American Decades
The Postwar Youth Culture
Reemergence of the Youth Culture.
An American youth culture based on adolescent leisure activities had emerged in the prosperous 1920s, but it was sharply curtailed by the financial stringency of the Depression. During the prosperous years that followed World War II it blossomed once again. Middle-class and many working-class teenagers had money to spend on recreation and dating, and they did so with exuberance. The practice of adolescent dating, which also began in the 1920s, grew after the war. Teenagers in this postwar generation were given more autonomy by their parents than adolescents of earlier generations, but the extent of their newfound freedom, especially in regard to experimentation with sex, varied with social and economic class. In general, poor black teenagers growing up in the South had more freedom to engage in premarital sex than black adolescents with wealthier parents. Young, urban workingclass men and women who...
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1940's Lifestyles and Social Trends
