“Lamb to Slaughter” Roald Dahl Published in 1953
The 1950s had a particularly confining effect on many American women.
Advice books and magazine articles (“Don’t Be Afraid to Marry Young,” “Cooking To Me Is Poetry,” “Femininity Begins At Home”) urged women to leave the workforce and embrace their roles as wives and mothers.
The idea that a woman’s most important job was to bear and rear children.
Advertisements often times showed smiling women with their arms loaded with cooked food, or a women cleaning house and looking happy and content to be doing that and nothing else.
These were dedicated housewives whose only goal in life was to meet the pleasures of their husband and children. Society believed women fit this role, and it should be the goal for women.
“Harrison Bergeron” Kurt Vonnegut satire, dystopia published 1961
The Civil Rights Movement: A growing group of Americans spoke out against inequality and injustice during the 1950s. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries; during the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life. Whites used violence and intimidation to prevent blacks from asserting their rights.
The Cold War: The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War, was another defining element of the 1950s.Americans believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened democracy. Many people in the United States worried that communists, or “subversives,” could destroy American society from the inside as well as from the outside. Between 1945 and 1952, Congress held 84 hearings designed to put an end to “un-American activities.”Tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs, as well as their families and friends, in the anti-communist “Red Scare” of the 1950s. During his presidential campaign in 1960, John F. Kennedy had promised the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal: the “New Frontier,” a package of laws and reforms that sought to eliminate injustice and inequality in the United States.
A SeparatePeace 1959 John Knowles
It was that summer that I realized I had fallen in love with Exeter.
The great trees, the thick clinging ivy, the expanses of playing fields, the winding black-water river, the pure air all began to sort of intoxicate me. The masters were relaxed. Studies now were easy for me. The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.
There was a lively, congenial group of students in Peabody Hall that summer, many of them from other schools, accelerating like me. One was David Hackett from Milton Academy, on whom I later modeled Phineas. We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation.
Returning to Exeter for the fall term of 1943, I found that a charged, driven time had come to the school. I remember how virtually all the younger masters disappeared one by one.There was apple-harvesting "for the war," railroad-yard clearance "for the war."
Our war was so overwhelmingly vast, the first truly world war, that it overawed us into being dutiful, responsible, approaching it one step at a time.
“Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?” Tim O’Brien 1975 page 738
Vietnam War, antiwar, imagination to cope – both, both walk in single file, one in front and back and fear, haunted countryside – graveyard, infantry, dark,
Dead Poet’s Society released in 1989, setting is 1959
Screenplay by Tom Schulman. One of his teachers at boys prep school Montgomery Bell Academy, Sam Pickering, was the basis of Robin Williams's character in "Dead Poet's Society" BA from Vanderbilt
Montgomery Bell Academy offers young men an exemplary college preparatory experience, assisting them to be "gentlemen, scholars, and athletes" and young men of wisdom and moral integrity who will make significant contributions to society.