Gender And Culture in the 1950s

by Nelson, Deborah; Miller, Nancy K.; Katz, Cindi

• ISBN13: 9781558615120
• ISBN10: 1558615121
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-12-01
• Publisher: Feminist Pr

Summary

In the mainstream American imagination, the 1950s were an era of conformity when women strove to be perfect middle-class suburban housewives a la June Cleaver. But in reality, the 1950s were the decade of The Kinsey Report and The Bell Jar, of Cold War Communists and civil rights activism, and change for women. In this engaging collection, cultural commentators explore the 1950s from the centre to the margins -- from Norman Mailer to Peyton Place, from suburban porn to Patricia Highsmith, and from Soviet women to lesbians in post-Nazi Berlin. Fascinating reviews and interviews include Alicia Ostriker on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Diane Wood Middlebrook on Willem De Kooning, and Ivy Meeropol on her documentary about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Table of Contents

Editors' Note	8	(2)
Cindi Katz
Nancy K. Miller
Introduction	10	(14)
Deborah L. Nelson
PART I---ARTICLES
Liberal Antiliberalism: Mailer, O'Connor, and the Gender Politics of Middle-Class Ressentiment	24	(24)
Andrew Hoberek
The Accidental Blockbuster: Peyton Place in Literary and Institutional Context	48	(18)
Evan Brier
A Traveler in Residence: Maeve Brennan and the Last Days of New York	66	(24)
Ann Peters
Lost in Adaptation: Chicana History, the Cold War, and the Case of Josephina Niggli	90	(24)
William Orchard
Yolanda Padilla
Angels in the Home and at Work: Russian Women in the Khrushchev Years	114	(24)
Natasha Kolchevska
Mexico in the Fifties: Women and Church in Holy Alliance	138	(23)
Soledad Loaeza
A New Kind of Missionary Work: Christians, Christian Americanists, and the Adoption of Korean GI Babies, 1955--1961	161	(28)
Arissa Oh
Stronger, Smarter, and Less Queer: ``The White Negro'' and Mailer's Third Man	189	(26)
Frederick Whiting
Patriotic Perversions: Patricia Highsmith's Queer Vision of Cold War America in The Price of Salt, The Blunderer, and Deep Water	215	(19)
Victoria Hesford
American Iconoclast: Carmen Jones and the Revolutionary Divadom of Dorothy Dandridge	234	(16)
Tiffany Gilbert
PART II---ARTS AND ARCHIVES
Fragments and Past Lives	250	(11)
Lorie Novak
``The Game Show'': An Excerpt from BOOMING: A Millennial Memoir	261	(24)
Alice Jardine
Kinsey, Sex Research, and the Body of Knowledge: Let's Talk About Sex	285	(29)
Karen Winkler
The Chicago Poetry Group: African American Art and High Modernism at Midcentury	314	(10)
Lubna Najar
Fifty Years After	324	(10)
Paula Rabinowitz
PART III---FEMINIST CLASSICS: FEATURING MIRRA KOMAROVSKY
When Sex Became Gender: Mirra Komarovsky's Feminism of the 1950s	334	(22)
Shira Tarrant
Mirra Komarovsky: Another Appreciation	356	(9)
Natalie Boymel Kampen
PART IV---REVIEWS
Review: Our Kind: A Novel in Stories, by Kate Walbert	365	(4)
Rachel M. Brownstein
Ariel and After. Review: Ariel: The Restored Edition, by Sylvia Plath with a foreword by Frieda Hughes and Her Husband: Hughes and Plath---A Marriage by Diane Middlebrook	369	(7)
Alicia Ostriker
Review: Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit, by David Castronovo	376	(6)
Sarah Glazer
What Did the Women Want? Review: De Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan	382	(10)
Diane Middlebrook
Review: Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945--1961, by Christina Klein, and American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947--1962, by Bruce McConachie	392	(7)
Stacy Wolf
PART V---ALERTS AND PROVOCATIONS: A FEMINIST PUBLIC SPHERE FOR DEBATE AND ACTION
Academic Frostbite (A Cautionary Tale)	399
Anahid Kassabian