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

This engrossing study combines five accounts of “rebellious” young women and girls who navigated, adapted, and confronted conflicting moral messages and efforts to regulate sexual behavior amidst changing American sexual codes between World War II and the end of the 1950s. Focusing on diverse women and a range of expert voices, Littauer shows how individuals experienced and challenged attempts to contain their sexual choices. Through unorganized actions, youthful female sexual agency exposed deep contradictions between prescription and practice, and helped propel America towards what John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman termed “sexual liberalism.”

Bad Girls connects the war and postwar period to early twentieth-century sexual shifts and foreshadows the late 1960s upheavals. By tracing 1940s and 1950s developments in both action and attitude, Littauer sees a longer “sexual evolution” over a quicker “revolution” (142). In contrast to earlier literature, Littauer argues continuity existed in premarital sexual behavior and standards (rather than a brief wartime breach and postwar retrenchment to conservatism), contributing to new scholarship documenting significant rebellion, change, and liberalism in the “conservative” 1950s.

Chapter 1 frames the war as permanently opening up new possibilities for “sexual self-assertion” for young women and girls who flipped the sexual script through dogged pursuit of adventure and economic opportunities (19). Extending recent work on “Victory Girls,” Littauer offers unique spatial analysis of the booming wartime sexual culture and explores the emotional and economic motivations of young women within it, demonstrating the ways that—by refusal to curtail their (very public) actions—they “widened the gap between sexual conduct and standards” (51). The drink-soliciting B-girls of chapter 2 also claimed new visible space for women within San Francisco taverns and bars during wartime and after and blurred the lines between commercial and casual sex by exploiting the illusion that they were not sex workers but career girls seeking post-work drinks. These women navigated the dangers of arrest, sexual violence, and economic exploitation through a professional subculture providing strategies and networks of support, surviving bouts of reform and regulation to maintain their economic livelihood.

Chapter 3 is Littauer’s strongest case for women’s roles in shaping sexual standards, investigating their written contributions to the public debates surrounding Alfred Kinsey’s reports on the sexual practices of Americans, participation in his research, and the contradictions in their own sexual experiences. Their accounts, coupled with Kinsey’s revelation of illicit-but-common sexual practices, made visible the “sexual hypocrisy of post-war culture” and the challenges of interpreting conflicting and competing sources of authority (134). Chapter 4 builds on the work of Beth Bailey and Elaine Tyler May, who rooted the widespread practice of “going steady” within the Cold War search for stability-through-domesticity, through substantial engagement with contemporary experts’ discussion of a new “permissive with affection” standard that purportedly legitimized some youthful sexual exploration within relationships. Littauer’s close analysis of clinical studies provides glimpses of youth and their families, showing that “going steady” and being “in love” were flexible categories, though not without consequence. The final chapter examines the contributions of queer teenage girls, whose “failure” to achieve mature adulthood (as theorized by postwar social science) confounded heterosexual gender norms, while partaking in the pleasures of sex and domesticity. Not yet politicized advocates, these young lesbians—revealed through secondary oral histories and clinical studies—created nascent queer identities, resourcefully pursued information, and formed crucial ties to other lesbians that sustained them in a dangerous era.

Bad Girls contains compelling arguments, but Littauer has difficulty supporting causality between individual acts and widespread change in belief and policy, in part because change over time is ambiguous and empirical evidence tenuous, and several subsections seem disconnected from historiography. Overall, her sources are wonderfully extensive, encompassing a wealth of popular media; contemporary social science research; and oral histories, memoirs, and personal letters. However, supporting selections...