Prime Time 8. Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks, Schulbuch

3 Women in the 1950s A short history of the women’s rights movement The Beat Generation The neighborhood around New York City’s Columbia University was the birthplace of the Beat Generation, the meeting ground in the early 1940s of Jack Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg (who had an instant success with “Howl” published in 1955) and William Burroughs ( Naked Lunch , 1959). Kerouac became the icon of a whole generation after having published On the Road in 1957, his semiautobiography about the Beats’ road trips across the US and Mexico. The Beats can be seen as the forefathers of the hippies who came of age in the mid1960s. a) Read this extract taken from Joyce Johnson’s personal recollections and underline the points which surprise you. 1 Fact file The women’s movement Every epoch and every culture allocates specific roles to the two genders. Throughout human history, gender roles have changed and been adapted to the necessities of society. • • In prehistoric times , men and women held equal positions in their partnership as they both shared work. This changed after the Neolithic Revolution (transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement, around 8000–5000 B.C.) when women stayed indoors to take care of the increasing number of children and the housework while men were responsible for bringing home food. • • The Industrial Revolution (19 th century) created a working class. For many poorer working-class women the woman as housekeeper remained an ideal for a long time, but many families needed a second bread-winner. This led to women becoming more independent and demanding more rights. • • The first wave of the feminist movement in the early 20 th century won basic legal rights such as the right to vote (the suffrage movement was influential) or to own property. • • The second wave in the 1960s and 1970s fought for substantive equality, equal pay for equal work, an end to workplace discrimination, equal division of property upon divorce, new anti-rape laws, legal birth control and abortion services. • • A more recent wave, the third wave , includes activists who fight against prostitution, sex work or sexual harassment. Gender is seen as only one of women’s many identities. • • Groundbreaking works are Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) or Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). F 2 Female Beat writer Joyce Johnson fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. Having lived in the neighbourhood since her childhood, she became close friends with many male Beats. What did “real life” mean to a middle-class adolescent girl in 1950? I yearned for it and thought I’d recognise it when I saw it, but could not quite define it. I was sure real life was sexual, though my ignorance of sex was profound. Since no information could be extracted from grownups, and my friends knew little more than I did, I pursued my forbidden research in the dictionary and in the steamy passages of historical novels, trying to connect the dots. At fifteen, I probably knew less than today’s average eight-year-old. Until I entered Barnard College in 1951 and took a freshman orientation course called Modern Living, I did not have a very clear idea of how babies were born, nor did many of my classmates. I would meet Jack Kerouac only six years later. The postwar period was an age of enforced innocence in America. Ground that women had won in the Jazz Age and during the war years was suddenly gone, as if society had deliberately contracted amnesia. Women who had worked were now relegated to the home, and girls were sent to college to get their MRS. Sexual intercourse was reserved for married couples. It was unusual in the early Fifties for a young woman to get her own apartment, and if she 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 36 Gender issues Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv