Download or read book Daily Life of Women in Postwar America written by Nancy Hendricks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-02-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Beatniks to Sputnik and from Princess Grace to Peyton Place, this book illuminates the female half of the U.S. population as they entered a "brave new world" that revolutionized women's lives. After World War II, the United States was the strongest, most powerful nation in the world. Life was safe and secure—but many women were unhappy with their lives. What was going on behind the closed doors of America's "picture-perfect" houses? This volume includes chapters on the domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious lives of the average American woman after World War II. Chapters examine topics such as the entertainment industry's evolving concept of womanhood; Supreme Court decisions; the shifting idea of women and careers; advertising; rural, urban, and suburban life; issues women of color faced; and child rearing and other domestic responsibilities. A timeline of important events and glossary help to round out the text, along with further readings and a bibliography to point readers to additional resources for their research. Ideal for students in high school and college, this volume provides an important look at the revolutionary transformation of women's lives in the decades following World War II.

Download or read book A Jewish Feminine Mystique written by Hasia R. Diner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shira Kohn and Rachel Kranson are doctoral candidates in New York University's joint Ph. D. program in history and Hebrew and Judaic studies --Book Jacket.

Download or read book Make Room for TV written by Lynn Spigel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-06 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1948 and 1955, nearly two-thirds of all American families bought a television set—and a revolution in social life and popular culture was launched. In this fascinating book, Lynn Spigel chronicles the enormous impact of television in the formative years of the new medium: how, over the course of a single decade, television became an intimate part of everyday life. What did Americans expect from it? What effects did the new daily ritual of watching television have on children? Was television welcomed as an unprecedented "window on the world," or as a "one-eyed monster" that would disrupt households and corrupt children? Drawing on an ambitious array of unconventional sources, from sitcom scripts to articles and advertisements in women's magazines, Spigel offers the fullest available account of the popular response to television in the postwar years. She chronicles the role of television as a focus for evolving debates on issues ranging from the ideal of the perfect family and changes in women's role within the household to new uses of domestic space. The arrival of television did more than turn the living room into a private theater: it offered a national stage on which to play out and resolve conflicts about the way Americans should live. Spigel chronicles this lively and contentious debate as it took place in the popular media. Of particular interest is her treatment of the way in which the phenomenon of television itself was constantly deliberated—from how programs should be watched to where the set was placed to whether Mom, Dad, or kids should control the dial. Make Room for TV combines a powerful analysis of the growth of electronic culture with a nuanced social history of family life in postwar America, offering a provocative glimpse of the way television became the mirror of so many of America's hopes and fears and dreams.

Download or read book A Consumers Republic written by Lizabeth Cohen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.

Download or read book The Unwomanly Face of War written by Светлана Алексиевич and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published in Russian as U voiny--ne zhenskoe lietiso by Mastatskaya Litaratura, Minsk, in 1985. Originally published in English as War's unwomanly face by Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1988"--Title page verso.

Download or read book The Origins of Cool in Postwar America written by Joel Dinerstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.

Download or read book In the Name of National Security written by Robert J. Corber and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993-10-20 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Name of National Security exposes the ways in which the films of Alfred Hitchcock, in conjunction with liberal intellectuals and political figures of the 1950s, fostered homophobia so as to politicize issues of gender in the United States. As Corber shows, throughout the 1950s a cast of mind known as the Cold War consensus prevailed in the United States. Promoted by Cold War liberals--that is, liberals who wanted to perserve the legacies of the New Deal but also wished to separate liberalism from a Communist-dominated cultural politics--this consensus was grounded in the perceived threat that Communists, lesbians, and homosexuals posed to national security. Through an analysis of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, combined with new research on the historical context in which these films were produced, Corber shows how Cold War liberals tried to contain the increasing heterogeneity of American society by linking questions of gender and sexual identity directly to issues of national security, a strategic move that the films of Hitchcock both legitimated and at times undermined. Drawing on psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, Corber looks at such films as Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho to show how Hitchcock manipulated viewers' attachments and identifications to foster and reinforce the relationship between homophobia and national security issues. A revisionary account of Hitchcock's major works, In the Name of National Security is also of great interest for what it reveals about the construction of political "reality" in American history.

Download or read book Women of the Republic written by Linda K. Kerber and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. "I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government," wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right. Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice? When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuing health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of "Republican Motherhood" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not.

Download or read book Flappers and the New American Woman written by Catherine Gourley and published by Twenty-First Century Books. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the symbols that defined perceptions of women during the late 1910s and 1920s and how they changed women's role in society.

Download or read book America Day by Day written by Simone de Beauvoir and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of 1940s America by a French writer, eg. "The constipated girl smiles a loving smile at the lemon juice that relieves her intestines. In the subway, in the streets, on magazine pages, these smiles pursue me like obsessions. I read on a sign in a drugstore, 'Not to grin is a sin.' Everyone obeys the order, the system. 'Cheer up! Take it easy.' Optimism is necessary for the country's social peace and economic prosperity."

Download or read book Ambiguous Transitions written by Jill Massino and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.

Download or read book A History of the Book in America written by David Paul Nord and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier. The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business of bookselling. The histories of government publishing, law and policy, the periodical press, literary criticism, and reading--in settings such as schools, libraries, book clubs, self-help programs, and collectors' societies--receive imaginative scrutiny as well. The Enduring Book demonstrates that the corporate consolidations of the last half-century have left space for the independent publisher, that multiplicity continues to define American print culture, and that even in the digital age, the book endures. Contributors: David Abrahamson, Northwestern University James L. Baughman, University of Wisconsin-Madison Kenneth Cmiel (d. 2006) James Danky, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert DeMaria Jr., Vassar College Donald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert W. Frase (d. 2003) Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School John B. Hench, American Antiquarian Society Patrick Henry, New York City College of Technology Dan Lacy (d. 2001) Marshall Leaffer, Indiana University Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University Elizabeth Long, Rice University Beth Luey, Arizona State University Tom McCarthy, Beirut, Lebanon Laura J. Miller, Brandeis University Priscilla Coit Murphy, Chapel Hill, N.C. David Paul Nord, Indiana University Carol Polsgrove, Indiana University David Reinking, Clemson University Jane Rhodes, Macalester College John V. Richardson Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University Linda Scott, University of Oxford Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press Ilan Stavans, Amherst College Harvey M. Teres, Syracuse University John B. Thompson, University of Cambridge Trysh Travis, University of Florida Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University

Download or read book Uncontained written by Elizabeth A. Wheeler and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the post-war era, American urban fiction was dominated by the imagery of containment. This book offers a critique of this familiar story, evident in the noir narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote and others.

Download or read book Daily Life in the United States 1940 1959 written by Eugenia Kaledin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2000-09-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examine the everyday lives of ordinary Americans from the 1940s and 1950s and discover how very different the two decades were. World War II affected Americans and the way they behaved, not only in the 1940s, but also in the years that followed when the depression that preceded the war was replaced with an economic boom. Explore how women's roles and lives changed during these two very distinct decades, how politics and political decisions impacted all walks of life, and what the advent of growing technology, much of it developed during the war, meant to the general population. What was it like to be a woman suddenly earning her own money while men were off fighting? How did children and teenagers contribute to the war effort? How did housing change in postwar America? What pastimes were popular during these two decades and how did they reflect the times? These questions and others are explored in detail, encouraging students, teachers, and interested readers to recognize the tremendous shift in society between the war years and the atomic age that immediately followed. This text presents the 1940s as a time of social problems that existed alongside community commitment to the war, while the 1950s are presented as a time when exciting social change such as the beginning of the civil rights movement and the building of Levittowns occurred. After the war ordinary people began to question long-accepted ideas. The exploration of these everyday details provides a rich look at two very important decades in our country's history.

Download or read book Daily Life in 1950s America written by Nancy Hendricks and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2019-02-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing the era firmly within the American experience, this reference illuminates what daily life was really like in the 1950s, including for people from the "Other America"—those outside the prosperous, white middle class. 'Daily Life in 1950s America shows that the era was anything but uneventful. Apart from revolutionary changes during the decade itself, it was in the 1950s that the seeds took root for the social turmoil of the 1960s and the technological world of today. The book's interdisciplinary format looks at the domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious life of average Americans. Readers can look at sections separately according to their interests or classroom assignment, or can read them as an ongoing narrative. By entering the homes of average Americans, far from the corridors of power, we can make sense of the 1950s and see how the headlines of the era translated into their daily lives. This readable and informative book is ideal for anyone interested in this formative decade in American life. Well-researched factual material is presented in an engaging way, along with lively sidebars to humanize each section. It is unique in blending the history, popular culture, and sociology of American daily life, including those of Americans who were not white, middle class, and prosperous.

Download or read book Women at the Front written by Jane E. Schultz and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront. Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves. Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.

Download or read book Replaceable You written by David Serlin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, the United States underwent a massive cultural transformation that was vividly realized in the development and widespread use of new medical technologies. Plastic surgery, wonder drugs, artificial organs, and prosthetics inspired Americans to believe in a new age of modern medical miracles. The nationalistic pride that flourished in postwar society, meanwhile, encouraged many Americans to put tremendous faith in the power of medicine to rehabilitate and otherwise transform the lives and bodies of the disabled and those considered abnormal. Replaceable You revisits this heady era in American history to consider how these medical technologies and procedures were used to advance the politics of conformity during the 1950s.