Masculinity In The 1950s Essay

For young males in 1950s America, masculinity would be identifiable through “the shape of a man’s body,” in particular the “size of the waistline.” Physical prowess became a worry as traditional male jobs for the middle-class shifting into white-collar offices where physical exertion was a remote possibility. An individual worry of physical weight in the 1950s stemmed from societal concerns taught from the American government. Presidential administrations such as Kennedy and Eisenhower, had “fitness crusades” that emphasized to the American public that active lifestyles were a patriotic achievement, especially for young men whose potential lives as future soldiers in the Cold War necessitated peak prowess for a better American military. The

Cold War and apprehensions concerning it fueled much of the decades “cultural anxieties” concerning its relation to masculinity, as individual maleness faded in the light of the atomic bomb and its capabilities. American men were publically urged for fitness, a cultural project that influenced the emergence of Public Service Announcements, portraying proper behaviors for young men and women both through sometime overdramatic portrayals of drugs, sexual predators, and even morally loose behavior such as pre-martial sex. The need for a defined men’s place in the 1950s also fueled sociologists, whose concepts of social norms became rocked through new studies on sexuality.
The filed of sociology in the 1950s focused primarily on the place of men in society and the key characteristics that defined men, who they feared held a “gender failure,” and the Kinsey Report that detailed “revelations about homosexuality” that brought fears of sexual deviant behavior to the American consciousness for much of the decade; a panic of “sex-crimes” that government officials and psychiatrists believed originated from failure within the family.

An oft unrecognized phenomena is that men too heard the “call for domesticity,” as social scientists and other “experts” wanted men to “play a greater role” within households, to gain a more influential and physical presence for their children alongside the continual role as head of the family. Men were urged to “partake in raising children,” that the domestic sphere should not be held entirely by the mother of the household. This was wholly in fear of the “overbearing” female figure creating “effeminate” sons that would then engage in sex-crimes such as homosexuality; such thought processes led family professionals to urge more fatherly influence in the life at home. Yet this “posed a dilemma” within fathers, as a balance between “work and home demands” grew more difficult to manage as focusing on the family would lower potential income and thus social status, while attention to career could neglect the children into deviant behaviors. Such contradictory messages in the 1950s were gladly received yet unable to properly be executed, and frustration built under the veneer of traditional American nuclear family until the 1960s, when divorce rates dramatically rose, proving the traditional family mores of the era as incapable of true implementation in any true American lifestyle. And when traditional authorities would not recognize this, the youth culture of the decade implemented one of the first true counter culture movements in

America.
Within American life from the 1920s to the 1960s, young men and women grew from generation to generation changing their perspectives on what their gendered roles and norms of behavior were. Through the technology and key events through the years, as well as in response to the past lives of their parents, men and women established behaviors, new norms of American culture, until their children in turn grew to do the same. Overarching the entire period of 1920 through 1960, however, is the belief of youth culture settling down into traditional families and gaining material symbols of success. Not until the advent of the 1960s did a permanent counter culture that expressly rejected the norms of not only the previous generation, but the current youth culture as well, truly emerge into permanence. Through the decades of the 20th century in America, gender performance typically in every generation was of one prominent type, though other smaller subculture did flourish. The 1960s, with its wholesale rejection of American nuclear family, established dual youth culture in contrast to one another, with one culture gaining popularity over another as time passes, a system that continues into the 21st century.