Introduction: rising expectations and the challenge from World War II; 1. Psychology: Benjamin Spock, Carl Rogers, and the liberalizing impulse in the 1950s; 2. Religion: ballrooms, bingo, blue laws and Billy Graham - piety and secularization in 1950s America; 3. Sex: Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor and the sexual revolution in the postwar period; 4. Women: the rising status of women in the age of Eisenhower; 5. The youth culture: rock 'n roll, blue jeans, and the myth of opposition; 6. From original sin to self actualization: Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, and new notions of identity in postwar America; 7. Denouement: the normative lag and the role of religion in the transformation of American culture.
The Permissive Society points to the emergence of a liberalizing impulse during the 1950s, with a traditionalist moral framework giving way to a less authoritarian approach to moral issues.
Alan Petigny, the son of West Indian immigrants, is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida. He graduated with honors from the University of South Florida and received his master's and doctorate from Brown University. Prior to becoming an academic, Petigny worked as a policy analyst for the U.S. Congress' Joint Economic Committee. He was also an award-winning reporter for a public radio station based in Tampa, Florida, contributing material to both Florida Public Radio and NPR.
'Alan Petigny has pulled back the camera to project a wider angle
on a series of dramatic changes generally associated with the
1960s. From the sexual revolution to the decline of faith, Petigny
illustrates the slow evolution of values that permeated American
culture from World War II to the 1970s and that shape the world we
live in today. In doing so, The Permissive Society emphasizes the
crucial role played by psychology and the 'therapeutic ethos.'
Petigny also reminds us of the often-neglected role of adults - not
just youth culture - in driving the changes that produced a
cultural revolution.' Brian Balogh, University of Virginia and
author of A Government Out of Sight
'Challenging conventional views of early postwar America as a
conservative, conformist, and somnolent era, Alan Petigny finds a
ferment of shifting social codes, more tolerant child-rearing
practices, evolving religious thought, changing views of women's
roles, and a vogue for self-actualization. Boldly provocative and
wide-ranging in coverage - from bingo and blue jeans to Peale,
Spock, and Niebuhr - The Permissive Society invites us to look
afresh at an era that Petigny finds more complex, and more
interesting, than we had thought.' Paul Boyer, author of By the
Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the
Atomic Age
'Alan Petigny audaciously challenges our understanding of the 1950s
as a time of staid tradition. With a fine eye for detail, he shows
a turbulent decade in which sexual mores, the role of women, ideas
of child rearing, conceptions of God and the place of religion in
society, and psychological assumptions of self-worth underwent
profound, and sometimes destructive, change. This is an important
book.' Donald T. Critchlow, Saint Louis University
'In the past few years, historians have begun to disassemble the
stereotypes of the 1950s, rejecting the descriptions of a uniformly
rigid, conservative, and dour society. With Alan Petigny's astute
and surprising book, this demolition project hits with full force.
Focusing on liberal religion and the widespread popularity of
psychology, counseling, and the ideals of identity-fulfillment, the
author describes a very different society in the making, in which
permissive behavior rejected the strident calls for Cold War
conformism. Contrarian in the very best sense of the term, this
remarkable book transforms what we thought we knew about the
postwar world, restoring balance, common sense, and dispassionate
perspective to the history of the period.' James Gilbert,
University of Maryland
'In The Permissive Society, Petigny finds new indicators of
behavioral change in sources neglected by cultural historians. His
documentation of a permissive turn in the 1940s and 1950s provides
a marvellous antidote to the naïve narratives of social change that
clutter the canon of post-World War II cultural history. Both
conservatives and progressives will benefit from careful study of
this fascinating lesson in how cultural norms changed in response
to new social realities.' James Reed, Rutgers University
'With The Permissive Society, Alan Petigny gives revisionist
history a good name. With freshness of perspective, deftness of
design, and ingenuity of research, he proposes to find in the 1950s
the seeds of the democratic change associated with the 1960s - and
thus makes both decades more intriguing. The Permissive Society is
a work that social and cultural historians of the postwar era will
have to reckon with, and that anyone interested in a cogent
scholarly argument is bound to enjoy.' Stephen J. Whitfield,
Brandeis University
'Alan Petigny is a gifted scholar who has meticulously
reconstructed the history of the 1950s. Petigny argues persuasively
that the 1950s were not truly conservative. Unlike other
revisionist accounts that lean heavily on anecdotes, this
intellectual history is firmly rooted in statistics that hold
persuasive power. Drawing examples from religion, psychology, child
rearing, and youth culture, Petigny perceptively shows that the
1950s were part of a century-long liberal shift.' W. J. Rorabaugh,
author of Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (Cambridge
University Press University of Washington, 2002).
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