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Another Time, Another Place
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20679 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
3,058 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
YOUNG, WHITE, AND MISERABLE
Growing Up Female in the Fifties
Wini Brenies
Boston: Beacon Press, 1992
261 pp., $25.00
NEW YORK IN THE FIFTIES
Dan Wakefield
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992
355 pp., $24.95
Compared with the glitzy twenties or the iconoclastic sixties, the 1950s has had few chroniclers. It seems, as we look back, to be a sleepy time, a respite after the war, a time when America closed in on itself and, simply, did not want to be disturbed. It seems, in fact, unremittingly dull. We listen but hear only the silence: That decade, we have assumed, has little to say to the generations that followed. Yet, like most conveniently labeled historical periods, the Silent Generation was more complicated than it appears.
How did it feel to live through the 1950s? That depends on who you were, where you were, and what you were doing. "I felt the Silent Generation thing was a sort of libel," the writer Meg Greenfield says, recalling her own experiences of the 1950s. "Now it's simply become the accepted wisdom, but he fifties are a badly researched and badly reported time. There was more social action and more sense than we're given credit for."
Greenfield's discomfort with the way the fifties has been characterized is shared by both Wini Breines and Dan Wakefield, two writers who offer us research and personal testimony to defend their views of the decade. Breines, a sociologist who was an adolescent in the 1950s, and Wakefield, who came to New York in 1952 when he transferred from the University of Indiana to Columbia, have distinct perspectives on America at mid-century. Their memories and observations help to dispel our preconceptions and to make sense of a moment of the past that, for some people, evokes nostalgia; for others, bewilderment; for still others, repugnance.
Many readers of Young, White and Miserable and New York in the Fifties will come to these accounts with their own store of memories. Mine include air raid drills in school, where we practiced surviving an atomic bomb attack by crouching beneath our desks, head cradled in our arms; the launch of Sputnik; the grainy
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