Document 2
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (excerpt), 1963
The problem…was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the US. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children…lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“is this all?”…
In the 15 years after WWII this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished…core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their station-wagons full of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day…Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions…
Document 3
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, 1957
Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety--leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest--Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie--Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can't feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy get-out phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.Stranger flowers yet--for as the Negro alto mused over everyone's head with dignity, the young, tall, slender, blond kid from Curtis Street, Denver, jeans and studded belt, sucked on his mouthpiece while waiting for the others to finish; and when they did he started, and you had to look around to see where the solo was coming from, for it came from angelical smiling lips upon the mouthpiece and it was a soft, sweet, fairy-tale solo on an alto. Lonely as America, a throatpierced sound in the night.
Document 4
Howl by Allen Ginsberg, 1955
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan
angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the skull ...
Document 5
Historian Alice Kessler-Harris (Modified)Out To Work, 2003, 301.
At first glance, the 1950s was a decade of the family…But already the family was flashing warning signals…Homes and cars, refrigerators and washing machines, telephones and multiple televisions required higher incomes…The two-income family emerged. In 1950, wives earned wages in only 21.6% of all families. By 1960, 30.5% of wives worked for wages. And that figure would continue to increase. Full and part-time working wives contributed about 26% of the total family income.
Document 6
Mexican Americans Caught in a “Witch Hunt” by Zaragosa Vargas, 2016 Published by Oregon State University
During the 1950s, the “decade of the wetback,” the number of illegals coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent. “To many activists, cheap labor displaced native workers, increased labor law violations and discrimination, and encouraged racist public discourse about illegal aliens and the rise in crime, disease, and other social ills. Mexican Americans greatly feared that the influx of workers from Mexico would endanger their marginal foothold in America.”
Document 7
How the Suburbs Changed America by Ben Wattenberg in The First Measured Century,2015.
Again, the GI bill was a key part of the solution. It allowed veterans to buy a home with no money down. What's more, it guaranteed the loans, removing the risk for lenders. In a housing boom to end all housing booms, builders responded. Lakewood, California, 15 miles south of Los Angeles, in 1950 this was called the fastest-growing housing development in the world. On one day, 100 homes were sold in one hour. Builders here started 50 houses a day. Cement trucks waited in a mile-long line to pour foundations for low-cost housing. Within just three years, the empty farm land around Lakewood had grown to a city of 90,000 people. Nationwide, housing starts soared from a low of only one per 1,000 people in the war year of 1944 to a high of 12 per 1,000 in 1950, a number not equaled since.
By 1950, the same assembly-line methods that had turned out an airplane every five minutes during the war were used to build almost four new houses per minute.