Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer’s Mountain, and Post-war America

Reviewed by: Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America by Rachel Kranson Kathleen A. Laughlin (bio) Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America. By Rachel Kranson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 232 pp. Rachel Kranson’s engaging cultural history of Jewish life in postwar America complements revisionist histories of the postwar years that interrogate the notion that the 1950s was an idyllic time characterized by an easy conformity and uncritical ideological consensus. She carefully [End Page 584] explores the underlying tensions within the upwardly mobile Jewish community, which eventually contributed to the emergence of a Jewish counterculture in the late 1960s and 1970s. In a search for authenticity, when an increasing number of Jews were joining the ranks of the suburban middle class, postwar Jewish thought leaders romanticized a Jewish cultural life shaped by social isolation and economic vulnerability. Jews coming of age in the 1960s, empowered and inspired by wider critiques of conformity promulgated by social movements, especially from within the New Left, were similarly eager to construct an authentic Jewish identity. Just as historians of African Americans, gays and lesbians, and women have discovered preconditions to the activism of the 1960s and 1970s in nascent critiques of the white supremacy, heteronormative dominance, and oppressive gender ideals in postwar America, Kranson sees continuity from critiques of upward mobility in the 1950s to Jewish countercultural impulses in the 1970s. Relying on the works and actions of Jewish leaders, Kranson examines how the process of upward mobility, manifested in a migration from cities to suburbs, raised concerns about the direction of Jewish identity. Employing statistical measures for upward mobility in categories such as educational attainment, entrance to the professions, income, and migration to the suburbs, Kranson implies that Jewish life in postwar America was a profound change that inspired romantic visions of a Jewish identity forged in the past. While “newly prosperous Jews used their growing resources to transform Jewish culture and practice, creating new modes of ritual and socialization that harmonized with their middle-class standing,” Jewish leaders attempted to forge a more legitimate Jewish identity that evoked the isolation and poverty experienced in the shtetl and immigrant slums in the U.S. as well as in the creation of a separate state of Israel as a homeland for Holocaust survivors (3). The idealization of these distinctive historical moments in Jewish history changed the way Jewish culture was understood and taught in America during the postwar years. A plethora of scholarly works of Jewish history explored life in Eastern Europe and America’s immigrant communities. Leaders contrasted the intense spirituality of shtetl life, the labor activism of immigrants, and the nation-building in Israel with the banality of suburban culture. Separate chapters consider how anxieties around Jewish life in America were displayed within several aspects of identity formation: religious practices, political affiliations, and conceptions of gender. Kranson uses one congregation as a case study to illustrate the ambivalence surrounding the suburban synagogue building boom. Congregation Solel took several steps to avoid undermining its longstanding spiritual mission in [End Page 585] urban Chicago. But Kranson acknowledges that most synagogues did not go to such lengths to retain ties to the immigrant past, which begs the question of just how much angst suburban Jews felt about the purpose of their congregations. She similarly focuses on the criticism of a select group of pundits who feared that suburbanization would lead to the ascendancy of conservative politics, even though opinion polls revealed that suburban Jews did not renounce liberalism. Due in part to the evisceration of the Jewish Left after World War II, leaders sought to ensure that Jews continued to espouse and support progressive ideas, which, apparently, many did. They also feared that the postwar expectation that Jewish men must become successful breadwinners would undermine historical commitments to education and spirituality. The role of Jewish women was especially contested; women’s fervent civic engagement in the suburbs raised apprehensions about the future of the Jewish family. Jews coming of age in the 1960s, influenced by leaders’ uneasiness over the process of suburbanization and inspired by social protests and countercultural behaviors, shared their elders’ romantic conceptions of the past...

8 Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer’s Mountain, and Post-war America

THE PATHOLOGICAL FAMILY: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy. By Deborah Weinstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013.COLD WAR KIDS: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945-1960. By Marilyn Irvin Holt. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2014.EVERYBODY ELSE: Adoption and the Politics of Domesticity in Postwar America. By Sarah Potter. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. 2014.The proposition of 1960s radical feminism that the personal is (always) political notwithstanding, how the relationship between the private and the public is understood and experienced is shaped by particular historical conditions and changes over time. Undergirded by this premise, Marilyn Irvin Holt's Cold War Kids, Deborah Weinstein's The Pathological Family, and Sarah Potter's Every- body Else are all concerned with mapping the shifting conceptual and material boundaries between the family and society from 1945 to 1960 in the United States. Collectively examining the ideas, initiatives, and experiences of wide array of historical actors-from federal policy makers to scientific experts to adoptive and foster parents from diverse class and racial backgrounds-these three historians convincingly contend that the supposedly private realms of childhood and the family attained heightened public and political significance in the postwar period, with important ramifications for both family life and American politics that have continued to resonate into our own time.Cold War Kids thoroughly documents the growing involvement by the federal government in fostering the health, education, and welfare of American children from across the social spectrum during the fifteen years following World War II. Although local and state governments to assume some responsibility for children's welfare beginning in the nineteenth century and federal policy makers expressed interest in children's issues during the Progressive era, the 1920s, and the New Deal years, legislation addressing child labor and the needs of dependent children targeted only the most socially and economically marginalized. It was not until after World War II, Marilyn Holt explains, that the federal government began to consider America's youth as one collective group (8), thereby marking the postwar era as crucial turning point (2) in the history of childhood. Indeed, in contrast to those historians of childhood and of twentieth-century American politics who have characterized the postwar years as period of inertia in between the governmental welfare activism of the Progressive era/New Deal, on the one hand, and the Great Society, on the other, Holt reveals the post-World War II years to be a pivotal period in which the federal government's role in issues related to America's youth was hotly debated, periodically challenged, sometimes championed, and slowly expanded (2-3).Through her examination of presidential speeches, records from congressional debates and investigations, and reports issued by White House conferences and presidential commissions, Holt demonstrates that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, members of their administrations, members of Congress, and public servants in an array of federal agencies became prominent participants in the growing public discourse about children and family life that characterized the postwar years. Federal government officials were motivated to speak up and act on behalf of children by whole array of developments, sensibilities, and concerns familiar to scholars of the postwar period, including: longings for familial and social stability following the Depression and World War II, confidence in the booming economy, anxieties about the survival of democracy and capitalism spurred by the Cold War, angst about rising rates of working women and juvenile delinquency, the prevalence of racial discrimination and the burgeoning civil rights movement, national housing crisis, and the sheer numbers of young people in the population putting demands on educational and welfare systems that families, local communities, and state governments could not meet on their own. …

The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America. Richard K. Popp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 204 pp. $39.95 hbk.Americans have long been known as mobile people characterized by seemingly insatiable wanderlust. In 1961, Time magazine proudly proclaimed nation's citi- zens to be the world's most restless travelers. It is easy to imagine this instinct for mobility as expression of national genetic trait. Richard K. Popp's book The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America does valuable service of showing how, in fact, this trait has been carefully culti- vated and shaped by tourism, advertising, and publishing industries. Wanderlust may come naturally to many Americans, but postwar culture of tourism described here was guided by many helping hands.Popp, an assistant professor of media studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, identifies number of factors that set stage for postwar travel boom, including widespread institution of two-week paid vacation, development of an expansive network of roads, craze of automobility and consumer credit industry that facili- tated it, and government efforts to promote tourism during Depression era. Equally important, however, was creation of mindset that taught Americans they were sup- posed to travel, that their two weeks of paid vacation should be spent on road. As Popp describes it, middlebrow and nationalist cultural narratives converged to position travel as a shared activity that constructed and affirmed group identity for those who sought to be real Americans. The creation of these narratives is focus of book.One major strength of book is Popp's discussion of emergence of travel magazine Holiday, created by Curtis Publishing in 1946. Popp demonstrates how magazine was carefully formulated using market research to reach that segment of reading public most attractive to potential advertisers in tourism business. These readers had income necessary for travel and, more importantly, had values that allowed them to spend freely on themselves, either for entertainment or for self- development. Popp rightly identifies this as precursor to trend toward market segmentation that affected magazine industry as whole in postwar years as television took away their general audience. Holiday enjoyed several decades of popu- larity with its travel stories, destination features, enticing photos, and advertisements for everything related to tourism. Even Jack Kerouac, America's iconic postwar trav- eler, wrote for it. As Popp suggests, magazine made an effort to cultivate particu- lar way of seeing and understanding tourist locations in way that soothed readers anxieties about travel by replicating readers' preconceived ideas of place and pre- sented them through lens of middle-class desire.The middle-class focus of postwar travel narratives fit in well with cold war cul- tural constructions. …

Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics by Michael Davidson Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 281 pages Michael Davidson's new study impressively complicates conventional narrative that literary historians have continued to use to define literary writings of postwar years. Especially when describing role of poetry in 1950s and 1960s, literary historians have traditionally seen field as sharply divided between apologists for establishment and renegades or mavericks--or and raw, as Robert Lowell defined them in an influential 1961 interview. Lowell drew on terms from Claude Levi-Strauss (from a book excerpt that had just been published in Partisan Review) that carried within them a judgmental weight. Tribes that cooked day's catch were more advanced than those that simply fell to devouring it. What was strikingly unfair about such a characterization, of course, was notion that renegades were in some way unsophisticated, as if they were driven to spontaneous objections because they didn't know any better. Correcting such a simplification has, in decades following Lowell's pronouncement, been an important task for many. Impressive careers were developed by those who defended these postwar outsider poets, from Sherman Paul's innovative journal-entry type meditations from 1970s, which addressed Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, David Antin, and others, to Marjorie Perloff's how-to-read models for linguistic experimentalists in Europe and America. Indeed, Davidson himself actively participated in that rehabilitation. His important first book of criticism, The San Francisco Renaissance (1989) remains a significant introduction to alternate poetry of Black Mountain, of beats, and of those who made a community for themselves in San Francisco in 1950s. Guys Like Us continues Davidson's examination of poets of postwar years (here he defines Cold War as extending from close of World War II to beginnings of detente in 1980s), but he now views those poets within a framework that he has widely expanded. That Davidson makes considerable demands on poets he studies is not surprising, given ambitions in his own poetry. In work he started to publish in 1980s--beginning with The Landing of Rochambeau (1985)--he joined with Michael Palmer and Ron Silliman, among others, to design a poetry that flourished as it investigated those places in which sharply different facets of cultural life overlapped. It follows, then, that he would hold poets to a high standard, conceiving of them as participating fully (if subtly, complexly, even secretively) in shaping of postwar culture--or perhaps more accurately, in resisting dominant culture's idea of how to shape postwar years. Focusing in different chapters on work of such poets as Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Amira Baraka, and Jack Spicer (with extended attention to individual works by Kenneth Rexroth, Edward Field, John Wieners, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others)--and emphasizing pioneer work these writers accomplished in decades just after World War II--Davidson consistently challenges poems by placing them within larger contexts, even viewing them alongside popular films or prose potboilers. He involves Orson Welles's Lady from Shanghai (1947) with Rexroth's Love Poems of Marichiko, or he evokes Michael Curtiz's treatment of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce (1945) as a prelude to discussing Bishop and Plath. Crucial to so bold a project is Davidson's ability to discern a Cold War cultural imaginary both vast enough to encompass diverse materials and precise enough to generate meaningful interpretations. Agency panic (the phrase is credited to Timothy Melley in his Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America [2000]) fuses fears of insecurity at global and local level and assumes that a fatal feminization threatens agency that is presumed to be the domain of strong masculine figures (8). …

The Cursillo movement, the three-day “short course” in Christianity that Mallorquín Catholic layman Eduardo Bonnín Aguiló founded in 1944, flourished in the postwar American religious landscape. That the weekend, which emphasizes Bonnín’s theological triptych of piety, study, and action, swept through U.S. Catholic dioceses, parishes, as well as Protestant churches, is a testament to the desire of lay men and women for a personal and communal experience of God. This study of the rapid rise of the Cursillo weekend movement, post-weekend phenomena, and Cursillo spinoffs in the postwar years serves as a case study that illuminates how the global, national, and local were able to work together in new ways in postwar America. A postwar cultural and religious climate of experimentation and global awareness encouraged communalism and working for a common cause. This ethos helped make possible a broad lay-centric spiritual movement that traversed geographic and denominational boundaries.

Book Review| June 01 2021 Review: Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America Avigail Sachs Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018, 231 pp., 45 b/w illus. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN 9780813941271 Robert Wojtowicz Robert Wojtowicz Old Dominion University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2021) 80 (2): 230–231. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2021.80.2.230 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert Wojtowicz; Review: Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 June 2021; 80 (2): 230–231. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2021.80.2.230 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search How is a discipline born, or, alternatively, how is an existing discipline reimagined? These are the questions Avigail Sachs ponders and, to a large degree, answers in her thoughtful, meticulously researched study of postwar architectural education, Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America. The backdrop is the rise of the science-based research enterprise within American higher education as it was supported by such federal agencies as the National Science Foundation. Departments and schools of architecture, many of them still adjusting to the Bauhaus-inspired reforms that had only recently upended traditional, Beaux-Arts educational practices, sought renewed relevance within this context. As developed during the 1950s and 1960s, environmental design offered a new, more comprehensive way of thinking about architectural pedagogy and practice that continues to inform the discipline today. Sachs's discussion ranges across familiar academic territory, much of it bounded by the Ivy League, including Harvard's Graduate School... You do not currently have access to this content.

The 1960s

Winner of the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies Recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual & Cultural History It has become an accepted truth: after World War II, American Jews chose to be silent about the mass murder of millions of their European brothers and sisters at the hands of the Nazis. In this compelling work, Hasia R. Diner shows the assumption of silence to be categorically false. Uncovering a rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances—in song, literature, liturgy, public display, political activism, and hundreds of other forms— We Remember with Reverence and Love shows that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust arose from a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in postwar America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to dismantle the idea of American Jewish “forgetfulness,” she brings to life the moving and manifold ways that this widely diverse group paid tribute to the tragedy. Diner also offers a compelling new perspective on the 1960s and its potent legacy, by revealing how our typical understanding of the postwar years emerged from the cauldron of cultural divisions and campus battles a generation later. The student activists and “new Jews” of the 1960s who, in rebelling against the American Jewish world they had grown up in “a world of remarkable affluence and broadening cultural possibilities” created a flawed portrait of what their parents had, or rather, had not, done in the postwar years. This distorted legacy has been transformed by two generations of scholars, writers, rabbis, and Jewish community leaders into a taken-for-granted truth.

America’s Songs II: Songs from the 1890's to the Post-War Years continues to tell the stories behind popular songs in our country’s history, serving as a sequel to the bestselling America’s Songs: Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. Beginning in 1890 and ending in post-war America, America's Songs II is a testament to the richness of popular music in the first half of the 20th century. This volume builds on the unique features of the first volume, delving deeper into the nature of the collaboration between well-known songwriters of the time but also shedding light on some of the early performers to turn songs into hits. The book’s structure – a collection of short easy-to-read essays – allows the author to provide historical context to certain songs, but also to demonstrate how individual songs facilitated the popularity of specific genres, including ragtime, jazz, and blues, which subsequently reshaped the landscape of American popular music. America’s Songs II: Songs from the 1890's to the Post-War Years will appeal to American popular music enthusiasts but will also serve as an ideal reference guide for students or as a supplement in American music courses.

In postwar America, millions of African Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Appalachian whites migrated to cities where tight housing markets, poverty, ethnic ties, and especially racial discrimination funneled them into densely populated racial and ethnic enclaves. Despite racial segregation, these neighborhoods contained diverse populations and were rich in religious, cultural, social, and economic activities. Yet middle-class whites viewed them the way nineteenth-century Americans had viewed crowded immigrant quarters: as “slums” and “blight” filled with unsafe buildings and uncivilized people prone to indigence, disease, and crime. Attacking slums and blight as physical problems, government officials implemented urban renewal policies that bulldozed neighborhoods and displaced their inhabitants. Eventually Americans would confront underlying urban problems such as poverty and racial discrimination, but by then the slum conditions of the postwar years had begun to fade.

Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America. By Michael Staub. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 386 pages. $29.50 (cloth). MICHAEL STAUB'S TORN AT THE ROOTS MODESTLY CALLS ITSELF A STUDY OF THE "crisis of Jewish liberalism" but really encompasses so much more than that. Published at the same time that Camp David and Oslo devolved into the second Intifidah and increased Israeli aggression against Palestinians, and as the United States' government prepared to make war against Saddam Hussein for the second time, Staub's work stands, ultimately, as a melancholy account of a time in the relatively recent past when official and semi-official representatives of American Jewry took a surprising number of positions on the issues of the day, positions that in our own moment might strike many of us as refreshingly unorthodox and unpredictable. In a moment when it has become harder and harder to speak in public both as a lover of Jewish culture (and Jewish people) and also as a critic of Israel, Staub's book brings us back to a time when such a combination would have been entirely common—when, in fact, a person could have found mainstream organizations to join (including synagogues), petitions to sign, protests to march in, that would support just such a position. Staub's characters are liberals for many reasons. Some found the rationale for their political activity in doctrinal teachings—in a rediscovered (or newly invented) "prophetic tradition" for instance. Many others rooted their liberalism [End Page 277] in a more secular idea of Jewish identity, an idea that might include a hint of Biblical justification but that ultimately rested on a post-Enlightenment sense of Jewish peoplehood and mission. Staub demonstrates convincingly in Torn at the Roots that the story of liberalism in American Jewish life after 1945 can, in many ways, be seen as a fifty-year discussion about the meaning of the Holocaust for American Jews. Arguing with the conventional wisdom that American Jews did not really start to discuss the Holocaust publicly until after the Eichmann trial, Staub shows how Holocaust consciousness became the "lingua franca of intracommunal contest" (17) in the postwar years. In a far-ranging set of investigations that follows this insight, Staub is able to show how American Jewish debates on Zionism, desegregation, Vietnam, Black Power, Palestine, feminism, and gay liberation all were shaped by a concern with the legacy of the Nazi genocide. While the ultimate meanings of the Holocaust remained fluid in these years, Staub deftly sketches two basic constituencies in the debate. On the one hand are those who take the evidence of the Holocaust as a demand for a narrowing of Jewish concerns around only those issues that directly touch on Jewishness and Judaism; on the other hand are the many who see the Holocaust as a call for "multi-particularism" (a term Staub borrows from Arthur Waskow [155])—a turning outwards to activism and alliance. The general trajectory of Torn at the Roots takes us from a time when the multi-particularists were in ascendance, up until the late 1970s when, as Staub sees it, the inward looking, anti-liberals won the day. Torn at the Roots recuperates a time in the very recent past (a time that has, it seems, largely disappeared from our historical record and our cultural consciousness) when American Jewish identity was defined for many individuals as constructed by ambivalence, bricolage, and nonconformity. If Staub is right, that time is passed and this is something to mourn. Towards the very end of the book Staub quotes anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff on the meanings of intracommunal fighting. Fighting, says Myerhoff, "is a partnership, requiring cooperation. A boundary-maintaining mechanism—for strangers cannot participate fully—it is also above all a proudly sociable activity" (308). Staub adapts Randolph Bourne's dictum that says, "war is the health of the state" to now read, "arguing is the health of the Jews." But, according to Staub, the shared...

This article revisits the US transition to peacetime after the Second World War from a bottom-up perspective. While postwar America is often portrayed as a unified society led by returning veterans who seamlessly reintegrated into civilian life, this account obscures the uneven, prolonged, and often exclusionary nature of that transition. Drawing on recent historiography and highlighting understudied groups such as female veterans, veterans of color, conscientious objectors, war brides, prisoners of war, and civilians caught in the machinery of war, the article emphasizes the multiple and often overlapping timelines through which Americans ‘exited’ the war. It also explores the blurred boundaries between wartime and peacetime, especially for those veterans who reenlisted, served in occupation forces, or carried their struggles into the civil rights movement. The article argues that 1945 should not be seen as a clean break but rather as one among many possible endpoints in a much longer process of demobilization and reintegration. In doing so, it not only calls for a more inclusive history of the postwar years but also invites a broader reflection on how national memory elevates some veterans while rendering others invisible.

Reviewed by: Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties by Amanda H. Littauer Nadine Boulay Amanda H. Littauer, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2015) At a glance, when considering pre-1960s notions or representations of sexuality in US culture, “sexual nonconformity” and rebellion would typically be unlikely terms applied to the wartime and the Cold War era. These decades may indeed conjure up popular images of long-limbed white pin up girls and Hollywood glamour, but the prevailing discourses, messages, and morals that circulated around women’s sexuality are often recalled as conservative, revolving around the institution of heterosexual marriage and the (white) nuclear family as a microcosm of the nation. While revolutionary fervour, changing sexual mores, and increased visible articulations of female sexual agency are ordinarily associated with the proceeding decades, during the 1940s and 1950s many teen girls and women participated in a range of sexual behaviours and practices that flouted normative expectations of feminized sexuality. As Amanda Littauer contends in Bad Girls, World War II “left a legacy of young female sexual self-assertion that would generate both conservative and liberal responses in the postwar years,” galvanizing calls for women’s sexual agency, and influencing the sexual cultures of the 1960s and 1970s. (19) While scholars have highlighted the more liberal facets of the 1940s and 1950s, very little of this scholarship examines the experiences, thoughts, and experiences of sexual agency of women and girls. Beginning in the 1970s, feminist and queer historians have worked to make visible how the wartime home front generated new opportunities for heterosexual women, gay men, and lesbians to claim sexual and economic agency in ways that were unprecedented. Postwar America was a period of paradox concerning sexuality; these decades may have been rife with restriction, but also of vocal debate, giving rise to the Homophile and Civil Rights movements, prompting challenges to racial segregation, and seeing the publication of the Kinsey reports. There was also a heightened sense of panic about the sexual morality of women and girls, fears surrounding the spread of venereal diseases and miscegenation, and efforts to surveil and contain these “threats.” Considering that heightened restrictions so often suggest greater contestation, Bad Girls refutes the notion that practices of pre-1960s sexual nonconformity were temporary, but rather recognizes these practices as part of “the long sexual revolution,” and refuses to cordon off women and girls articulation of sexual agency to the 1960s and 1970s. (2) The task of locating and making visible the experiences and agency of women and their sexuality in this historical moment is no easy task. Considering that “the thoughts of most women and girls [End Page 368] are lost to history” – particularly when historians rightly attend to intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class – feminist historians have to be methodologically and theoretically creative. (82) Littauer presents an “omnivorous approach” in her text, tracking the relationships between prevailing ideologies and representations, working with and extrapolating from a myriad of sources, including: state and federal contact reports that attempted to track women who were named by servicemen as possible sources of venereal diseases; policy makers and law enforcement agents who used their power and authority in forms of social control; social scientific studies that sought to observe and understand postwar sexual cultures; and, when possible, the testimonies of women and girls themselves. (11) Littauer infers evidence of female sexual agency and practices through the sites of contact that women often had with institutions of authority, such as through the documents (“contact reports”) left by government officials who sought to limit the interactions between servicemen and civilian women, many of whom were seen as infringing on social spaces typically reserved for men. Well aware that wartime had altered the sexual landscape, Littauer argues that officials and the public alike feared that what they saw as an encroaching tide of sexual liberalism would erode the institution of marriage and increase occurrences of “juvenile delinquency.” (21) These anxieties were largely focused on the bodies of women and girls; from figures like Victory Girls and B-Girls of the 1940s and 1950s – who were...

Today we take it for granted that political leaders and presidential administrations will address issues related to children and teenagers. But in the not-so-distant past, politicians had little to say, and federal programs less to do with children except those of very specific populations. This book shows how the War changed all that. Against the backdrop of the postwar baby boom, and the rise of a distinct teen culture, Cold War Kids unfolds the little-known story of how politics and federal policy expanded their influence in shaping children's lives and experiences making way for the youth-attuned political culture that we've come to expect. In the first part of the twentieth century, narrow and incremental policies focused on children were the norm. And then, in the postwar years, monumental events such as the introduction of the Salk vaccine or the Soviet launch of Sputnik delivered jolts to the body politic, producing a federal response that included all children. Cold War Kids charts the changes that followed, making the mid-twentieth century a turning point in federal action directly affecting children and teenagers. With the 1950 and 1960 White House Conferences on Children and Youth as a framework, Marilyn Irvin Holt examines childhood policy and children's experience in relation to population shifts, suburbia, divorce and family stability, working mothers, and the influence of television. Here we see how the government, driven by a War mentality, was becoming ever more involved in aspects of health, education, and welfare even as the baby boom shaped American thought, promoting societal acceptance of the argument that all children, not just the poorest and neediest, merited their government's attention. This period, largely viewed as a time of stagnation in studies of children and childhood after World War II, emerges in Holt's cogent account as a distinct period in the history of children in America.