Speaking of Milwaukee...

As long as were sharing historical pics we like....

No idea of the age of this ... 1920s? First encountered it in Wolski's (an east-side Milwaukee bar for you uninitiates). Always had fantasies of tearing it down and taking her home with me. Now I don't have to!

Nothing in particular to say about this that couldn't go for every female personification of progress, geography, etc. Although the accessories are Milwaukee-specific which makes it pretty awesome if you're familiar with that place ... and a little odd if you're not. (Click pic for close-up). Also funny cuz when I think of Milwaukee, neither prosperity nor hot ladies come to mind very often. (ouch.)

Discussion Section: Hollywood Productions for the Early American Survey

Teaching the Early American History (to 1865) survey for the first time with a class period ripe for motion picture showings. However, I've been at a loss for what to show as somewhat faithful Hollywood-style secondary sources or "based on a true story" film productions that present a point of departure for critiquing memory and history production, etc. I began thinking about this after showing quite possibly the most boring pbs documentary production; so boring that I actually felt guilty for wasting my students time with just a half an hour of this poorly paced work.

Even though it's a little late for my class, I thought it might be useful to create a little list for future reference.

Non-documentary tv/films I have used:
The New World (2005)
HBO's John Adams (2008)
Gangs of New York (2002)

Non-documentary tv/films I have considered:
Amistad (1997)
Roots (1977)
The Patriot (2000)
Glory (1989)

That's a very limited selection, especially considering that in Modern US or 20th Century classes I have more films I want to show than time available.

What else is out there? (I mean besides those Civil War miniseries that were quite popular in the 1980s.)

Awesome Documents from Summer School Post Fünf: Manifest Destiny, or Turner's Frontier Thesis Part 2*

I take mralarm's "American Progress" and raise it a "Looking Down Yosemite Valley" (1865).


Nothing says the divine right of continental expansion or "Thank you, Providence -- this shit is ours" like an empty fertile valley, a canyon parted like the Red Sea, and a westward perspective that takes us towards the "light."

I don't know, the landscapes of the Hudson River School are fine and all, but if its the late-19th century, and my name is Alfred Bierstadt then I'm heading to Milwaukee and running for mayor.

*credit actually to a student of mine, and fellow teacher, for pointing out the utility of Mr. Bierstadt's work for this subject.

Tipping? A practice that denigrates the recipient, or a damn good way to make some extra money...

I came across the following passage, written in the 1890s, during the course of doing research on domestic service. Many women considered the occupation "degraded" in the nineteenth century and avoided it at all costs. Lucy Maynard Salmon, a professor at Vassar, blamed tipping, or what she referred to as "feeing":



I was thinking that it would be kind of swell to be tipped after giving a good lecture. Hell, I would be happy to even receive a holiday fruitcake. Perhaps this is the distance of the 21st century speaking. Tipping has far more acceptance in American culture today.

Then again, how individuals appreciate and measure merit can be problematic and hopelessly captive to popular opinion. The lecturer who would probably get the most tips is the one who droned on endlessly about the bravery of soldiers during the Civil War...

Shark Justice

In 1647 English lower gentryman and royalist supporter Richard Ligon lost everything in the English Civil War. He then sailed to Barbados as a refugee, taking many notes and later publishing them as the now famous True and Exact History of Barbados. The book includes scenes from his ship voyage, including many descriptions of seafish etc., and this one: Seeing as how some of our HSS readers are known shark enthusiasts, I though it appropriate to post:

There is a Fish called a Sharke, which he as is a common enemy to Saylers and all others that venture, in Calmes, to commit their naked bodies to the sea (for he often bites off Legs, sometimes Armes, and now and then swallowes the whole body, if the Fish bee great): So when the Saylers take them, they use them accordingly. Sometimes by putting out their eyes, and throwing them over bord; sometimes by mangling and cutting their bodies, finns, and tayles, making them a prey to others, who were mercilesse Tyrants themselves; And in this kind of justice they are very Accurate.

Accurate indeed. Karma for you, fish face!

Confessions

Three unpopular beliefs, held by one unpopular historian:

1. False consciousness is a useful and mostly accurate way of thinking about mass culture.
   
2. The study of "great, white men" is essential for those seeking to understand most historical periods.
   
3. The United States is, in many ways, exceptional.
   

That felt great. Anyone else have any historical confessions they'd like to get off their chests?

Awesome Documents from Summer School, Post 4: Modernity and Mass Culture

I love Busby Berkeley. The guy had an awesome name and his choreography was truly amazing. Berkeley routines are super fun to watch, and they are perfect for illustrating the links between mass production and mass culture during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The routines vividly illustrate the key concepts of taylorization: mathematical precision, uniformity, scientific management, the interchangeability of individual workers, abstraction, fragmentation, repetition.

I love this particular clip because it makes these connections so shamelessly. In "Bend Down Sister," the links between mass production and mass culture aren't just figurative - they're literal!



I love how the routine conflates female factory workers with their mass produced product. The overall message also tips its hat to the burgeoning beauty culture of the period, making it great for teaching the notion of woman as both spectacle and object of exchange. Finally, there's a great "gay joke" around minute 1:15. Hilarious!

Grant's Tome and the Presidential Memoir of the Month Club

*Crawling out of my summer fortress of solitude where summer school instruction, dissertation chapters, and baseball play in continuous loops.*

The bloggers at the New York Times' "Room for Debate" recently asked a number of historians and biographers to offer up advice to my former fellow cellar dweller and now reputed vox pop and memoir writer Dick Cheney.

The consensus model memoir is Ulysses S. Grant's, which I haven't read and thus cannot comment on -- plus it's never clear why this one is so top-notch. Apparently it left the widow Grant with a nice nest egg. (That's not necessarily an issue with the Cheneys, what with one novelist already in the family.)

Other greatest hits include works by Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Calvin Coolidge (!) and memoirs by right-hand henchmen like Dean Acheson and George Kennan. Somehow the complete works of Gerald Ford didn't make the cut. While the participants keep their subjectivity in check, they are certainly show ol' Dick down the path of troubled and flawed presidencies.

All the participants play along, offering detailed analyses of these supposed great works. All, that is, except David Levering Lewis. This is all he had to say:

I would say that Grant’s presidential memoir is the best of the genre, unparalleled to date. Dean Acheson’s “Present at the Creation” is grand cru political memoir. And I’d also single out the Georgia coming-of-age remembrance by Jimmy Carter. As for the historical value of Cheney’s and Rice’s memoirs, I’d not expect much gain for the record of the republic.

No one offered up any notable vice presidential memoirs -- at least by veeps who never became president (and let's hope that is the case for Cheney). Presumably there's something out there like Spiro Ag[k]new All Along or Dan Quayle's Bird Under Glass that could give Mr. Cheney some direction.

Awesome Documents from Summer School, Post 3: Technology and Perception

Wolfgang Shivelbusch, an independent scholar who has been writing "transnational" history since long before the field was trendy, is my very favorite historian. His book, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century is a fabulous text for teaching how technological change affects perception, consciousness, and daily life. A particularly interesting section of the book explores the meanings of the railroad accident in the nineteenth century and its impacts on the fields of medicine, law, and psychology.

Mark Seltzer's Serial Killers: Life and Death in America's Wound Culture is not as good for teaching (too dense/difficult for an intro-level class in my opinion), but it does include a pretty cool episode that meshes well with Schivelbusch's arguments about railroad accidents:


"Train wrecker, before that, businessman" strikes me as a really great response to the "what's your profession" question.

Awesome Documents from Summer School, Post 2: Turner's Frontier Thesis

Are you now using or have you ever used this image in your classroom? Have you encountered it in a classroom?


Poor John Gast. Dude's like a lessonplan. Zing.

Awesome Documents from Summer School, Post 1: Civil War and Reconstruction

I'm instructing the second "half" of the United States history survey this summer. It is, admittedly, my favorite half. And to make the whole deal even more exciting, this time... its GLOBAL. I'm teaching from a global perspective, people, and I have documents to share.

This isn't exactly a "historical" document in the pure sense of the term, but it is awesome (the surprising, apprehension-producing kind of awesome, of course):

Your Imperial History, Sponsored by Your New Emperors

Last month I spent a day in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There you’ll find “Old San Juan:” the neighborhood that dates back to the Spanish conquistador era. Atop a hill overlooking this area town is “EL Morro” an enormous Spanish fort constructed between the 16th and 18th centuries. A very, very cool citadel.

To the Puerto Ricans it’s a place of “national” pride. Many of the placards in the site make reference to the former might of this arsenal, and emphasize the powerful legacy of imperial Spain. But how Spanish might relates to local pride is unclear. Spain for its part arrived in 1494, promptly killed all the original inhabitants, and repopulated the island with indian subjects from elsewhere in their American empire. So whether current Puerto Ricans identify with colonizer or colonized in this case, I know not. Regardless, it's a popular place.

Geopolitical history: due to Caribbean wind patterns, if you’re a ship coming from Europe, Puerto Rico is first the island you encounter with fresh water (important after a long Atlantic trek). Now on Puerto Rico, there’s only one place suitable for a major harbor: the San Juan bay. Harbors are important if you want your ship to stay anchored during a storm. The bay itself has a relatively small mouth, so control it and you thus control the bay, thus the island, and thus all of the Caribbean, so the logic went.

Here is a picture of that bay mouth, which the fort overlooks with its scores of gunports.

Here is a picture of a passing ship, taken from one of those gunports.

Here is a pic of a port with a gun still in it. Think you could hit that ship from here? If not, no worries! El Morro had 50+ cannon posts, so I think as a whole its odds were pretty good.

In sum, it’s one of old Spain’s most impressive military engineering feats. As such it kept the island safe for over 400 years. Despite numerous attacks, no imperial rival was ever able to best the fortifications of “El Morro.”

At least not until 1898. That year the U.S.A., fresh with global ambitions and cutting edge battleships, laid waste to the Spanish defenses within a few hours. The attack was part of the larger Spanish-American War, wherein the adolescent America decided it was now strong enough to piss with the imperial big dogs, and proved it by beating up on the by-then-moribund Spanish empire, taking Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines all within six weeks.

We’ve since given up on the later two of those territories, but to this day Puerto Rico remains a U.S. “protectorate” (a euphemism for colony). As a colony, the island uses U.S. dollars, the U.S. Postal Service, U.S. phone services, and this:
And that’s the most interesting part. In addition to the questionable legitimacy of a public history story which emphasizes P.R. nationalism by drawing upon the might of a former conqueror, the site itself is managed by a successive conqueror! After demolishing large parts of the fort with big battleship bombs, the U.S. spent lots of money in the 20th century restoring “El Morro” to its former condition. Today the Department of the Interior maintains the area. And despite National Park Service's out-of-place pine tree logo in front of the building, the role of the U.S. government is largely silent within the fort’s historical presentations.

Fool me once, shame on you. But fool me twice…

oops

I'm mostly ok with the speech Obama made yesterday at Buchenwald. Perhaps a bit too much on the American GI experience for a speech on death camps, if you ask me. And check out his unfortunate, uncharacteristic slip at minute 7:55:

On Fakes II

Morris published part 6 of the Bamboozling Ourselves series today and I realized that I forgot to note in my previous post that the essay is deeply historical. From footnote 38:

"When you get to the time 65-85 years ago, the past becomes extremely confusing because our knowledge of the past as second-hand memories inherited from our grand-parents, becomes hopelessly intertwined with our knowledge of the past as an objective history written up in books. The great British historian Eric Hobsbawn called this time a twilight zone between history and memory, a no-man’s land of time — a time that is simultaneously part of us and very important to us, but that has also slipped from our reach. He suggested that it is almost impossible to acquire a fair representation of what happened in this twilight zone. The story of van Meegeren is located in our own twilight zone. Hence I think our fascination, and hence also our frustration.”

It is very much worth reading, for historians and others.

On Fakes

Errol Morris has another amazing essay up at Zoom, his nyt blog. Like his other Zoom essays, "Bamboozling Ourselves" is composed as a series of installations that are published online over a period of several days (Morris has delivered 5 of the promised 7 installations so far). The topic of the essay is the infamous Dutch art forger and Nazi sympathizer, Han van Meegeren, whose case Morris uses as a springboard for musing about the nature of art, authenticity, authorship, aesthetics, and expertise.

The piece reminds me quite a bit of the brilliant, but challenging, Orson Welles film F for Fake, which also addresses the topic of forgery and explores many of the same questions as Morris' essay. I'm actually surprised he hasn't mentioned it yet - its a rare and strange movie, but a filmmaker like Morris has to have seen it.

Welles made F for Fake in 1974, late in his career. I saw it at a film festival at the Castro theatre in San Francisco several years ago, during a period when I was suffering from a very serious Tiger Beat-Teen Bop obsession with Welles. The F for Fake wikipedia entry offers a pretty hilarious summary of the film's reception:

F for Fake faced widespread popular rejection in the United States upon its release, though it fared better commercially in Europe. Critical reaction ranged from praise to confusion and hostility, with many finding the work to be indulgent or incoherent. F for Fake has, however, grown in stature over the years and is now often considered not only a film classic, but a precursor to modern editing techniques as well as a popularizer of more avant-garde methods.

For those readers who like the Morris essay, have an interest in art forgery, and are looking for a film that induces confusion and hostility, I highly recommend F for Fake. I found an extended trailer for the thing on youtube - it is both much better and much worse than the actual movie:



If you got through that in one piece, but were hoping for more of the "indulgence" mentioned in the wikipedia entry, try this clip, from a section of the film where Welles contemplates the meaning of authorship and the making of Chatres:

Depicting the "Sub-Prime" Household

I'm sure many of you have already seen this visualization of the "credit crisis" by Jonathan Jarvis. The 11-minute animation (embedded at the end of this post) is a part of Jarvis's master's thesis, which explores how to "use new media to make sense of an increasingly complex world."

The visualization does a fantastic job at explaining the economic downturn in an accessible, informative way. The use of simple, iconic, visual representations to explain complex financial processes is a strategy that I think has a lot of promise, especially when it comes to expanding awareness and understanding of these processes to the general public. One of the great lessons of the economic downturn is the idea that global and national financial systems affect everyone. The financial crisis has taught us to question the "experts" who design and command our economy by underscoring the fact that we all have a stake in the management and operation of capital.

That said, after watching, reading, and listening to analyses of the "financial crisis" for months now, I've noticed some troubling trends. Jarvis' animation offers an important contribution to popular understanding of our current economic situation, but like so many depictions of the crisis these days, it also has some problems. One that stands out to me most clearly occurs in in the seventh minute of the visualization, in a section illustrating "prime" and "subprime" mortgages:



I'm fascinated with Jarvis' depiction of the sub-prime household, mostly because it lays bare the assumptions pretty much everyone is making, but rarely stating, about who these people really are. I don't want to overextend myself here, but my reading of this image is that that sub-prime family exhibits many of the characteristics that have been historically attributed in the popular imagination to poor, black households: irresponsible behavior (drinking, smoking), obesity, out-of-control fertility... Do what you will with the presence of a tattoo on the man and poofy hair on the woman (both missing in the depiction of the prime household), or the fact that this family doesn't even have a dog. The point is that the sub-prime household is depicted not simply as poor, but also as immoral.

I think the racialization of the "immoral, sub-prime household" in this depiction and others deserves more discussion. The stench of immorality associated with the financial crisis has elicited a lot of rage over the past six-eight months. Most of this rage has been directed at "greedy" lenders and traders, but the undercurrent of contempt for "sub-prime" households cannot be ignored.

What's missing for me in discussions of the economic crisis is a historical approach that takes into account changing constructions of race, poverty, family, and home ownership in the United States. I agree that it is vital for the general public to understand the workings of our financial system, but that understanding will be incomplete if it doesn't connect economic processes to the cultural and social forces that have shaped them.

If anyone has encountered this kind of analysis in popular sources, I'd love to read them - links are welcome in the comments section.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Part I:


The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Part II:

Happy Law Day and Loyalty Day!

Today, May 1, Americans celebrate two very important holidays: Law Day and Loyalty Day.

Law Day was introduced in 1958 by Dwight D. Eisenhower. A few years later, Congress passed a joint resolution, designating May 1 as "Law Day, U.S.A." Has a nice ring to it, no? The joint resolution requests that the president issue a proclamation each year that identifies Law Day as:

...a special day of celebration by the people of the United States … in appreciation of their liberties and the reaffirmation of their loyalty to the United States and of their rededication to the ideals of equality and justice under law in their relations with each other and with other countries; … for the cultivation of the respect for law that is so vital to the democratic way of life ... inviting the people of the United States to observe Law Day, U.S.A., with appropriate ceremonies and in other appropriate ways, through public entities and private organizations and in schools and other suitable places.

A year after introducing Law Day, holiday-lover Eisenhower introduced another important celebration to the American calendar - Loyalty Day. Form United States Code 36 § 115:

I love the emphasis both holidays place on "appropriate" celebration. Less appropriate observances also occur on May 1, in the Unites States and around the world. Those inclined to honor labor celebrate International Workers Day. The more paganly-inclined celebrate the Walpurgisnach,Samhain, and Þrimilci-mōnaþ (beginning of the so-called Month of Milkings). And finally, Hawaiians celebrate island culture on May 1 with Lei Day. 

Here's to a very auspicious May 1 for all HSS readers - weather you celebrate the rule of law, the workers of the world, or the many milkings to occur this month.

Religion Professor Cites Kant, GM in Single Op-Ed

In a recent NYT op-ed, chair of the religion department at Columbia, Mark C. Taylor, compared graduate education to automobile production:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

This comparison seems a little unfair to Detroit. A federal bailout of graduate education would be nice, though.

Taylor offers some interesting ideas about how to fix the university system. Some are better than others, but I'm particularly fond of this one:

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

I have two suggestions on this concept. First, a seven-year evaluation cycle seems a bit much. Does Taylor really think the Departments of Mind or Time will become obsolete that quickly? Second suggestion: Where's the Department of Archives? Honestly, I really think we need a Department of Archives.

I'm less fond of this idea:

Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

Taylor is clearly fond of seven-year cycles, and while I like the consistency of that, I'm not sure I can get behind abolishing tenure. I imagine a total overthrow every seven years. Like what if a bunch of folks from the Money Department decided to take down the Body Department in review? And what if they succeed and the Body Department was disbanded and the entire Body faculty fired? Then, like seven years later, when interest in Body studies experiences a resurgence, everyone asks "why doesn't anyone study the body?" And they start pointing fingers and then suddenly the Money Department is being questioned - Is it necessary? Just a hold over from an earlier seven year cycle, too out of step with today's important issues to continue as a department? And so on. I wonder if Taylor's current departmental affiliation, religion, has anything to do with his take on tenure?

the cult and capital of heavy metals

Reading a retrospective of the first few Black Sabbath albums this evening ... geezer band members and sound engineers trying to cobble together drug-eroded memories about studio details, production sequences, etc. ... a fairly hackneyed article genre in the classic rock world. But then in the middle of this narrative, a third type of character enters the story: the record label sales exec! Appearing only briefly, his comments seem interjectory and out of place. He says this about the song Paranoid, the band's first big hit single in 1970:

"We were looking for a single," says Joe Smith, who signed the group to Warner Bros., "and they were hard to get. There was still resistance in Top 40 radio to playing any single by one of these bands. If somebody's going to take a shot, 'Paranoid' was the record to take a shot with. Also, it was a great title for a single at the time."
....
"Although the single only made it to Number 61 in the States, Black Sabbath had a special distinction at Warner Bros., as Joe Smith relates: "What astounded us was the sales. Black Sabbath was our most efficient seller. There's a certain curve where the sales end. With Black Sabbath it never ended. It never totally stopped. The fever would be gone, but you'd still be selling 5,000 a week or 10,000 a week, so we never had returns with Black Sabbath. They had six Platinum albums in a row; multi-Platinum albums. There is a feeling among kids now that they missed something and here's a chance to get it back, and Black Sabbath is one of the very few groups in that genre that's out there playing."

Never mind that the band which invented the metal genre -- a music form based almost totally on youthful rebellion to authority -- has the honor of holding a multi-million dollar media conglomerate's "Most Efficient Seller" title. I'm interested in this idea about "kids" getting to purchase a little piece of history -- to participate in shared mythological past that's not based around nationality, or the state, or demons and Norse gods, but on a space constructed by the industry which sells access to it. Teenage anxieties are assuaged through spending capital, and the kids can "get back" those good-ol'-days of the 1970s when the drugs were strong, the music loud, the parents powerless, and the women clad in fantasy undergarments.

Historians like to talk about developments such as this in very macro, abstract terms. We use phrases like "capitalism" or "imagined communities" or "capillaries of power" to describe ubiquitous forces or long term trends which affect our lives without us even realizing it. But in this exec's last sentence, I'm actually shocked at how simultaneously cognizant and ignorant he is about these very processes at work. Ick.

The Passion of Marx and Engels (as told by J. Edgar Hoover)

In early 1958, at the height of the Cold War, the country's greatest hell/crime-fighter, J. Edgar Hoover, pandered to the red fears of the masses with Masters of Deceit: What the communist bosses are doing now to bring America to its knees.


The book is the kind of sensationalism you'd expect from pure red-baiting drivel, but there are moments when it appears Hoover (or his ghostwriter William Nichols) did his homework, such as when he discusses dialectical materialism. I would certainly recommend this book over the even subber than subpar (though nonetheless entertaining) You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) by Dr. Fred Schwarz (1960), if only because Hoover is such an intriguing and important figure in US history.

In the intellectual biographies of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels it is particularly striking how Hoover employs the sex lives of the two to discount their theories. For a man whose own sexual proclivities were shrouded from the public and have long since been debated and parodied in popular culture, Hoover does not stray from the Cold War gender line in his writings. Indeed, he portrays Marx as a soft lout who commits the sin/crime of not supporting his wife financially. Hoover's line of reasoning boils down to this: no wonder this guy wanted a free lunch, he's a lazy ass who sits around all day just writing while his family subsists on stale bread and rotten potatoes.

Strangely [though it is unclear why it's so strange], [Marx's] heart held an inner love for a home-town girl Jenny von Westphalen, a devotion to remain bright despite the utter squalor, poverty, and despair that lay ahead. Jenny, four years older than Karl, was the daughter of a government official in Trier. She was beautiful, charming, and of a socially high rank, much higher than that of the Marx family. She, too, was desperately in love, but she feared to tell her parents. What would they think -- the daughter of Privy Councillor Ludwig von Westphalen marrying Karl Marx?...

The time for marriage, however, was still distant. Karl was away at school. Then, after graduation, he did not have a job and did not seem to care to find one -- another lifelong trait. He preferred to dabble in atheism, socialism, and polemics. After seven long years Jenny was still waiting, but finally, on June 12, 1843, they were married.

Despite the dreaded polemics it sounds like a Hollywood story of young love, right? Calling John Hughes!

But wait, this is the guy whose disciples want to relieve our women of housework. "How? Hugh factory and apartment-house kitchens would be set up, so that women would be 'free' to work in factories and mines along with the men." THE NERVE! Hmm, but it also sounds exactly like what happened in the US some 16 years prior.

Engels, on the other hand, at least made some money, but his sin/crime was even more vile. The guy was a playboy, and you know that doesn't jibe with Cold War gender norms.

Engels was tall and thin, blue-eyed, two years younger than Marx, and a lover of horses and women. He lived for years with one girl without marriage and then, upon her death, with her sister. He finally consented to marry the latter on her deathbed [the horror, the horror!].

So Engels had carnal knowledge of two sisters and only married one when she was on her death bed (yet, Hoover says nothing of Engels' critique of the family), and Marx married an upper-class woman and turned her into a part-time beggar. In Masters of Deceit, then, we find that the origin of socialist deception lies in the sexual relationships of its theorists, well, at least when they are framed by the restrictive gender norms of the 1950s.