cover image Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties

Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties

Wini Breines, Winifred Breines. Beacon Press (MA), $25 (261pp) ISBN 978-0-8070-7502-9

Breines, a Northeastern University sociology professor, here explores a generation of women she believes were protofeminists--unheralded pioneers of the women's to avoid repetition movement. She takes a hard look at the '50s zeitgeist, at the duplicities of the suburban America born at the dawn of the atomic age, at depressed women for whom child-rearing was the only approved source of identity. Yet she argues that this era offered sexual opportunities to young women even as it bound them with puritanical strictures, and that because of such contradictions young women became uniquely concerned with living differently than their self-sacrificing mothers. The study presents a melange of '50s artifacts: explication of such '50s novels as Marjorie Morningstar , snippets from Sylvia Plath's writing, visions of the make-up and barrettes that beckoned teenage girls at the five-and-tenweb . The book is a revelation, especially for those who came of age in the '50s. (June)