Littauer, Amanda H., author.
Chapel Hill [North Carolina] : The University of North Carolina Press, [2015]
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Part of the series Gender and American culture;Gender & American culture.
Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II-era victory girls to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms. Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life –Publisher description.
- Acknowledgments — Introduction: what are we waiting for? — Victory girls : sex, mobility, and adventure on the home front — B-girls : soliciting drinks and negotiating sex in mid-century bars — Tearing off the veil : women and girls respond to the Kinsey report — Going steady : permissiveness, petting, and premarital sex in the 1950s — Someone to love : teen girls, queer desire, and contested meanings of immaturity in the 1950s — Conclusion: feminist sexual futures — Notes — Bibliography — Index.
Subjects:
- Sex customs — United States — History — 20th century.
- Women — Sexual behavior — United States — History — 20th century.
Requested by Lansing, M.