The Ideal American Family In The 1950s

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The ideal American family in the 1950s comprised of a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and several happy submissive, law abiding, obedient and submissive “good children”, all living in the cosy homes of the newly built suburbs on the outskirts of a larger city. This narrow view was accepted and propagated by the mass media was widely accepted as normal. Any deviation from this was ideal was less accepted, less desirable, less tolerated. Still we find several sub-cultures that arose during this period that questioned and challenged this narrow definition of normal that included the teens/youth, the Beats and the gays and

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