This is really interesting and I'm inclined to suspect it's accurate, but I'm displeased by the fact that almost all the citations are from secondary sources, especially since that article contains an awful lot of stats that should be findable from primary sources.
There's another way to think of the 1950s. This applies to both the things we, as North Americans, liked about the 1950s and the things which we, a select few anyway, were rebelling against by the late 1960s. The mainstream culture, mostly a media culture, was a carefully constructed one.
Everyone says the fifties were time of innocence. Well know the cliche of the hygiene films and all that. But, the reason they were produced from the mid forties onwards was that government officials were worried that adults were not around to instruct their kids. The men were away at war and the women were working in the plants. Fifties culture was an conscious attempt to construct an ordered society in the wake of twenty years of upheaval(economic depression and global war). America in the fifties was society recovering from trauma. There were things that just were not talked about and yet their memory influenced everything. Fifties America was society denying its pain. Not so innocent.
I'm kind of fascinated by the period in the US from 1945 to 1965. There was a lot of change happening. That events were building to the dramatic social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There's a branch of mathematics that applies here: Catastrophe Theory. This theory studies the dynamics of sudden change, Catastrophes, and how the conditions pile up. You can see the conditions piling up towards a social catastrophe if you examine the period as history. For someone living in the time, the period might have seemed very ordered.
Also, older adults of any era yearn to return to the time in which they themselves came of age. That's the time of one's life when worldviews become set. Everything diverges from one's comfortable mental models after that. The models inevitably get updated, but the discomfort often remains.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-08 03:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-08 04:37 am (UTC)Everyone says the fifties were time of innocence. Well know the cliche of the hygiene films and all that. But, the reason they were produced from the mid forties onwards was that government officials were worried that adults were not around to instruct their kids. The men were away at war and the women were working in the plants. Fifties culture was an conscious attempt to construct an ordered society in the wake of twenty years of upheaval(economic depression and global war). America in the fifties was society recovering from trauma. There were things that just were not talked about and yet their memory influenced everything. Fifties America was society denying its pain. Not so innocent.
I'm kind of fascinated by the period in the US from 1945 to 1965. There was a lot of change happening. That events were building to the dramatic social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There's a branch of mathematics that applies here: Catastrophe Theory. This theory studies the dynamics of sudden change, Catastrophes, and how the conditions pile up. You can see the conditions piling up towards a social catastrophe if you examine the period as history. For someone living in the time, the period might have seemed very ordered.
Also, older adults of any era yearn to return to the time in which they themselves came of age. That's the time of one's life when worldviews become set. Everything diverges from one's comfortable mental models after that. The models inevitably get updated, but the discomfort often remains.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-08 04:48 am (UTC)