Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties
Amanda H. Littauer
Abstract
This book looks at mid-century American sex and culture. It traces the origins of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. The book 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 free ... More
This book looks at mid-century American sex and culture. It traces the origins of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. The book 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, the text 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.
Keywords:
sexual revolution,
sexual liberation,
victory girls,
sexual freedoms,
postwar society,
sexual morality,
sexual life
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781469623788 |
Published to North Carolina Scholarship Online: May 2016 |
DOI:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469623788.001.0001 |