The Fifties: A Women's Oral History
by Brett Harvey
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Book Summary Information
Author: Brett HarveyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-08-28
ISBN: 059522959X
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: IUniverse
Book Reviews of The Fifties: A Women's Oral History
Book Review: Not to be missed
Summary: 5 Stars
This book should be required reading for every woman and teenage girl in America, many of whom take for granted the struggles our foremothers went through and how hard it was to be a woman not so long ago. Many of the stories in this book are heartbreaking, and very memorable. Even though many people like to portray the Fifties as a golden paradise, an age of innocence, when nothing was the least little bit amiss, books like this paint a radically different picture. The Fifties were just as tumultuous as any other decade, but people back then were better at covering up and repressing taboo behaviours, like premarital sex and lesbianism. Reading this book made me very glad I was not alive in the Fifties.
The women interviewed for this book spoke about many different subjects which most women of the decade had to deal with, often in isolation because they had no one to talk to or because they had been taught not to speak up and be "unladylike" by disturbing the status quo and rocking the boat. Among these subjects include radical politics, military wives, life in Levittowns, the sexual double standard of the era (girls who went all the way were punished for enjoying sex or getting pregnant, while the boys didn't even get so much as a slap on the wrist), what it was like for unwed mothers (the story about Doris, who got pregnant for the first time as the result of a rape, was particularly heartbreaking), how know-it-all male physicians treated their patients like stupid children and totally took over their birth experiences, making it more about the doctor being a god over womens' bodies than the woman going through one of the most powerful experiences possible, what it was like in the days before the Pill, when premarital chastity was accomplished more through fear than personal beliefs and when "technical virgins" abounded just as much as they do today, lesbian women, divorce, higher education (many women were urged to drop out of college if they had academic difficulties, or were bullied out of fields of study dominating by men, such as business and architecture), and what women experiencing crisis pregnancies had to go through in the days of back alley abortions. This was also the era when impressionable young women were taught that their highest aspiration should be to be a wife, mother, and homemaker, with the only respectable professions open to women being that of nurse, teacher, and secretary. Married women who wanted to work were seen as odd, and many people would not hire married women. Married women who had no children were thought to be insane, and if they didn't have "enough" children, they were looked on just as suspiciously. This was not a great decade in which to be a nonconformist. After reading a book like this, it would be hard for anyone to not realise why there were so many radical sweeping changes in the Sixties and Seventies. These women who had come of age in the Fifties had been through enough and weren't going to take being treated like second-class citizens and living under a sexual double standard anymore.
This is difficult stuff to read at times, knowing what life was like for women not that long ago, but it should also be inspiring, realising how far we've come in so many ways. It should be a real eye-opener for anyone, male or female, who refuses to believe that things were really this bad back in the Fifties.
Summary of The Fifties: A Women's Oral History
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.20th Century Books
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