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Gender and Culture in the 1950s: WSQ: Fall/Winter 2005
In the mainstream American imagination, the 1950s were an era of conformity when women strove to be perfect middle-class suburban housewives à 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 center 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.
In this engaging collection, cultural commentators explore the 1950s from the center 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.
240 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2005
8 people want to read
About the author
Deborah Nelson
3 books5 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Deborah Nelson is a professor in the English Dept. at the University of Chicago. From her faculty page on the UofC website:
My field is late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, what is known in shorthand as Post45 or Post War (to the confusion of many: which war?). I also am a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journalPost45and a book series atStanford University Press. My interests in the field include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. I have been working recently on the immediate postwar moment, @1948, on which topic I and three colleagues ran a year-long, interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. My colleague Leela Gandhi and I co-edited a selection of papers presented in the seminar in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. In the fall of 2018, James Sparrow in the Department of History and I will curate an exhibit from the holdings of the Smart Museum on the @1948 moment.
This past spring my book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Tough Enough focuses on these six women who are aligned with no single tradition but whose work coheres in a style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough challenges the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. My first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence asa topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades.
Deborah Nelson is a professor in the English Dept. at the University of Chicago. From her faculty page on the UofC website:
My field is late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, what is known in shorthand as Post45 or Post War (to the confusion of many: which war?). I also am a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journalPost45and a book series atStanford University Press. My interests in the field include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. I have been working recently on the immediate postwar moment, @1948, on which topic I and three colleagues ran a year-long, interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. My colleague Leela Gandhi and I co-edited a selection of papers presented in the seminar in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. In the fall of 2018, James Sparrow in the Department of History and I will curate an exhibit from the holdings of the Smart Museum on the @1948 moment.
This past spring my book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Tough Enough focuses on these six women who are aligned with no single tradition but whose work coheres in a style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough challenges the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. My first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence asa topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades.
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