOCIAL ASPECTS The 1950s is often viewed as a period of conformity, when both men and women observed strict gender roles and complied with society’s expectations.

After the devastation of the Great Depression and World War II, many Americans sought to build a peaceful and prosperous society.

However, even though certain gender roles and norms were socially enforced, the 1950s was not as conformist as is sometimes portrayed, and discontent with the status quo bubbled just beneath the surface of the placid peacetime society.

Although women were expected to identify primarily as wives and mothers and to eschew work outside of the home, women continued to make up a significant proportion of the postwar labor force.

Moreover, the 1950s witnessed significant changes in patterns of sexual behavior, which would ultimately lead to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Changing social trends following World War II Demobilization at the end of World War II brought a great many changes. Millions of women who had joined the workforce during the war were displaced by returning soldiers.

Messages in popular culture and the mass media encouraged these women to give up their jobs and return quietly to domestic life.

Most women, however, wished to keep their jobs, and thus women made up approximately one-third of the peacetime labor force. During the 1950s, marriage and homeownership rates skyrocketed, so there is no doubt that many Americans were content to pursue the “American dream.” These trends were aided by suburbanization and the mass production of automobiles.

Cars allowed Americans who lived in the suburbs to commute easily into urban areas for work.

Cars not only changed work and housing patterns, but also facilitated the rise of new sexual norms.

They provided young couples with a place to spend time together alone, away from the prying eyes of parents and other members of the community.

This, in turn, led to a rise in premarital sex and birth rates.

Thus, patterns of sexual behavior were changing even as the traditional ideal continued to insist upon marriage before sex. Between 1946 and 1964, the largest generation of Americans, known as the baby boomers, was born.

This demographic trend in turn reinforced women’s identities as wives and mothers.

Despite societal norms that encouraged women to stay in the home and out of the workplace, approximately forty percent of women with young children, and at least half of women with older children, chose to remain in the work force. Social issues of the 1950s Despite the prosperity of the 1950s, not everyone benefited from it.

Some Americans were dissatisfied with the changes brought by affluence.

Social critics and a small group of writers and.... »