Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950sUniversity of Chicago Press, 2005 - 269 من الصفحات While the 1950s have been popularly portrayed-on television and in the movies and literature-as a conformist and conservative age, the decade is better understood as a revolutionary time for politics, economy, mass media, and family life. Magazines, films, newspapers, and television of the day scrutinized every aspect of this changing society, paying special attention to the lifestyles of the middle-class men and their families who were moving to the suburbs newly springing up outside American cities. Much of this attention focused on issues of masculinity, both to enforce accepted ideas and to understand serious departures from the norm. Neither a period of "male crisis" nor yet a time of free experimentation, the decade was marked by contradiction and a wide spectrum of role models. This was, in short, the age of Tennessee Williams as well as John Wayne. In Men in the Middle, James Gilbert uncovers a fascinating and extensive body of literature that confronts the problems and possibilities of expressing masculinity in the 1950s. Drawing on the biographies of men who explored manhood either in their writings or in their public personas, Gilbert examines the stories of several of the most important figures of the day-revivalist Billy Graham, playwright Tennessee Williams, sociologist David Riesman, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Playboy literary editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky, and TV-sitcom dad Ozzie Nelson-and allows us to see beyond the inherited stereotypes of the time. Each of these stories, in Gilbert's hands, adds crucial dimensions to our understanding of masculinity the 1950s. No longer will this era be seen solely in terms of the conformist man in the gray flannel suit or the Marlboro Man. |
المحتوى
Men in the Middle | 1 |
2 Crisis and the History of Masculinity | 15 |
David Riesman and Character | 34 |
The 1950s | 62 |
Alfred Kinsey and the Report That Shook the World | 81 |
Billy Graham and Male Conversions | 106 |
Learning Companionate Fatherhood | 135 |
Men Lies and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof | 164 |
9 The Gender of High Culture | 189 |
Perspectives on Masculinity Crisis | 215 |
Notes | 225 |
259 | |
عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة
Alfred Kinsey American character American culture American history American Quarterly appeared argued audience Big Daddy Billy Graham boys Brick century Chicago Christian consumption contemporary conversion critics critique David Riesman defined depicted discussion domestic drama Dwight Macdonald emotional episode essay evangelical example exploration Exurbanites father female feminine feminized film gender historians Hollywood homosexuality Hot Tin Roof identity important individual interviews Kinsey Kinsey Report Kinsey’s literature Lonely Crowd magazine Maggie manhood Margaret Mead masculinity masculinity crisis mass culture middle-class modern Momism Nelson MSS notion other-direction Ozzie and Harriet Ozzie Nelson Ozzie's personality Philip Wylie play Playboy political popular culture problems psychological public intellectuals published radio season Ricky Riesman MSS role script sexual behavior sexual revolution situation comedy Skipper social society Spectorsky MSS story lines box suburban suggests television Tennessee Williams tion transformation University Press Williams’s women worried writers wrote Wylie York