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

Who would not buy a book about girls in search of hot sex? Illustrated with colorful evidence about the American girls who decided to “do it,” girls who found sex too exciting not to pursue in the decades before the 1960s counterculture, Bad Girls does not disappoint. As Amanda Littauer writes in this lively, well-researched book, the “victory girls,” “B-girls,” lesbians, and ordinary teenagers of the 1940s and 1950s set the stage for the sexual revolution. Bad Girls is also an account of female sexual courage: if girls couldn’t get what they wanted at home, they often hit the road, leaving school, parents, community, and sometimes a young husband behind.

The sexual revolution is often said to have begun with the marketing of oral contraceptives in 1960 and the widespread availability of all birth control by 1965. But Littauer asks us to rethink these assumptions, arguing that a “long sexual revolution” (3) was already under way before World War II. It accelerated during the war years, when “victory girls” put their bodies to work on behalf of the war effort—and sometimes got a few dollars and a dose of venereal disease in return. In the postwar years, “B-girls,” or “drink solicitors,” seduced men into buying watered-down and fake drinks, earning a percentage of each sale. B-girls sometimes came through with a little sex too, but they did not consider themselves prostitutes. By using their sexuality to make a sale, they “expanded the possibilities for women’s sexual license” (53).

As historians like Alan Bérubé, Leisa Meyer, and Mary Louise Roberts have shown, World War II was a turning point for American sexuality: queer men and women swarmed to cities and military bases in record numbers. War also provided a template for normalizing heterosexual, white male violence. But as Littauer notes, the war put civilian girls in motion too, allowing them to break free of family and community to participate in creating a distinctive and public sexual youth culture. After the war, sexologist Alfred Kinsey entered the conversation that girls and women had already begun. Littauer argues that Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in October 1953, brought “a wider range of female voices into the postwar conversation about sexuality” (82). Some women participated in the study (importantly, as Littauer notes, Kinsey only sought out white informants), while other sexually active women wrote to Dr. Kinsey with frank questions.

How to balance girls’ desire for hot premarital sex with support for the institution of marriage? One cultural compromise was “going steady” and other forms of play marriage, which allowed young women to engage in heavy petting and intercourse within the tacit rules of monogamous engagement. With sexual talk, sexual experimentation skyrocketed—but so did pregnancy and VD. “Between 1940 and 1960,” Littauer informs us, “census data shows a 2.5-fold increase in single motherhood among white women and a threefold increase among all women of childbearing age” (113). If some of this intercourse was acquaintance rape, a term that Littauer introduces while acknowledging that many girls would not have recognized it as rape, it was also the logical endpoint of the heavy petting, digital penetration, and oral sex that girls welcomed.

Littauer reads her sources deeply to tease out three key themes in postwar sexuality studies: acquaintance rape and sexual force; African American girls’ embrace of their own sexuality; and the spread of sexual practices and sex knowledge—particularly oral sex—within teen culture. Bad Girls does not minimize the costs of female desire; unwanted pregnancies, hastily arranged and ill-advised marriages, and dangerous illegal abortions were common. Yet Littauer makes a persuasive argument for why women in search of sexual pleasure would risk “getting caught” to have it. Using sources that range from health and social work records to oral histories, memoirs, and popular culture, Littauer records...