Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion Before the Sixties

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II-era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms.

Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life.

Author: Amanda H. Littauer
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/02/2015
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.15w x 0.77d
ISBN: 9781469623788

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2015 pg. 114
Chronicle of Higher Education 09/04/2015 pg. 18
Choice 02/01/2016

About the Author
Littauer, Amanda H.: - Amanda H. Littauer is assistant professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Northern Illinois University.