(re: miscegenation) Not in California or the more populated parts of the North.
But it was impossible for a mixed-race married couple to cross the United States from one of these bastions of tolerance to the other without becoming felons en route.
....
(re: books) IIRC the only censored topics were contraceptives, abortion and to a lesser extent Communism.
(re: prophylactics) I concede there.
But still, for the average Joe and Jane, they would have hardly cared, and it likely didn't seem a big deal at the time...
Now let's stipulate that the "average Joe and Jane" didn't worry too much about being denied free legal access to Marxist texts. (For that matter, I'm not sure there was actual censorship of strictly political stuff--it's just that getting caught with it would put everything else you did under suspicion).
But seriously now, do you think that Joe and Jane had no concern whatsoever with being blocked from birth-control related items and
information? The latter would get you in trouble, for "obscenity." The former would get you in trouble on those grounds plus others.
It might be that Joe was generally less bothered by this sort of repression than Jane was. But that brings us closer to the crux of this thread's original question, which is not so much "Were the 1950s seen as a good time
at the time?" as "Why do so many
modern people idealize the 1950s?" One category of nostalgics is definitely those who think that what I call "sexual freedom" and "gender equality" is a bad thing.
How many of us here have actually read Betty Friedan's
Feminine Mystique? I was quite surprised when I finally did, to learn that Friedan was not bemoaning a general and eternal suppression of women from time immemorial. No, she was comparing the experiences of women of her generation, coming of age in the late 1940s and 1950s, with the accepted cultural expectations for women in just the two decades before. Her claim was that in the postwar years, women were quite actively and systematically forced out of public life and places they had won for themselves outside the domestic sphere were eroded and denied them.
Another very interesting if less famous book to consider in this context is Leslie Reagan's
When Abortion Was a Crime. Reagan examines the history of the actual practice of abortion as well as its legal status in the United States (focusing mainly on the Chicago region) from the late eighteenth century until Supreme Court ruled in
Roe v Wade. Interestingly, while abortion was largely illegal in most of this period, it was criminalized mainly on the grounds of restricting medical practice to approved professionals--a properly licensed medical professional could always terminate a pregnancy on ground of "medical necessity," and the controversy was fought over what was and was not medically necessary. Reagan observes several phases of the practice, such as the initial battle to impose medical professionalism (ie ban midwives), the long period when licensed MDs did predominate but these doctors were private practitioners generally hired by the mother of a family (therefore strongly inclined to find "medical necessity" whenever these matriarchs deemed they should, lest they lose customers), through the evolution of more centralized hospitals which spurred the parallel evolution of specialized abortion clinics. This takes us up to the WWII era, when although abortion clinics were in a shadowy, dubious legal position and sometimes subject to raids, it was still generally possible for a woman to find a reasonably safe place to terminate a pregnancy. Postwar, the Roman Catholic Church found allies among "cultural conservatives" as we say nowadays, particularly well in alignment with anti-Communists, to start systematically shutting down these clinics and imposing ever stricter scrutiny on hospital ethics boards to stringently deny nearly every application for abortion in those institutions. Thus, despite the fact that advances in medical technology had made abortion a safer procedure than ever before (if conducted in a properly run medical facility) this period, this "Fab Fifties" running into the '60s, was the time of the real bloodbath for women, the era of the back-alley abortionist and hospital wards filling with women dying from their mistakes.
On this thread some of us have already alluded to the dark side of '50s nostalgia in the matter of it being the time before the Civil Rights ball really got rolling in terms of results.
Actually the true "Good Old Days" of the Fifties ran from the end of the Korean War to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965...
Funny how the Civil Rights Act makes such a convenient bookend for the
end of the "good old days," isn't it.
Well, I just think that in addition to race relations, we should look at gender relations too. For someone living in those days, there were generally rays of hope, though as Betty Friedan and Leslie Reagan make clear, for
some people (half the population in fact) the clock was clearly running backward. Looking backward, to favor these days of possible hope and certain fear over the days when hopes came to better fruition is I think evidence of reaction.