Australian Youth Culture

between having a relationship, or having a career, and subsequently more women entered the workforce.

Throughout the 1950s women were restricted, and confined to marriage and the home. Education for females was nearly unheard of, and frowned upon after a certain extent. Women in the workplace were treated with contempt, discriminated against and often sexually harassed. Pay was unequal, as was the prospect of promotions. However, the rise of Australian feminism in the 1960s significantly undermined legal and social barriers that made women the 'second sex '. Australian women in the 1960’s achieved the elimination of discriminatory practices such as lower pay for female workers, and discrimination against women on the basis of their marital

During the 1950s, Australian youth culture took its lead from America, in movies, music and popular culture. Young Australians grasped American concepts such as rock ‘n’ roll, American popular artists such as Elvis Presley and ‘rocker’ fashion modeled after Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Young Australians in the 1960s were responsible for branding the entire decade as one for the fight for racial equality, birth of the hippies, and political

It was the beginning of actual “teenagers”. The first Australian subculture that developed in the post-World War Two period was that of the ‘bodgies’ (and their female counterparts ‘widgies’, who modeled themselves based on the Americans who had frequented Australia during the War. Bodgies took on the ‘James Dean look’, after the young American actor who became a cultural icon of teenage disillusionment. This led to them being seen as the cause of teenage delinquency, violent, destructive and antisocial, and in the latter half of the 1950s, apprehension that teenage delinquency was becoming more and more frequent soon reached a crescendo. A ‘moral panic’ went throughout the Australian community, as more sensationalist media reports fueled the opinion that many Australian youth were out of control. Some promoted punishments such as sending them “to sea under a tough [navy] skipper” (Perth Daily News, 16/10, 1957). The social climate of the 1950s didn’t help the community paranoia, as many lived in fear of a nuclear World War. At the time, two thirds of Australian adults believed peace could not, and would not last beyond 1958. For the elderly, who had lived through the Great Depression and World War Two, the rebelliousness of these teenagers was treacherous. Youth were, after all, the hope for creating a different world, and the Australian youth of the 1950s did not instill much hope in the Australian