Karen Halttunen

A Summary of Three Essays:

Daniel Belgrad, “The 1950s and 1960s,” in A Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008), pgs. 230-245.
Belgrad begins by identifying themes common to the cultural milieu of the period: fears of nuclear war, economic growth, political centrism, and a reorientation toward family life following World War II. Writes Belgrad, “Some explanations for the perceived crisis of masculinity blamed American women rather than the workplace. Men were weak, it was argued, because their women were domineering. Women who had learned independence during the war years were seen as a threat to American manhood and a violation of the natural order” (233). Male entertainment such as Playboy focuses on “connoisseurship and casual sex” while films like The Manchurian Candidate equate feminine influence with brainwashing (234). Writes Belgrad, “The Kinsey reports…also encouraged sexual experimentation by offering scientific evidence that the sexual practices of white, middle-class, college-educated Americans were more wide-ranging than almost anyone had previously acknowledged” (236). Conversely “women without domestic ambitions were demeaned as unfeminine and unnatural…Dissatisfied and frustrated women were ostracized as depressive anomalies” (237). Meanwhile, underground comics “mocked the self-satisfaction of Cold War America” (238).

Jane H. Hunter, “Gender and Sexuality,” in A Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008), pgs. 327-340.
Hunter writes, “As the marked category, women were conventionally the ‘other,’ the forces for community, kinship, or propriety accompanying the rugged American individualist on his journey west” (327). The media are responsible for shaping the dominant narrative. As a result of this hegemony, during the Cold War, “the popular literature glorified family life as a counterpoint to the all-embracing Soviet state, and contrasted ‘warm hearth’ with the Cold War in a nuclear age” (336). Popular culture insisted that the “choices” offered by consumerism made up for the lack of social opportunities outside the home and, what’s more, made American women more fortunate than their counterparts around the world.

George Lipsitz, “Cultural Theory, Dialogue, and American Cultural History,” in A Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008), pgs. 265-278.
Lipsitz writes, “The practices and processes of popular culture frequently provide cultural historians with opportunities for demonstrating the dialogic nature of social life” (272). In this way, “[Mikhail] Bakhtin’s insistence on connecting culture with power ennables cultural historians to delineate the ways in which competing social groups find themselves imbricated in each other’s words, stories, and ideas” (273).… (altro)