T7 Social Cultural Flashcards
1
Q
The Cinema
A
- The cinema remained popular but less so than the inter-war years because of the influence of television.
- Average weekly cinema attendances fell from 90 million a week in 1946 to 47 million ten years later.
- The drive-in cinema, first opened in the 1930s, became very popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in rural areas, with some 4,000 drive-ins spreading across the United States.
- Among its advantages was the fact that a family with a baby could take care of their child while watching a movie, while teenagers with access to autos found drive-ins ideal for dates.
- In the 1950s, the greater privacy afforded to patrons gave drive-ins a reputation as immoral, and they were labelled ‘passion pits’ in the media.
- In the period following the Second World War, young people wanted new and exciting symbols of rebellion.
- Hollywood responded to audience demands – the late 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of the antihero, with stars like newcomers James Dean, Paul Newman and Marlon Brando replacing more ‘proper’ actors like Tyrone Power, Van Johnson and Robert Taylor.
2
Q
The Growing Power of Television
A
- In 1954, water officials in the city of Toledo, Ohio began to investigate why there seemed to be
huge upsurges in demand during random three-minute periods each evening. - They solved the mystery when they correlated the mass flushing of toilets with commercial breaks on TV.
- By this time television was a national phenomenon. The number of sets had risen from 60,000 in 1947 to 37 million by 1955; three million were sold in just the first six months of 1950.
- By 1956, Americans spent $15.6 billion on the sale and repair of TV sets. The TV was the lynchpin of the home.
- The year 1954 saw the arrival of TV dinners so the family need not waste precious viewing time eating around the table.
3
Q
Popular TV Shows
A
- Popular programmes were viewed by millions.
- By 1960, it is estimated that watching TV was the favourite leisure activity of half the population.
- It is estimated, too, that half the population saw Mary Martin take to the air as Peter Pan in a 1955 spectacular
- A regular audience of 50 million watched I Love Lucy.
- Comedienne Lucille Ball broke the stereotypical mould of passive females, being both performer and producer.
- In 1953, she was awarded an $8 million contract.
- The irony was I Love Lucy itself was about a dizzy blonde who created comic mayhem wherever she went.
- Many sitcoms celebrated the American family as the heart of the USA – Leave it to Beaver, for example, showed the boy Beaver learning that mum and dad were always right.
- In this sense, family values and the position of the sexes was always reinforced with mum as the homemaker and dad going out to work.
- In shows such as the Donna Reed Show where housewife Donna always saved the day with her good sense and quiet manner.
- Television became a huge factor in popular culture not only in the USA but throughout the world.
- Studios grew large and impressive, rivalling those of film, and major actors such as Loretta Young and Ray Milland were recruited to TV.
4
Q
TV Advertising
A
- TV stations in the USA were, like radio, always commercial concerns and advertisers adapted to funding programming as readily as they had on radio.
- Sponsoring programmes such as The Colgate Comedy Hour and broadcasting adverts in between programmes, often competing to make theirs the most memorable and entertaining.
- Some programmes could generate income themselves – when Walt Disney launched his Davy Crockett series in 1955 it was accompanied by sales of $300,000 in tie-in merchandising.
5
Q
Youth Culture
A
- In 1950, 41.6% of the population was under 24 and, in 1960, 44.5%.
- Teenagers were increasingly seen as a discrete group with common interests and concerns.
- As a market developed to cater for their interests, they seemed to look and act differently to their parents.
6
Q
These changes were due to several factors
A
- Young people in the 1950s had far more money to spend than any previous generation of teenagers had had, and companies responded with new products specifically targeted towards them. In 1957, it was estimated that the average teenager had between $10 and $15 a week to spend, compared with 1–2 dollars in the 1940s. Teenagers’ annual spending power climbed from $10 billion in 1950 to $25 billion in 1959.
- Many teenagers were influenced by the youth films of the 1950s. Rebel Without a Cause was the first film to appeal specifically to a teenage audience. As such, it was also the first film to address the issue of a generation gap. The film made a cult hero of James Dean, the more so as he was killed in a car accident in 1955 aged only 24. Dean plays a character who rebels against his parents, even coming to blows with his father, and gets in trouble with the local police for drunkenness.
- The establishment of rock and roll music was a crucial development, for it gave teenagers music of their own to listen to, instead of having to listen to their parents’ type of music. The more parents disliked the new music, the more popular it was with teenagers. In 1956, Elvis Presley erupted onto the pop music scene, singing songs that broke all sales records, such as Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog. He was a phenomenal success with teenagers, while their parents and teachers deplored his sensual style of performing, his tight jeans and his permanent sneer.
- The increasing popularity of television also opened teenagers up to a new world that they did not know about. These new experiences that teenagers were having made them realise that they were their own person, and they could do their own thing if they wanted. They did not have to follow the same path as their parents.
7
Q
Teenage rebellion?
A
- However, there were increasing concerns that young people were out of control.
- Evidence was presented of gang fights, teenage drunkenness and disrespectful behaviour toward adults.
- In 1956, the number of murders carried out by teenagers in New York rose by 26% over the previous year.
- So-called experts from various academic disciplines, particularly psychology, argued that aberrant behaviour could be cured once the problem was recognised.
- They offered various explanations of delinquency.
- In 1954, psychologist Frederic Wertham published The Seduction of the Innocent, which exposed the violence and brutality of comic books that sold in their millions.
- After this, in fact, the content of comics was moderated but not before thirteen states passed laws regulating their publication, distribution and sale.
- Some experts offered the explanation of poor role models, particularly the depiction of rebellious behaviour in movies such as Laszlo Benedek’s The Wild One (1954) and Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
- The former is about a motorcycle gang who terrorise a sleepy town. When asked what he is rebelling against, their leader, played by Marlon Brando, answers, ‘What you got?’ It was argued that there was a link between violence and rebellion on the screen and in real life.
- Others argued that there were too many ‘latch-key’ kids whose parents were always out at work
exercised little control. The US Senate was so concerned that it held hearing on delinquent youth behaviour throughout the decade. - It should be remembered too, that one-half, of all male teenagers during the 1950s was conscripted [drafted] into the armed forces where discipline and traditional values were vigorously reinforced.
- Meanwhile the average age of marriage, young in 1940 at just 21.5 years, reduced even further in the 1950s 20.3 years; comparatively young women became housewives and mothers.
- While teenage rebellion was to become a much wider phenomenon as the decade progressed in the later 1960s, there were in the early years of the 1950s few real signs of its stirrings – certainly not in middle class white America.
8
Q
American 1950s Women
A
- The Second World War had mixed results for the position of women.
- They had shown they could do jobs that traditionally had been male-dominated.
- Four US states made equal pay for women compulsory, while other states tried to protect women from discrimination in their jobs.
- In 1940, women made up 19% of the workforce.
- This had risen to 28.8 per cent ten years later.
- Nevertheless, at the end of the war the majority of women willingly gave up their wartime jobs and returned to their role as mothers and wives and their traditional ‘female’ jobs.
9
Q
Stereotyping Women
A
- The media appeared to both create and develop the stereotype of women as homemakers.
- Commentators cite the many periodicals aimed at women such as Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s, full of articles on cooking, fashion, homecare and how to keep your husband happy.
- Dr Spock, whose hugely influential books on childcare sold over a million copies every year throughout the 1950s, emphasised the need for a mother’s presence and love.
- Adverts focused on the woman as housewife and mother.
- As with TV, the image the media portrayed was usually of white and middle-class women; working-class and ethnic minority women did not feature significantly.
- Many women’s magazines featured articles that emphasised the domestic role of women, although not all would go so far as Mrs Dale Carnegie, who asserted in McCall’s magazine in 1954 that there is ‘simply no room for split-level thinking – or doing – when Mr and Mrs set their sights on a happy home, a host of friends and a bright future through success in HIS job’.
10
Q
Women’s Reality
A
- The reality behind the stereotype may be more complex. While periodicals may have promoted a particular message, we have little idea how effectively they informed actual relationships.
- Writing in 2000, historian Nancy Walker has shown that even the persuasive view of the periodicals is simplistic.
- Ladies’ Home Journal, for example, ran a series of articles ‘How America lives’, which did show the wide ethnic and class mix.
- She argues that the periodicals reflected the complexities of life more than they reinforced stereotypes.
- The magazine Redbook, for example, ran a $500 prize competition in 1960 inviting readers to write on ‘Why You Feel Trapped’ and they received 24,000 entries.
- While many women may have accepted a largely domestic role, many others either did not or felt frustrated and unfulfilled by it.
- The seeds were being sown here for the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s.
11
Q
Women and Work
A
- Feminist Betty Friedan conducted research into the subsequent careers of former students of the exclusive all-female Smith College in 1957 and found that 89% were homemakers.
- However, we should remember that her well-educated, wealthy respondents were hardly typical of women in the USA.
- Despite the stereotype of women staying in the home, the percentage of women in the labour force did increase in the 1950s from 33.8% in 1950 to 37.8% by the end of the decade.
- Opportunities for jobs with career advancement prospects had not noticeably increased.
- Labor Unions did not generally favour women in the workforce – although they did support a campaign for better working conditions for waitresses.
- The biggest increase of women in work was among those who were married – from 36% in 1940 to 60% by 1960. This may have been necessary to help make ends meet.
- Writing in 1996, historian James T. Patterson has concluded that many women in the 1950s sought jobs more than careers, in order to supplement the family income.
- Clearly, however, this does not negate the effort many were prepared to make to rise in the profession of their choice.
- However, women who went out to work instead of getting married were treated with great suspicion by the rest of society.
- Indeed, one very influential book, Modern Woman: the Lost Sex, actually blamed many of the social problems of the 1950s, such as teenage drinking and delinquency, on career women.
- In the 1950s, growing numbers of women, especially from middle-class backgrounds, began to challenge their traditional role as they became increasingly frustrated with life as a housewife.
- There was more to life than bringing up children and looking after their husbands.
- Many female teenagers were strongly influenced by the greater freedom of the ‘swinging sixties’ which, in turn, encouraged them to challenge traditional attitudes and roles.
12
Q
Women’s Education
A
- Women were now much better educated so they could have a professional career.
- In 1950, there were 721,000 women at university. By 1960, this had reached 1.3 million.
- However, many of these had a very limited choice of career because, once they married, they were expected to devote their energies to their husband and children.
- Many became increasingly bored and frustrated with life as a suburban housewife.
