The Fifties: A Women's Oral History - Softcover

Harvey, Brett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 059522959X ISBN 13: 9780595229598

Publisher: IUniverse, 2002

Synopsis

Many think of America in the 1950s as our last happy decade, with every family just like the one in "Leave it to Beaver" and every woman living just like Donna Reed. In fact, it was a time of great fear, especially for women, and especially the fear of not fitting in. As a woman, you were odd if you graduated from college without being married; if you were married you were odd if you didn't immediately have children; if you had children you were odd if you also wanted to work. Before the feminist movement, women were treated as second-class citizens whose roles were utterly restricted, and The Fifties: A Women's Oral History fully explores those roles, the women who lived them, and the women who broke the molds.

About this title

About the Author:

Brett Harvey is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Mother Jones, Mirabella, Ms., Cosmopolitan, and the New York Times Book Review

From Kirkus Reviews:

Freelance journalist Harvey (The Village Voice, etc.) half- successfully orchestrates a number of women's ``coming of age'' memories of the 50's, highlighting the restrictions and penalties these mostly middle-class, bright, urban, East Coast women endured. Drawing on interviews with 92 women aged 58-68, Harvey reconstructs the sexual values that shaped women's lives--the bizarre contradiction between their seductive appearance (red lipstick, pointy bras) and the repressive morality that made marriage the condition for sex, and the bearing of children and living in isolating, child-oriented suburban developments the norm. She discusses the brutality of childbirth dominated by male physicians; the naivet‚ of young mothers (one was advised to nurse while listening to Beethoven and smoking a cigarette); birth control; and the priority placed on ``perfect'' children through whom mothers acquired their value. Lamenting that no man ever had to choose between having a family and a career, she examines the working lives of those who successfully entered male-dominated professions; those who cultivated low-level jobs ``to fall back on''; the experience of lesbians (especially the freedom they enjoyed in the military); the deterrent effect of the civil-rights movement and anti-Communist activities on women's liberation; and the displacement of women in radical politics. With the election of JFK in 1960, the introduction of the Pill, and the Redbook survey examining ``Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped''--to which 24,000 women replied--the women's movement, Harvey points out, gained direction: Women like those interviewed by Harvey went to school and to work, divorced their husbands, and protested against the war in Vietnam. Harvey is a talented writer with an eye for detail and anecdote, but her study is narrow, often stereotyped, and lacks the diversity, surprise, and range of oral history at its best. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: IUniverse
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 059522959X
• ISBN 13: 9780595229598
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256