¦ Compare the photographs of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner with those of actresses Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger. What are the similarities and differences and what do they suggest about Hollywood's rendering of the past?
¦ Why would Hollywood take pains to depict the visual aspects of the past accurately?
These exciting ideas, to say nothing of their own inclinations, young people found casting off their inhibitions more and more tempting.
Conservatives bemoaned what they described as the breakdown of moral standards, the fragmentation of the family, and the decline of parental authority—all with some reason. Nevertheless, society was not collapsing. Much of the rebelliousness of the young, like their particular style of dress, was faddish in nature, in a sense a kind of youthful conformity. This was particularly true of college students. Elaborate rituals governed every aspect of their extracurricular life, which was consuming a steadily larger share of most students’ time and energy. Fraternity and sorority initiations, “proms,” attendance at Saturday afternoon football games, styles of dress, and college slang, seemingly aspects of independence and free choice, were nearly everywhere shaped and controlled by peer pressure.
But young people’s new ways of relating to one another, while influenced by the desire to conform, were not mere fads and were not confined to people under thirty. This can be seen most clearly in the birth control movement, the drive to legalize the use of contraceptives.
World History
