"Marriage is for adults": Love, Maturity, and the Sexual Organization of Families in the U.S.-American 1950s and 1960s
Referent/in: Nina Mackert (Erfurt)Abstract:
Despite the focus on the importance of marriage and family life in 1950s and 1960s America, adolescents were not unanimously encouraged marrying young. An instability was ascribed to adolescent bodies which posed a threat to the normative ideal of successful marriages and functional nuclear families. In times when a „moral laxity“ of juveniles was diagnosed, maturity and the ability to love seemed to be a quality that had to be acquired in the process of growing up. Sexual delinquency and unwed pregnancy served as a negative pattern for the ideal of to-be adults. I will show how hegemonic notions of proper adolescent development were shaped in terms of sexual identity, dating practices, and marriage, and thereby address the question of resources twofold: I analyze how and when youth were seen as crucial social resources and how hegemonic notions of „proper“ growing up figured only mature, responsible people as able to participate in community and society at large.
