Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (54 page)

Some women's colleges (which were generally headed by men) discouraged their students from taking "serious" subjects or preparing for careers. Mills College demanded a "distinctively feminine curriculum" and featured such subjects as ceramics, weaving, and flower arrangement. The president of Stephens College highlighted courses in interior decorating, cosmetics, and grooming, and added that for women "the college years must be rehearsal periods for the major performance" of marriage. Adlai Stevenson told Smith College graduates that he knew no better vocation for women than that they might assume the "humble role of housewife."
⁶²

Statistics concerning the world of work offered the clearest measures of the institutional barriers to gender equality. The percentage of workingage women who were in the labor force gradually increased in the 1950s, from 33.9 at the start of the decade (smaller than the 1945 high of 35.8 percent) to 37.8 in 1960. That was 23.3 million people, 9 million more than in 1940 and nearly 5 million more than in 1950.
⁶³
This was one of the most significant social trends during the postwar era. But women remained highly segregated in occupations deemed suitable for their "lesser" talents: as secretaries, waitresses, elementary school teachers, nurses, and other mostly low-paid members of the labor force. Some such women as waitresses received support from unions for better working conditions.
⁶⁴
But most unions concentrated on attracting men. The median income of white female full-time workers decreased from 63 percent of the median for males in 1945 to 57 per cent in 1973.
⁶⁵

These aggregate statistics, revealing as they are, fail to catch perhaps the most significant trend in women's work in the early postwar years. This was the rapid increase in the percentage of women workers who were married. This rose from 36 percent in 1940 to 52 percent in 1950 to 60 percent in 1960—and to 63 percent in 1970. In part the increases reflected demography: higher percentages of women had husbands. But the most important cause of the trend was the desire of married women to enter the market. These were not women starting careers when they were young; they were housewives belatedly finding work, much of it low-paid, in order to help ends meet in their homes. This is what "togetherness" often meant for such families.
⁶⁶

Contemporaries and historians have disagreed over why so many of these married women entered the work force. Some have emphasized the allure of the consumer culture, which, it was thought, was creating an ever more palpable "land of desire," especially among married women in the middle classes, among whom the greatest increases in employment were taking place at the time.
⁶⁷
Achieving a degree of security, these women (like many men) were thought to develop ever-greater appetites for goods. Expectations about the Good Life kept escalating. Luxuries became necessities.

That surely happened: in this way as in many others, the rise of the consumer culture profoundly affected the behavior of people. But women were neither mindless consumers nor a homogeneous group. They divided, as always, along racial, ethnic, religious, regional, age, and class lines, and it is therefore hazardous to generalize freely, especially about complicated motivations. Women who were poor—many millions in the 1950s—could scarcely buy very deeply into the consumer culture. And many others—again the Levittowners come to mind—anxiously remembered the frightening years of the Great Depression and World War II. They wanted more consumer goods—why not?—but they also yearned for security and then more security, which they tried to advance by adding earned income to their households.
⁶⁸
They cannot be accused of accumulating goods for the sake of goods.

In time many of these working women developed a heightened sense of empowerment. That was a long-range result of widespread female employment, of ascending affluence, and of the movement for civil rights, which drove ideological demands in many unanticipated ways. In the 1950s, however, most of these women were looking for jobs, not careers, and they exhibited little feminist consciousness. That arose mainly in the 1960s.

I
N 1954
F
REDRIC
W
ERTHAM
, a psychologist, published
The Seduction of the Innocent
, an emotional expose of the damage that violence and brutality in comic books (which were published at a rate of more than 60 million a month by the late 1940s) were inflicting on young people. Children, he said, were learning all the wrong lessons and might become delinquents. Others would suffer from "linear dyslexia." A year later Benjamin Fine came out with
1,000,000 Delinquents
—the number of adolescents he said (accurately) would run afoul of the law in 1956.
Time
magazine, never to be outdone, then brought forth a special issue. It was entitled "Teenagers on the Rampage."
⁶⁹

Jeremiads such as these exposed a nervous underside to the surface calm of American culture in the mid-1950s, even before the oldest cohorts of baby boomers were entering their teens. The alarmists received support from a great many federal agencies such as the Children's Bureau, which—like many other concerned American institutions in the postwar era—took to heart messages from the ascendant field of psychology and imagined that intervention by "experts" could modify personal behavior. The experts (and others) cited a host of apparently accelerating trends that purported to show an explosion of juvenile delinquency and youthful rebellion. These ranged from serious matters such as gang fights and teenaged drinking parties to more trivial matters such as the growing tendency of young "greasers" to wear cut-off T-shirts and blue jeans and to style their hair in pompadours and duck-tails. Role models such as Brando and Dean especially worried conservatives. Other alarmists blamed the apparent spate of youthful rebellion on working mothers—prisoners of the consumer culture—who left "latch-key" children behind to fend for themselves.

The United States Senate, moved to action by such concerns, responded as early as 1953 by undertaking major hearings into delinquency. These lasted off and on throughout the 1950s and attracted considerable notice after 1955 when Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, a liberal Democrat, agreed to take over the investigations. (Kefauver, who had large ambitions to become President, was good at finding ways into the public eye: in 1950 he had presided over enormously popular televised hearings that sought to prove the spread of "organized crime" in America.) States and towns joined in the fight against sources of juvenile unrest. By 1955 thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books. Leading intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills, praised Wertham's efforts.
⁷⁰

Hollywood pitched in with release in 1955 of
Rebel Without a Cause
and
The Blackboard Jungle
, both of which featured rebellious teenagers. In
Rebel
Dean defies his weak-willed, apron-clad father and domineering mother and joins a group of disaffected classmates who challenge local conventions. Brooding and surly, Dean became an idol of sorts to many adolescents.
Blackboard Jungle
, greatly aided in impact by the song "Rock Around the Clock" in its sound track, shows wild and unruly high schoolers threatening to destroy all order in the classroom. Like most apparently daring Hollywood films, both movies in fact closed with the forces of good in control. At the end of
Rebel
Dean sees the light and submits to the authority of his father, who says, "You can depend on me. Trust me." Glenn Ford, the embattled teacher in
Jungle
, manages to isolate the worst kids and regain authority. Still, these movies upset many contemporaries. Some reviewers, fearing that
Blackboard Jungle
would incite young people, damned it. A number of localities sought to ban it.
⁷¹

Nothing worried traditionalists in the mid-1950s more than the impact on young people of revolutionary changes in popular music, especially rock 'n' roll. Until then "pop" music had remained fairly tame. Hits in the early 1950s had included Rosemary Clooney's "Come On-a My House," Perry Como's "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes," and Patti Page's "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" Even then, however, country and rhythm-and-blues tunes, some of them drawing on black musical forms, were gaining a considerable following. In 1954,
Billboard
magazine noted that rhythm and blues "is no longer identified as the music of a specific group, but one that can now enjoy a healthy following among all people, regardless of race or color."
⁷²

Later that year the record "Sh-Boom" came out, which in its white version by the Crew Cuts and its black version by the Chords became the fifth-best-selling song of the year. Some historians regard it as the first rock-'n'-roll hit.
⁷³
It was quickly followed by an undoubted sensation, "Rock Around the Clock," as recorded by an all-white band, Bill Haley and the Comets. Haley's group combined country and western with rhythm and blues and featured hard-driving electric guitars and drums. "Rock Around the Clock" took off to the top of the charts and ultimately sold some 16 million recordings. Soon black rock 'n' rollers, too, like Chuck Berry ("Johnny B. Goode," 1958), Chubby Checker ("The Twist," 1960), and Fats Domino, rose to fame with a series of big-selling records.
⁷⁴

Rock 'n' roll did not supplant other forms of popular music: top hits of the late 1950s included "Tammy" by Debbie Reynolds, "Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin, and songs by Como, Sinatra, Nat "King" Cole, Lena Home, and other favorites. Pat Boone, a clean-cut singer, was a "pop" star. Folksinging groups such as The Weavers enjoyed a revival at the end of the decade and in the early 1960s. Jazz artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and many others retained loyal followings. But the rise of rock 'n' roll was nonetheless one of the most shocking cultural phenomena of the mid- and late 1950s, especially to people over the age of twenty-five. Like jazz in the 1920s, the new music seemed to separate young Americans from their elders and to usher in the beginnings of a strange and powerful "youth culture." Rock 'n' roll gave millions of young people—especially "teenagers" (a noun that came into widespread use only in 1956)—a sense of common bond: only
they
could appreciate it.
⁷⁵

No performer aroused more alarm than Elvis Presley. Elvis, twenty years old in 1955, was the son of poor Mississippi farm folk who had moved into public housing in Memphis when he was fourteen. He pomaded his hair and idolized Brando and Dean, whose
Rebel Without a Cause
he saw at least a dozen times and whose lines he could recite from memory. Presley learned to sing and play guitar while performing with local groups, often with people from his Assembly of God congregation. In 1954 he recorded "That's All Right" and a few other songs, mainly in the blues and country traditions, thereby exciting Sam Phillips, a local disk jockey, record producer, and discoverer of musical talent. Phillips loved black music and had recorded such musicians as B. B. King earlier in the 1950s. But the color line barred them from fame. "If I could find a white man with a Negro sound," Phillips is reputed to have said, "I could make a billion dollars."
⁷⁶

Presley was the man whom Phillips had been seeking. By the end of 1955 his records were hits, and his live performances, in which he affected an alienated Brando look and gyrated sexually in time with the music, were sensations. Audiences, composed mainly of young people, screeched and wailed in scenes that frightened other observers. One outraged commentator charged that Presley's performances were "strip-teases with clothes on . . . not only suggestive but downright obscene." In 1956 several of Presley's hits, such as "Hound Dog" and "Heartbreak Hotel," sold millions of records. He signed to appear in three movies. Ed Sullivan, who had prudishly announced that "Elvis the Pelvis" would never appear on his show, gave in and offered him the unheard-of sum of $50,000 to perform on three of them. (On one the cameras showed him only from the waist up.) An estimated 54 million Americans watched Elvis on one of these shows—the largest audience for anything on TV until that time (and not surpassed until 67 million tuned in the Beatles, also on "Ed Sullivan," in 1964). Elvis had rocketed to fame as one of the most phenomenal stars of a decade that, thanks to the rise of the mass media, was ushering in an era of unprecedented star- and celebrity-worship. The composer Leonard Bernstein later went so far as to call Presley "the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century."
⁷⁷

The rise of the new music owed a good deal of its growth to affluence and the power of the consumer culture. By then teenagers were earning millions of dollars, often by working in fast-food places on the roadsides. Others had allowances from their parents. Many could come up with the modest sums that it took to buy record-players, as they were called at the time, and to purchase the cheap 45-rpm vinyl disks that carried the new tunes. Almost everyone could afford to feed nickels into the jukeboxes that played the music wherever teenagers assembled. Retail sales of records jumped from $182 million in 1954 to $521 million in 1960. Rock 'n' roll, like much else in the United States, quickly became corn-modified—a vital part of the thriving culture of consumption.