What We Really Miss About The 1950s Summary

Ahhh, the good ol’ days. When people hear this, they think back to a time when they remember happiness. However, people tend to only remember the happiness and not the negative aspects of that time period. When people think back to the 1940’s and the 1950’s they think that these are the greatest generations. However, looking at texts, and TV shows from this time period shows the truth. These families are conformists; a happy suburban home, a father who works, a mother who stays at home, and the three children who may disobey their parents, but learn from their mistakes. The show, Father Knows Best, and the book, Homeward Bound, by Elaine Tyler May, gives a better sense of what actually happened in these suburban homes, and what happens if you try and conform the society.

The American family has continuously been changing over the years and has been shaped by changing ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and class. The institution of the family has changed but it has also remained the same in some aspects. Society’s acceptance of changes in gender and sexual norms have reshaped representations of the family. Betty Friedan, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Dorothy Sue Cobble have written articles that pertain to the changing of the institution. As the American society changes its views on gender and sexual norms, sometimes through movements, it has informed representations of the family.

Families are a social institution they provide a set of rules that define a social unit of importance to society. This gives us positions like being a parent and child. Rules give us guidance on the expected norms. Families are important for the major functions of child rearing, caring for the elderly, and providing comfort and emotional support. Before the 1950s, American families were considered to a nuclear type of family. Nuclear families consist of a married heterosexual couple, living in the same household, with children. The women stay at home to take care of their children and the household. The men are breadwinners meaning the work outside the household to earn money for his family. Television shows would typically portray a middle-class

Who could survive life in the 50’s? How would you earn money? How would you avoid gangs and thieves? Gary found a great way. That way is Dirk.

It seems as though people always mention the 50s when asked about the ideal family. For the past 65 years, the 50s family has maintained its status as the ideal model of the average American household. Though the ideal family is described as that of one in the 50s, it is almost impossible to find a family even remotely as functional as the kind portrayed in the TV shows and movies of that time. Today, it is far more common to find a family with one parent, one with no children, and even one with two parents of the same gender. So why is it that despite all of the dysfunctionality of today’s society, people continue to cite the 50s as the perfect American family? The evolution of the typical family from the 50s until now has resulted in two almost unrecognizably different concepts; however, people generally continue to maintain the standard 50s family as a template for American families today.

The Structure of the American family has changed drastically. There actually isn’t much of a “structure” anymore to families. The social norm of what used to be in the 50’s where the man was the only person to work and the women stood home and kept up the home and children. Couples got married young and didn’t have children out of wedlock. It was almost like most family followed the same structure. The 50’s doesn’t seem like it was chaotic as it is today with couples working multiple jobs at different times and families never being together with each other at the same time and so many hobbies, sports, and extracurricular things going on with each family. The biggest thing that comes to my mind that has changed completely is that even growing

In the 1950’s, the ideal family was a nuclear family. A nuclear family consists of a working father and a domestic mother (Conley, 289). Women were expected to stay home with the children, cook, and clean. Women were supposed to maintain a specific role in society to

Here are some important people involved in the fifties. First of all, there's the worldwide famous, rock king, Elvis Presley. Elvis was known worldwide for his amazing singing and rock and was nicknamed the “king of rock and roll” according to “Elvis changed everything in the fifties - the music, fashion, teenagers attitudes.” his music changed the lifestyles of many people in the the fifties. Second, there was Martin Luther King Jr. he was very important to the fifties for many reasons, but long story short, he was a big part of the civil rights movement. According to http://www.nobelprize.org/, “Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation” meaning that he thought that everyone even African Americans had the same rights, and that's what was so amazing about him. Third, there's Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain. According to http://www.biography.com, Queen Elizabeth “became queen on February 6, 1952, and was crowned on June 2, 1953.” She was important to history because she has been

The Impact of Non-Traditional Families in the Twenty-First Century The image of the American family looks and functions very differently than families of the past few decades. Men and women raised in the 1950's and 1960's when programs such as "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best" epitomized the average family, are likely to find themselves in situations that have changed dramatically. Research claims that many family structures are common: single-parent families, remarried couples, unmarried couples, step families, foster families, multi-generational families, extended families, and the doubling up of two families within the same home. Marriage, divorce, and patterns of childbirth are some of the factors that have contributed to

Most of our grandparents remember the times of the fifties. A time of youthfulness, rebellion and rock and roll is what the fifties were all about. As the teenagers of the twenty first century start to grow up, and have families of their own, they will also remember what their youth was like, as did their grandparents. The teenagers of the fifties and the twenty-first century could be compared to day and night. The 1950's have come and gone, but it is not an era that will be forgotten, the teenagers of the twenty-first era will soon remember what it was like just as their grandparents are these days.

Over decades, television shows have reflected the social changes of the family structure. Starting with the 1960’s, a family commonly consisted of parents and their children. Nuclear families, with parents and children, embodied shows like Leave it to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett. Family was everything to people back in the day.

Today’s television programs are very different from the television programs that were shown over fifty years ago. The shows in the past portrayed a modest conservative family. These families consist of a hardworking man and a stay at home woman, married raising their own biological children. As the years went by, television has started to portray a more liberal definition of what a family means in today’s world. Because of today’s TV shows, there are different ideas about what a family should look like.

A snapshot of the classic yet desired white family of the 1950’s: a pale skinned man with a pressed tie and shiny dress shoes, enjoys the pancakes and eggs his slender and sweet wife had prepared for him before work. The gentle figure leans to kiss her children who hustle to catch the school bus, a full lunch box in each hand and new toys for show and tell. However, this depiction of the “traditional american family” has been greatly modified. In her family history course, Stephanie Coontz asked her students to illustrate their own concept of a traditional or perfect family. Unsurprisingly, the predominating result was the stereotypical “nuclear” family, consisting of only father, mother, and children. This had once been culturally correct, but beginning in the mid-1900’s, the ideal American family has changed immensely with social development. Although the traditional family still exists in several households across the nation, the majority of families are far from the initial standards.

We think of shows from the 1950’s, like Leave it to Beaver, as the outline that a family structure should have. Dad worked, Mom stayed at home, and the home had school aged children. Diane Crisbell, in her article Myths of the 1950’s, found that 79% of US homes had this structure in the 50’s. During this time only 25% of married women worked outside the home. Non Traditional families, or those that had only one parent, made up only 11% of the families. Crisbell also noted that girls were less likely to have children out of wedlock and that there was less crime during the 1950’s. In 2007 Time International did a study. In this study they found that in the 1950’s 79% of newly wed couples would reach their 15th wedding anniversary.

There is always that one question that has been on everyone’s mind, what does a real “family” look like? What is a “family?” What are mothers supposed to do? fathers? children? What are their gender roles? Well, during the 1950s, there were many families whom believed that the show “I Love Lucy” portrayed the perfect family, but that was back in the “good old days”. It has been more than 50 years and there are still current shows today that portray a perfect family, in different ways. The American television series, “Modern Family” portrays one big perfect straight, gay, diverse, traditional family. These televisions hit series are informing the audience how a perfect family is supposed to be but some in a positive way and others in a negative way. Well, the real answer is that the 1950s were not the “good old days”.