Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties by Amanda H. Littauer (review)

At a glance, when considering pre-1960s notions or representations of sexuality in US culture, “sexual nonconformity” and rebellion would typically be unlikely terms applied to the wartime and the Cold War era. These decades may indeed conjure up popular images of long-limbed white pin up girls and Hollywood glamour, but the prevailing discourses, messages, and morals that circulated around women’s sexuality are often recalled as conservative, revolving around the institution of heterosexual marriage and the (white) nuclear family as a microcosm of the nation. While revolutionary fervour, changing sexual mores, and increased visible articulations of female sexual agency are ordinarily associated with the proceeding decades, during the 1940s and 1950s many teen girls and women participated in a range of sexual behaviours and practices that flouted normative expectations of feminized sexuality. As Amanda Littauer contends in Bad Girls, World War II “left a legacy of young female sexual self-assertion that would generate both conservative and liberal responses in the postwar years,” galvanizing calls for women’s sexual agency, and influencing the sexual cultures of the 1960s and 1970s. (19)

While scholars have highlighted the more liberal facets of the 1940s and 1950s, very little of this scholarship examines the experiences, thoughts, and experiences of sexual agency of women and girls. Beginning in the 1970s, feminist and queer historians have worked to make visible how the wartime home front generated new opportunities for heterosexual women, gay men, and lesbians to claim sexual and economic agency in ways that were unprecedented. Postwar America was a period of paradox concerning sexuality; these decades may have been rife with restriction, but also of vocal debate, giving rise to the Homophile and Civil Rights movements, prompting challenges to racial segregation, and seeing the publication of the Kinsey reports. There was also a heightened sense of panic about the sexual morality of women and girls, fears surrounding the spread of venereal diseases and miscegenation, and efforts to surveil and contain these “threats.” Considering that heightened restrictions so often suggest greater contestation, Bad Girls refutes the notion that practices of pre-1960s sexual nonconformity were temporary, but rather recognizes these practices as part of “the long sexual revolution,” and refuses to cordon off women and girls articulation of sexual agency to the 1960s and 1970s. (2)

The task of locating and making visible the experiences and agency of women and their sexuality in this historical moment is no easy task. Considering that “the thoughts of most women and girls are lost to history” – particularly when historians rightly attend to intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class – feminist historians have to be methodologically and theoretically creative. (82) Littauer presents an “omnivorous approach” in her text, tracking the relationships between prevailing ideologies and representations, working with and extrapolating from a myriad of sources, including: state and federal contact reports that attempted to track women who were named by servicemen as possible sources of venereal diseases; policy makers and law enforcement agents who used their power and authority in forms of social control; social scientific studies that sought to observe and understand postwar sexual cultures; and, when possible, the testimonies of women and girls themselves. (11)

Littauer infers evidence of female sexual agency and practices through the sites of contact that women often had with institutions of authority, such as through the documents (“contact reports”) left by government officials who sought to limit the interactions between servicemen and civilian women, many of whom were seen as infringing on social spaces typically reserved for men. Well aware that wartime had altered the sexual landscape, Littauer argues that officials and the public alike feared that what they saw as an encroaching tide of sexual liberalism would erode the institution of marriage and increase occurrences of “juvenile delinquency.” (21) These anxieties were largely focused on the bodies of women and girls; from figures like Victory Girls and B-Girls of the 1940s and 1950s – who were...