1950’s Youth Culture
Youth culture in the nineteen fifties was a time that opened up the world to be integrated for whites and blacks. In this paper the fifties are analyzed through the clothing, styles, cars, family life, and most importantly entertainment.
Talking to various members of my family I asked them if they could remember the way that the youth dressed in the nineteen- fifties. The responses were all similar. The popular man role wore tight white T- shirts which were described to me (I hate this expression)as ‘Guinea T’s.’ These are white T- shirts in which the manufacturer cut- off the sleeves. Also regular white T- shirts were worn with one sleeve rolled up with a pack of cigarettes. When I talked to a man in my neighborhood, John Braggs, he explained to me that the modern style of wearing your pants low on your hips actually began in the fifties. He said that they wore tight jeans that were pulled down low at the waist with of course a tight white T- shirt tucked in. "I don’t know where y’all started wearen’ ‘em so baggy from, but I don’t like it," he shouted in his southern accent. The females were not as revealing as the modern women are. Longer dresses and dressier shirts were their style. The ‘Beatnik’! generation was forming out of Grenitch village in Manhattan which the style was more of a depressing look. They wore mostly black or darker colors. I watched a movie called ‘The Wanderers’ to try to take a look at how they dressed and the portrayal was what I just described.
The type of children that the fifties brought out was a common question I asked everyone I surveyed, and to tell you the truth they were not all that much help. There were the popular crowd who were ‘Greaser’ types. The Greaser boys were the bad boys, they spawned off of the rebellious biker gang called the ‘Hell’s Angel’s.’ This group was a bike gang who rebelled against the norm of society. Society tried to keep the children innocent instead of letting them have fun. The Greaser style spawned off of this belief. I watched the movie "Grease" to see how teenage Greasers lived and where they hung out.
Places like the drive- in movie theater or the soda pop stand. Another big style was that of the surfers on the west coast and in Hawaii. The sport became open to the public for the first time in this decade. Everyone had a surfboard, or should I say a pier.
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... lady. Her name was Pat Lin and she was a playwright in Washington and New York. When I started asking her a questions about the paper she gave me a shocking theory I would never have thought of. Elvis started the Civil Rights movement was what it came down to. During the fifties blacks and whites were in two different societies.
All of a sudden a white man came along who sounded and danced like a black man. This man was Elvis, he turned the white community on to his music which at the time sounded like music from the black society. The fad for the ‘black culture’ kept growing. TV shows like the "Ed Sullivan Show" and Dick Clarks "American Bandstand" began showing an integrated style of television. This is where people started seeing a problem, black culture was for the first time ever being shown to white families. Black people were beginning to be shown as equal members within the white society.
When this paper was started I did not believe that the fifties was a decade of any real importance. It is being forgotten as the generations get older. Learning about the decade where rebellion took over the society was one of the best things I could have done to enhance my mind.
The 1960’s changed the world in an explosion of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, for the first time women and men where declaring freedom and free love. The sexual revolution of the 1960’s saw changes in the way the world saw its self, and the way we saw each other. It changed what we wanted to buy, how we bought it and how we sold it to each other. Artistic free thinkers began to push boundaries everywhere they could. This is reflected in the music of the times, the notable events and the fashion.
New fashions were surfacing in both men’s and women’s fashions. Men were wearing Bermuda pants, baggy pants that were cut off at the knee, while women were wearing capris, tight pants that cut off just below the knee. Men were wearing tailored jackets and making a slight move towards the casual dress of today’s workplace. Women were wearing natural shoulders as opposed to the heavily padded ones of the war years. Flat, neck-hugging collars replaced the mannish collars of the late 1940’s. Waists were tightly fitted and skirts were long (Melinkoff 46). The jeans of the time were often lined with plaid flanel and dungarees were worn to the most casual occasions. The sandals of the fifties were not much different than the sandals of today.
The 1950s seemed like a perfect decade. The rise of suburbs outside cities led to an expansion of the middle class, thus allowing more Americans to enjoy the luxuries of life. The rise of these suburbs also allowed the middle class to buy houses with land that used to only be owned by more wealthy inhabitants. Towns like Levittown-one of the first suburbs- were divided in such a way that every house looked the same (“Family Structures”). Any imperfections were looked upon as unfavorable to the community as a whole. Due to these values, people today think of the 1950s as a clean cut and model decade. This is a simplistic perception because underneath the surface, events that took place outside the United States actually had a direct effect on our own country’s history. The rise of Communism in Russia struck fear into the hearts of the American people because it seemed to challenge their supposedly superior way of life.
Stephanie Coontz's essay `What we really miss about the 1950's' is an essay that talks about a poll taken in 1996 by the Knight-Ridder news agency that more Americans preferred 1950's as the best decade for children to grow up. Coontz doesn't believe that it is a decade for people to remember fondly about, except for financial reasons and better communication within families. Coontz doesn't believe in it as the best decade because of the votes, the 50's only won by nine percent, and especially not by African Americans. Examples from family and financial issues in the 50's that makes it better than other decades from 20's to 80's. She doesn't believe that the 50's should be taken `literally' because from 50's there were changes in values that caused racism, sexism discrimination against women. Even though the 50's were good, it didn't lead to a better 60, 70, and 80.
Being that African Americans were if not just getting their foot in the door as being looked at as human and beginning to be accepted in U.S. society at that time. Executives in the recording industry encouraged white artists attempt to replicate the sound of popular black musicians for profit. This resulted in music like rock-n-roll that is largely associated with whites and the African American pioneers who laid down the foundation for the music are forgotten or better yet not even heard of. Cultural appropriation is still remains a concern even
During the post WWII period in America, the face of the nation changed greatly under the presidency of Truman and Eisenhower. America underwent another era of good feelings as they thought themselves undefeatable and superior over the rest of the world. Communism was the American enemy and American sought to rid the world of it. Because of the extreme paranoia caused by Communism, conformity became an ideal way to distinguish American Culture from the rest. Conformity became a part of every American Life to a large extent. It became evident through the medium of culture, society and politics throughout the era of the 50s.
It became less about the outwardly racist and degrading stereotypes and became more about black artists being pushed to the side with their work covered by white artists. The most obvious example is the Rock N Roll revolution. Rock N Roll was marketed to teenagers as a way to command attention and was seen as a way of rebellion: Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips and abundance of sex appeal at the forefront. There is no doubt that Elvis Presley was a great performer and arguably the first real rock star. He was able to command a stage and have a room full of women scream at the top of their lungs with just one note. Doesn’t mean that he all those notes were his. For instance, Hound Dog, one of Elvis’s most recognizable songs was also a cover. The original artist, Big Mama Thornton, wrote the song in… and never got to see her version reach a fraction of the fame Elvis’s did. In fact “as to her royalties she says, “I got one check for $500 and I never seen another. (235)” Elvis’s version of Hound Dog sold roughly 2 million
...f the fittest in the Quarter to show an exaggerated microcosm of the prevalence of the principle in life around the world. The Quarter, like anywhere else in the world, is an environment that demands certain traits to survive. The importance of these traits varies from environment to environment, but in any environment, an organism that has optimal traits will win out over one that does not. In Streetcar, the environment dictates that sexual and animalistic traits are the most desirable forms of adaptation. Thanks to his adaptations, Stanley survives and prospers in the Quarter, despite having direct competition from Blanche, who is more evolved than him. Tennessee Williams uses Stanley’s survival in contrast with Blanche’s downfall to show that environment-specific adaptations can be more important than one’s overall level of advancement in the evolutionary chain.
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 is an act that was passed that clearly states that employers can’t be discriminate against someone based on their age 40 and older. The older adults are trying so hard to hold onto their jobs with dear life, because if not they will be nudged out and pushed aside. Not because of anything but rather because of their age. Age discrimination is on the rise as young as 50 years old. Age discrimination can happen to anyone regardless of your race, ethnic backgrounds or sexual orientation. A study was published in the Journal of Age Ageing and in the report it said that British People 50 years old and older faces discrimination about one third of them. In a resent survey older adults says job insecurity
Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967, as amended, protects workers age forty and over in hiring, promotion, and termination decisions. This project is going to analyze the ADEA and its amendment in terms of effectiveness, ineffectiveness, and influence which will be demonstrated by employment cases, research data. The project shows that the ADEA is not as effective as it suppose to be and its purpose of prohibiting age discrimination has not been implemented efficiently in workforce. The ADEA somewhat has enabled Americans work longer, however, it might not be the best
The nineteen fifties was a decade of prosperous times in America, but the average lifestyle of an American seemed extremely dull. The average American conformed to social norms, most Americans in the nineteen fifties dressed alike, talked the same way, and seemed to have the same types of personality. Music is what started to change the conformist lifestyle in America. Teenagers started to rebellion against their families by listening to Rock-n-Roll...
In 1967, a law was passed called the “Age Discrimination Employment Act”. The law simply means that an employer may not discriminate someone in any way due to their age. So often you hear of someone not getting a job because they are too young or even too old. Employers think that if someone is young they might not have the experience or maturity for certain positions, which may not always be the case. On the other hand, if a potential candidate for employment is older, a company might not want to hire them because they know that the person may be retiring soon. Take a look at the lawsuit against Radio Shack in 2007. David Nelson, then 55, had been employed for over 25 years when RadioShack assigned a new, 43-year-old regional manager to supervise him. Within four months of the new supervisor’s arrival, Nelson, who had a 25-year spotless performance record, was placed on two performance improvement plans (United States). Nelson, believing that he was being discriminated against by his new supervisor because of his age, complained to the human resources department. According to the complaint, within five days, before the allotted time for improvement was over, RadioShack terminated Nelson in retaliation for his complaint of discrimination (United
Third there is changes over time, “They must navigate the changing dimensions of available opportunities to commit their deviance, evolving technologies that can enable and catch them, their relationships within deviant communities…”(Adler, 2012, p. 523). I applied this to my study by looking at my participants who started smoke in high school and before, and how they had to adapt their smoking to each new location. My on participant who smoke when he was 12, only did it occasionally with his sister, then once in high school he learned that smoking with his friends was entertaining and fun, once he learned how he could be productive while high he started smoking more by himself, Then finally when he went to college, he still smokes at parties and by himself, but he also found that he could smoke and hangout with his roommate who doesn’t smoke and it be just as enjoyable. As he grew in his life and the opportunities for him changed from just with his sister, to his friends, then to just by himself, the way he participated in his deviance
Moreover, it also was a remarkable change with dressing styles under the circle of mini to maxi. Generally, in the 60s people’s dressing was stilted, unattractive and confined (Tracy Tolkien, 2002). However, young people experienced the highest incomes period after the Second World War. Therefore, they began to put more attention outside the basic human supply.... ...
...and the knowledge we learn from our own experiences. In this way, all human life has meaning that we create ourselves. I believe there is one holy God and that He has created the universe and all of us but ultimately, we are responsible for our own decisions and actions. There are still so many questions to be answered or looked at differently to gain understanding. I think that it is a human right and passage to spend our lives sorting through our perceptions, experiences, and advice to gain a sense of what is true about the universe and how we relate to this universe. Our humanity comes from the ability to experience the world like a story; finding beginnings, patterns, arcs, character development and endings. I hope, someday, I am able to experience and understand everything I wish to but there is always room for plot twists in any story and mine is no different.