What We Really Miss About the 1950's

What We Really Miss About the 1950’s was a very different analysis of the 1950’s. Stephanie Coontz points out the things we actually miss about the 50’s while shedding some light on some of the myths concerning the social status of America. I admit that when I first began reading this essay, part of me wondered what there was not to miss about this decade. It seemed like such a simple time. Images of immaculate cookie cutter homes in quiet suburban neighbor hoods came to my mind. Shows like Leave it to Beaver depict what I imagined every home being like. Before reading this essay I felt the same sense of nostalgia Coontz writes about most American’s feeling. Stephanie Coontz points out that it really was a good time for a lot of Americans. It was a time of change and prosperity in the face of all the social problems of the 30’s and 40’s. She also points out that not everything of the 1950’s was all that we tend to think it was.

I was shocked to learn, for example, that “teenage birth rates were almost twice as high in 1957 as in the 1990’s”. Although Coontz points out that most of those births were between married couples and that having a baby instead of furthering a career wouldn’t make life as difficult as it would today. This is probably because there were a lot more jobs available for people without a college degree. There were much clearer gender/familiar rolls. This on one hand made for less complexity amongst families. The perfect nuclear family where the father of the house hold was the bread winner, while the woman was the perfect little home maker. On the other hand, this put a lot of pressure on both men and women to fit into a mold. This The idea of fitting into this social norm was intensified by the influence of TV shows like Leave It to Beaver and Father Know Best. These TV shows acted, as Coontz puts it, like “advertisements, etiquette manuals, and how-to lessons”. This idea was also brought up in our last reading where Gary Soto tried to get his family to behave like the family depicted on Father Knows Best. These families were usually white, wealthy, and perfect. No one expected their family to act like the families from these sitcoms but they were what people would often compare themselves and others too. This idea of keeping up with the Jones’s kept the neighborhoods beautiful and seemed to keep families together. After all divorce rates were low and there were a lot of babies being born. The question is, did these families stay together for the right reasons?

The 50’s aren’t considered such a happy period for nothing. There were indeed a lot of things that were happening then we wouldn’t love to have now. It was a time when families stayed together, when work productivity lead to better pay; it was a time when a person did not have to go to a college to be successful. On the flip side, It was also a time of inequality, A time when peace and prosperity was achieved by discrimination and ignorance. Stephanie Coontz reminds us that things weren’t quite as perfect as they seemed.