Nostalgia In The 1950's

Honey, I’m home! The image brought up in most Americans heads when thinking about the 1950s included pastel color schemed houses, sunny lanes, friendly neighbors, and smiling, apron-clad wives. During most of American history, and especially during the 1950s, women were faced with social pressures to remain as the house keeper and raise the children, an essential position in the typical nuclear family. This tenacious stereotype created the idea of the “ideal woman” to give women a clear picture of what they were supposed to imitate as their proper role in society. Thus, the nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s is in part for the secure and happy nuclear families and spawns from “the memories of a particular group of Americans who have exercised

Levin states that “The objects and the flavor of our national nostalgia are not random” (Levin 24) and that the “baby boomers now utterly dominate our understanding of America’s postwar history, and in a very peculiar way” (Levin 25). Many of the baby-boomers, now in their fifties are finding themselves in an unfamiliar situation and that the world was “becoming less and less his own” (Levin 26). The world has drastically changed in many aspects, politically, economically, and culturally since the 1950s and 1960s and in many ways deviated from the norms which has allowed the baby boomers to be safe, comfortable and secure in all of the qualities previously listed. The loss of these values causes the baby boomers to try and do anything within their power to revert back to the times in which they consider to be the golden age. The demographic and economic power the baby boomers hold allow them to dominate our political landscape and thus, in essence, force their own idealized version of nostalgia on to the rest of the American public. Levin goes on to argue that as a result of the baby boomers longing for the past, “younger Americans so often find themselves reenacting memories they do not actually possess, and why our nation increasingly behaves like a retiree” (27). David in Pleasantville can be used as a case study to challenge and complicate Levin’s argument in that David is nostalgic for the past not because of the dominance of the baby boomers, but because of his own