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14 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 Fifties, particularly its promises of white-picketfence happiness. Understanding her rootedness in the Fifties is key to making sense of her. Yet to focus single-mindedly on her ties to the Fifties blinds us to how decisively and courageously she broke with the demands of white-girl femininity of the Fifties, in other words on what was truly new about the Sixties . Finally, what I missed from Whitfield's essay was any appreciation of the Fifties' aberrance. Historians are used to thinking about (and disputing) Sixties exceptionalism, but outside of feminist scholarship, there's been litde attention paid to Fifties' exceptionalism . Yet the Fifties' much-noted culture of containment is best understood in relation to the upheavals of the Depression and World War II, which so destabilized gender, racial, and sexual conventions , and to the backlash it generated in the form of McCarthyism. The Fifties did not have the disruptive feel of the Sixties—unless, of course, you were a left-wing unionist, a blacklisted folksinger or Hollywood artist, a Rosie who longed to continue riveting, or a black veteran whose experience abroad was a welcome respite from American-style racism—but they entailed a rupture. Indeed, the Fifties quarantined and halted much of the experimentation and radicalism of earlier decades, including that of the Popular Front years, and this has perhaps prevented us from seeing the continuities between the Sixties and the periods that preceded the Cold War. To return to Whitfield's useful example of West Side Story, I think one can ask whether Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim , andJerome Robbins would have produced the spiky West Side Story were it not both for their own experiences of marginality and for the gay subcultures of New York City, which after all stretched back much earlier into the 20th century. For that matter, one could point to the artist whose song tide I appropriated for the tide of my essay. Among David Bowie's biggest influences were the Dadaists, whose "gleeful mischief" he sought to recreate in the world of rock.11 Alice Echols is associateprofessor of English, American studies andethnicity, genderstudies, andhistory at USC. Her most recent book is Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks (Columbia University Press, 2002). 1 John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of the HomosexualMinority in the UnitedStates, 1940-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1983); Maurice Isserman, If I Hada Hammer: The Death of the OldLeft andthe Birth of the New Left (Basic Books, 1987); George Lipsitz, A Life in Struggle: Ivory Perry andthe Culture of Opposition (Temple University Press, 1988) and Time Passager. Collective Memory andAmerican Popular Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1990); and LeUa Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survivalin the Doldrums: The American Woman's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1980s (University of North CaroUna Press, 1987). 2 In Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times ofJanisJoplin (MetropoUtan Books, 1999) I discuss the relationship between the Beats and hippies who foUowed them. I Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil'RightsMovement: Black Communities Organising)ror Change (The Free Press, 1984). * Sugrue quoted in Patricia Cohen, "New Slant on the 60s: The Past Made New," New York Times, June 13, 1998, Al3. s Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury:A History (Random House, 1984). 6 Quoted inJames MUler, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987), 315. ' For Kerouac's flag rescue, sec Steven Watson, Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, andHipsters, 1944-1960 (Pantheon, 1995), 297. 1 detail the generational disconnect between firstand second-wave feminists in Daring to Be Bad: RadicalFeminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 8 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The CaseforFeminist Revolution (QuUl, 1993), 89. ' See Linda HamaUan, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (Norton, 1991), 271, 284;James Baldwin, Nobody KnowsMy Name (DeU, 1961), 172. The essay originaUy was pubhshed in the May 1961 issue of Esquire. '" Quoted in "TeUing a Mean Story: Amber HoUibaugh Interviews Dorothy Allison," Women's Review of Books QuIy 1992), 17. IISee "The Artist Who FeU to Earth," Ingrid Sischy's interview with Bowie in Interview (February...

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