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Essay on From Front Porch to Back Seat
Much of the angst in middle-class American culture of the 1950s was felt, and expressed by, men and was a gender-specific problem, related to masculine patterns of home and work life. Historian Beth Bailey (1988) writes that many middle-class men of the 1950s felt a loss of authority, of active "manhood," in the changeover from production-oriented to service oriented industry: “In the postwar era, Americans were coming to grips with changes in their economy and society that, they feared, had rendered "traditional" masculinity obsolete and threatened the vitality of American culture. In the world of the corporation, the "organization," men needed different qualities to succeed. Teamwork, conformity, cooperation, the "social ethic" -- these were functional behaviors -- the antithesis of aggressive masculinity. To continue to provide well for his family, many feared, a man would have to act like a woman.
We live, in this respect as in so many others, in utterly novel and unprecedented times. Until what seems like only yesterday, young people were groomed for marriage, and the paths leading to it were culturally well set out, at least in rough outline. In polite society, at the beginning of this century, our grandfathers came a-calling and a-wooing at the homes of our grandmothers, under conditions set by the woman, operating from strength on her own turf.
A generation later, courting couples began to go out on "dates," in public and increasingly on the man's terms, given that he had the income to pay for dinner and dancing. To be sure, some people "played the field," and, in the pre-war years, dating on college campuses became a matter more of proving popularity than of proving suitability for marriage.....
