Board of Education case, the Supreme Court declared that “separate educational facilities” for black children were “inherently unequal.” This ruling was the first nail in Jim Crow’s coffin.
For example, in 1954, in the landmark Brown v. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries during the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life.
The Civil Rights MovementĪ growing group of Americans spoke out against inequality and injustice during the 1950s. (In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, women’s rights advocate Betty Friedan argued that the suburbs were “burying women alive.”) This dissatisfaction, in turn, contributed to the rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s. The idea that a woman’s most important job was to bear and rear children was hardly a new one, but it began to generate a great deal of dissatisfaction among women who yearned for a more fulfilling life. Advice books and magazine articles (“Don’t Be Afraid to Marry Young,” “Cooking to Me Is Poetry,” “Femininity Begins At Home”) urged women to leave the workforce and embrace their roles as wives and mothers. In fact, the booms of the 1950s had a particularly confining effect on many American women.
Suburban homes, meanwhile, weren't always so perfect for the (mostly white) women who lived in them. In fact, the wide disparity in the bill’s implementation ended up driving growing gaps in wealth, education and civil rights between white and Black Americans. Bill helped white Americans prosper and accumulate wealth in the postwar years, it didn’t deliver on that promise for veterans of color. These houses were perfect for young families–they had informal “family rooms,” open floor plans and backyards–and so suburban developments earned nicknames like “Fertility Valley” and “The Rabbit Hutch.” Bill subsidized low-cost mortgages for many returning soldiers, which meant that it was often cheaper to buy one of these suburban houses than it was to rent an apartment in the city. Almost as soon as World War II ended, developers such as William Levitt (whose “Levittowns” in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania would become the most famous symbols of suburban life in the 1950s) began to buy land on the outskirts of cities and use mass production techniques to build modest, inexpensive tract houses there. The baby boom and the suburban boom went hand in hand. Middle-class people had more money to spend than ever–and, because the variety and availability of consumer goods expanded along with the economy, they also had more things to buy. Rates of unemployment and inflation were low, and wages were high. Between 19, the gross national product more than doubled, growing from $200 billion to more than $500 billion, kicking off “the Golden Age of American Capitalism.” Much of this increase came from government spending: The construction of interstate highways and schools, the distribution of veterans’ benefits and most of all the increase in military spending–on goods like airplanes and new technologies like computers–all contributed to the decade’s economic growth. In all, by the time the boom finally tapered off in 1964, there were almost 77 million “baby boomers.”Īfter World War II ended, many Americans were eager to have children because they were confident that the future promised peace and prosperity. About 4 million babies were born each year during the 1950s. Historians use the word “boom” to describe a lot of things about the 1950s: the booming economy, the booming suburbs and most of all the so-called “baby boom.” This boom began in 1946, when a record number of babies–3.4 million–were born in the United States.
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