The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965 (review)

Alan Petigny's The Permissive Society challenges familiar (and generally complementary) interpretations of U.S. history between 1941 and 1965 set forth by Daniel Bell, Liz Cohen, John D'Emilio, Christopher Lasch, and Elaine Tyler May, among others. According to these scholars, Americans, having endured a Great Depression and won World War II, were predisposed to calibrate and assess their expectations so as to conform to what they perceived and were told was "normative" in the United States. Most women and men—especially in the white middle class—wished to re-create for themselves a sense of normalcy and, for future offspring, a milieu largely devoid of shocks and dislocations comparable to those that they had experienced earlier in their lives.

Petigny, in contrast, claims that liberalizing trends that the vanguard of the Baby Boom cohort often associated with the pill, the frenzy over Led Zeppelin and The Who, youth drug use, and antiwar protests were crystalizing before the 1960s. Freed from fifteen years of struggle and sacrifice, the United States that Petigny reconstructs in The Permissive Society loosened behavioral codes and put emphasis on spontaneity. New impulses were manifest in domains as diverse as the medicalization of alcoholism or advertisements appearing in popular publications and over the airways. Ordinary Americans adopted an ethos, according to Petigny, which widened the gap between individual values and collective norms. "Adding momentum to a process that had been unfolding for well over five decades…the emergence of a Permissive Turn…during the latter half of the 1940s, and continuing throughout the 1950s, the popular ingestion of modern psychology, coupled with significant changes in child-rearing and religious practices, constituted an unprecedented challenge to traditional moral constraints" (pp. 2-3).

Tantalizing evidence bolsters Petigny's thesis about the U.S. as a permissive society between 1941 and 1965. The cumulative impact of some period-specific nuggets is jarring. Do readers presuppose that generational dynamics mattered only as the youth culture emerged? Then what should they make of adults glamorizing MAD magazine and thirty-somethings in the 1950s joining younger fans at Dick Clark's American Bandstand? Why is it significant that Pat Boone plucked Elvis Presley from obscurity as his warm-up act? Reanalyzing data on sexual behavior and attitudes, Petigny concludes that parents in the 1950s discouraged promiscuity, but they did not want their adolescent sons and daughters to be repressed. And views on sexuality, in a period of greater educational opportunities, affected views on women's place in society: "As a rule of thumb, the more schooling an individual possessed, the more inclined she was to be favorable to the liberation of women," The Progressive Society contends. "Conversely, the less education, the less amenable she tended to be toward loosening traditional constraints on women" (p. 162). To counterbalance notions that cultural diversity was not so critical after World War II, the author claims that the popularity of Mahatma Gandhi especially after his martyrdom made him an icon who represented the new era's sense of Self.

Like any good revisionist work, The Progressive Society: America, 1941-1965 forces us to reconsider conventional wisdom about how we describe and bracket successive periods of 20^th-century U.S. history. Most historians have moved beyond treating various decades, such as the 1920s and 1950s, as if what lies between these 10-year intervals encapsulates a distinctive block of time. Chronological boundaries are permeable, as Petigny's concluding paragraph indicates: The years between 1941 and 1965 must be situated in a broader process of cultural transformation. Rates of change were slow in the late 1930s and early 1940s; values and norms largely were aligned. After the Progressive Turn unfolded, with values loosening more rapidly than norms, the nation entered a third phase (from the mid- to late-1960s through much of the 1970s) "in the march toward a freer and more secular culture where individual autonomy became the hallmark of the times" (p. 282).

Reading The Permissive Society invites us...