In this book review of Young,White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties by Winifred Breines and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, an in depth analysis of the rapidly constricting nature of female roles played in the post-war era of the 1950s and the development of what will become modern day feminism will be discussed. After World War II, the rippling aftereffects of the 1950s had an extremely incarcerating effect on American women. These effects were a source of emotional, physical, and mental distress; and, although muted to an extent, elicited occurrences of physical backlash as well. As white American society became progressively more and more anti-women in the workforce, popular culture began marketing domesticity
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Using primary sources from that time period in addition to interviews and her own personal experience, Breines strives to answer the questions how and why these events culminated and merged to create such an unexpected but obvious backlash borne out of resentment. The central thesis is the idea that this era was awash in sexual and gender-role conflicting opportunities for young women even as it bombarded them with puritanical structures, and the resulting outcome was a generation of girls in high ponytails and poodle skirts, so heavily idealized and venerated by American culture that the only logical solution was to transform into women who were burning their clothing and protesting against the patriarchy not ten years later. Her thesis was unusually explicit in the fact that it did not require the reader to search for a murky, somewhat defined topic sentence like many authors so questioningly favor. She is direct and concise to an almost juvenile degree, but a degree that fits her subject matter well. Breines organizes the progression of this phenomenon by claiming her work to be a "sociological memoir," but instead of consecutive, chronological reflections she merely visits events in her past only occasionally, using them as sounding boards and supportive evidence of the sheer knowledge and data amassed in her
Using primary sources from that time period in addition to interviews and her own personal experience, Breines strives to answer the questions how and why these events culminated and merged to create such an unexpected but obvious backlash borne out of resentment. The central thesis is the idea that this era was awash in sexual and gender-role conflicting opportunities for young women even as it bombarded them with puritanical structures, and the resulting outcome was a generation of girls in high ponytails and poodle skirts, so heavily idealized and venerated by American culture that the only logical solution was to transform into women who were burning their clothing and protesting against the patriarchy not ten years later. Her thesis was unusually explicit in the fact that it did not require the reader to search for a murky, somewhat defined topic sentence like many authors so questioningly favor. She is direct and concise to an almost juvenile degree, but a degree that fits her subject matter well. Breines organizes the progression of this phenomenon by claiming her work to be a "sociological memoir," but instead of consecutive, chronological reflections she merely visits events in her past only occasionally, using them as sounding boards and supportive evidence of the sheer knowledge and data amassed in her