Women In America After Ww2

The increase in wage enticed many women to join the labor force. History usually assumes that this increase in the women labor market (specifically married women), and the new jobs opened to women, caused this ideological change in our society. These changes lead to the acceptance of married women in the workplace, and more desegregated workplace.
World War II opened a new chapter in the lives of Depression-weary Americans. The United States of America had an unusual importance in the war; it had been spared the physical destruction that had taken place throughout the world. Americans on the home front did not see the fighting and brutality as other countries experienced it. However, the events and changes on the home front due to the World
War transformed America. One of the greatest conversions was that of the American woman. Women around the country were transformed from the average house wife into a person with a voice and most importantly a purpose. For the first time women were working in the industries of America. As husbands and fathers, sons and brothers shipped out to fight in Europe and the Pacific, millions of women marched into factories, offices, and military bases to work in paying jobs and in roles reserved for men in peacetime. Women were making a living that was not comparable to anything they had seen before. They were dependent on themselves; for once they could support the household. Most of the work in industry was related to the war, such as radios for airplanes and shells for guns. The end of World War II brought a baby boom to many countries, especially Western ones. There is some disagreement as to the precise beginning and ending dates of the post-war baby boom, but it is most often agreed to begin in the years immediately after the war, ending more than a decade later; birth rates in the United States started to decline in 1957. In areas that had suffered heavy war damage, displacement of people and post-war economic hardship, such as Poland, the boom began some years later. When the war ended in 1945, millions of veterans returned home and were forced to integrate.
To help the integration process, Congress passed the G.I Bill of Rights. This bill encouraged home ownership and investment in higher education through the distribution of loans at low or no interest rates to veterans. Returning G.I.’s were getting married, starting families, pursuing higher education and buying their first homes. With veteran’s benefits, the twenty-something’s found new homes in planned communities on the outskirts of American cities. This group, whose formative years covered the Great Depression, was a generation hardened by poverty and deprived of the security of a home or job. Now thriving on the American Dream, life was simple, jobs were plentiful and babies were booming. Many Americans believed that lack of post-war government spending would send the United States back into depression. However, consumer demand fueled economic growth. The baby boom triggered a housing boom, consumption boom and a boom in the labor force. Between 1940 and 1960, the nation’s GDP jumped more than $300,000 million. The middle class grew and the majority of America’s labor force held white-collar jobs. This increase led to urbanization and increased the demand for ownership in cars and other '50s and '60s
inventions Pop Art, a form of Postmodernism, describes the genre of art during and after World War II. The question I am exploring within this topic is why did the influence of the time period of World War II create such sexual and abstracts work of art? Abstract works of art ? The idea or actual creation of sexual and abstract images have been around for centuries, Yet the idea of linking a genre of art works to the timed in which they were created doesn’t appear as a major topic of discussion. However the perspectives of Pop Art seem to dominate fiercely in the world of art critics. The 1940’s through the 1960’s were not only some of the most socially and politically volatile times in American History, but were the catalyst for the numerous changes in which occurred in American Popular culture during these and following years. Instead of experiencing the trauma which resulted after World War I’s end, post-World War II United States returned fairly easily back to everyday life. Although there were some problems converting from wartime to a peacetime economy in the late 1940’s, Americans took on the task and entered the 1950’s on a very auspicious high note. During the time period after World War II, the United States experienced many changes. Technology was abundant and the rate at which new inventions, industries and technologies came about was at a rate never seen before. From a television in every home to the first computers and ultimately space flight, these two decades after World War II were crowded with advancements. Some of the most dramatic changes came in the field of art. What was once a single, slow road of popular culture advancement branched off into thousands of smaller, faster changing roads. Even for astute, well-informed observers, following the progress of American art since World War II can be confounding. "Isms," movements, counter-movements, variations, vogues, and fads seem to come and go with increasing rapidity. Art historian Marshall B. Davidson notes: "Developments and changes that were formerly wrought over several decades, at least, now take place in a matter of seasons, and what the mass media hail as the latest trend one week, may be obsolete the next." Indeed, the mass media -- along with the nationwide growth of sophisticated art communities and the evolution of modern-leaning college and university art departments -- are in great measure responsible for the swift spread of ideas and experiences. But as later-twentieth-century people have come to "consume" information, entertainment, and fashions (not to mention goods and natural resources) at an accelerated pace, so do styles satiate and quickly pall. Creative persons are continually challenged to explore and experiment Ironically, for all of humankind's cultural sharing -- in the physical sciences, behavioral sciences, education, as well as the arts and humanities -- the troublesome fact remains that, on a global scale, social, political, economic, and environmental problems evade solution. The post-war decades have seen enormous upheaval and collective apprehension, distress that is reflected in much American art. "It was primarily as a result of the cataclysmic events surrounding World War II," Davidson continues, "that artists began to revise their fundamental precepts and devise new approaches to their work that would express the distortion and anarchism of the age." Similarly, John Wilmerding reflects: "The explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 marked a turning point in modern history; for the first time the human race possessed the ability to destroy itself totally. Man's affairs seemed to assume a heroic and tragic scale. Not surprisingly, so did the art of the period." And in a kind of apologia for abstract expressionism (a term first coined by critic Clement Greenberg), the dominant modern movement of the late '40s and '50s, former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Robert Beverly Hale declares:
If our art seems violent, it is because we have perpetrated more violence than any other generation. If it deals with weird dreams, it is because we have opened the caverns of the mind and let such phantoms loose. If it is filled with broken shapes, it is because we have watched the order of our fathers break and fall to pieces at our feet. We have seen in our century the development of fantastic scientific paraphernalia -- and much ill will. We live in fear of some monstrous event which will bring, at best, a curious and distorted future; at worst, annihilation. The artist is in part a prophet. We should not complain if the shadows that have lately haunted us have for some time been visible upon his canvas. While abstract expressionism dominated contemporary American painting and sculpture in the late '40s and '50s, the prevailing modern architectural mode was its aesthetic contradiction: the orderly, strict-modular, sheer, rectangular design systems of the International Style. Introduced before the War by German émigrés Walter Gropius and Ludwig Meis van der Rohe, the style remained pre-eminent for business and large office structures through and beyond the time of the two men's death in 1967. Variations are built to the present day. But, as in the fine arts, reaction set in by the 1960s. Such inventive architect-designers as Louis I. Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and I. M. Pei led, as Frederick Koeper describes, "a major shift in contemporary architecture toward geometrical order and the celebration of the wall after many decades of ascendancy of the metal skeleton." Indeed, walls once again become massive elements to contrast surfaces of glass, and, particularly in reinforced concrete structures, curved planes and continuous "skins" or "shells" are part of the architect's more recent technical vocabulary. Some forms of architectural expression in the '80s -- the work of Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, and Michael Graves, for example -- are highly sculptural and decorative, with artfully integrated ornament, albeit of stylized or abstract design. A signal comparison of nomenclature for certain concurrent movements in painting and sculpture, much architecture of the '70s and '80s is critically identified as "post-modern." The "Beat Movement" in modern literature has become an important period in the history of literature and society in America.
Incorporating influences such as jazz, art, literature, philosophy and religion, the beat writers created a new vision of modern life and changed the way a generation of people seen the world. The generation is now aging and its representative voices are becoming lost, but the message is alive and well. The Beats have forever changed the nature of American literature. They offered a method of escape from the unimaginative world we live in. There are many different writers whose work contributed to the literature of the beat movement; however; Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg were the most famous authors."In the age that coined the word "togetherness" as a synonym for family values, the Beats, each in his own style mounted the first open, sustained assault in American history on the masculine role as heterosexual spouse, father and grown-up provider. In the midst of the Cold War crusade against all deviations from the masculine norm, in the era that could almost be said to have invented the idea of classified information, they openly addressed homosexuality, bisexuality, and masturbation in their work, declassifying the secrets of the male body, making sexuality as complex as individual identity and pushing their chosen forms to new limits in the process" (Ann
Douglas) Many of the key Beat Generation figures were homosexual or bisexual, some of them quite openly, including two of the most prominent writers (Ginsberg and Burroughs). Many of them met each other through homosexual social connections, specifically David Kammerer's interest in Lucien Carr. One of the contentious features of Ginsberg's poem Howl for authorities were lines about homosexual sex. William Burroughs' Naked Lunch focuses on drug use, but also contains sexual content. In addition to references to homosexuality, it included explicit descriptions of alternative sexual practices. Both works were prosecuted for obscenity. Victory by the publishers in both cases in effect marked the end of literary censorship in the United States.