Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties

Description

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She 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, Littauer 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. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 12 INTRODUCTION: What Are We Waiting For?......Page 18 CHAPTER ONE: Victory Girls: Sex, Mobility, and Adventure on the Home Front......Page 35 CHAPTER TWO: B-Girls: Soliciting Drinks and Negotiating Sex in Mid-Century Bars......Page 69 CHAPTER THREE: Tearing Off the Veil: Women and Girls Respond to the Kinsey Reports......Page 98 CHAPTER FOUR: Going Steady: Permissiveness, Petting, and Premarital Sex in the 1950s......Page 128 CHAPTER FIVE: Someone to Love: Teenage Girls, Queer Desire, and Contested Meanings of Immaturity in the 1950s......Page 160 CONCLUSION: Feminist Sexual Futures......Page 191 Notes......Page 202 Bibliography......Page 246 B......Page 268 D......Page 269 G......Page 270 K......Page 271 M......Page 272 P......Page 273 S......Page 274 U......Page 275 Z......Page 276