on thursday at 8:00 p.m. eastern we'll preview four key issues facing congress this fall. federal funding to combat the zika virus. >> women in america today want to make sure that they have the ability to not get pregnant. why? because mosquitos ravage pregnant women. >> but today they turned down the very money that they argued for last may, and they decided to gamble with the lives of children like this. >> reporter: the annual defense and policies programs bill. >> all of these votes are very vital to the future of this nation in a time of turmoil and a time of the greatest number of refugees since the end of world war ii. >> gun violence legislation and criminal justice reform. >> every member of this body, every republican and every democrat wants to see less gun

violence. >> we must continue to work the work of non-violence and demand an end to senseless killing everywhere. >> and the resolution for congress to impeach irs commissioner john koskainen. >> house 828 impeaching john andrew koskinen for high crimes and misdemeanors. >> we'll review the expected congressional debate with susan ferrechio, correspondent for "the washington examiner." join us thursday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span for congress this fall.

he lists the public publication of male and female sexuality, the creation of "playboy" as factors that promote the stirrings of a revolt against prevailing cultural norms where, this class is a little under an hour. good afternoon. we've been talking about the cold war and the relationship between the cold war and its global dimension of fighting communism and its domestic dimension of promoting certain outlooks and certain values that were seen as indispensable to america's fight against communism in the world. as we've discussed already, the cold war not only had a military component, but it had a moral component. it had a dimension where if you were to be seen in american

society as an ardent cold warrior committed to the fight against communism, then you not only had to be a patriot and willing to do battle figuratively and theoretically against communism in the world, but you had to live by a certain standard to prove your american loyalty and your american patriotism. interestingly, in the late 1940s and early 1950s just when this alliance was getting off the ground, this alliance between this political fight in the world and this need for moral rearm rearmorment domestically in our country. just as that was emerging, we saw the beginnings of a fracture or a division or even some sentiments of dissent within american culture and american

society. a wave of dissent that begin to question not all but some of the moral values that were seen as indispensable to the larger project to fight the cold war. today i want to talk about the beginnings of that dissent. it won't be a full scale rebellion yet against the cold war or these traditional values. it will explode in a much more determined fashion in the 1960s, but that is something that we will address at a later time. you'll notice today when we talk about the beginnings of this wave of dissent against the

traditional values that were foundational for cold war america, you'll see that this wave of dissent or this sense of rebellion is coming not from teenagers who are suddenly energized by new music and rock 'n' roll and teenage rebellion, but actually even before all that is happening, this wave of dissent is not coming from kids. it's coming from adults. we'll be talking about and looking at those adults and what they had to say and how they began to challenge the ettiface or the whole structure of traditional values that were promoted so widely during the woeld car and the early years of the cold war itself. so we'll be looking. we'll be looking at the work that was done to promote the

development of the birth control pill in the 1950s. we'll be looking at the impact that hugh hefner made with "playboy magazine." we'll look at the popularity of the beats, poets, writers, that were starting to attract a sizable audience in the early 1950s and mid 1950s. we'll look at the messages that women were getting, women who were expected to live their lives in domestic roles as housewives mostly, from the popular media, magazines, et cetera, and a little bit about how consumer desires, something we know was prevalent in the post-war era was beginning to alter the perception that women simply -- women's place was simply to be in the home. certainly if there was any traditional value that was at the center of this set of cold war values, it was the celebration of a traditional marriage -- father working, mother at home -- domesticity.

>> we know that traditional values erupted after world war ii, in part, as a response to the chaos and the frenetic pace of events and politics and the war itself. people were uprooted from their homes. people were killed. life was turned into turmoil, and there was a general desire to sort of settle down and to retreat to some extent in a world that was dominated by traditional roles and traditional expectations. church attendance rises, increases. religion, formal church membership and religion, is attracting more people, says and, of course, it goes without saying that there's a constant preaching and promotion of

patriotic values and loyalty to america because that goes very -- definitely to the issue of being loyal to the effort, to fight the cold war, and proving that, in fact, you can't be suspected of being spying or sympathetic to any communist ideology. post war dreams were articulated, as you know, in the press, or in magazines. that particular portrait of, i guess, a happy couple. we really don't know how happy they may be. it certainly is an image that suggests the desirability of marriage, of traditional roles. male breadwinner. female, wife, mother at home. of course, this is the time not only of increased marriage, but the time of the baby boom. it's not just about getting married. it's becoming parents as well. this is part of the world that america feels it's defending

against godless communism in the world. a world of stable families, traditional roles. parents raising children. in the late 1940s americans begin to marry at higher rates than before. rates of marriage in the 1930s were lower and slower because, in fact, hard times made it difficult for many young couples to contemplate even moving off on their own and starting a family. the economy was somewhat precarious in that regard. more americans than ever got married in the 1950s, and they started to get married at a younger age so that the average age, for example that, a woman would get married in the 1950s was now just about 20 where in 1930 it was just about -- it was about a year older. because women are getting married earlier --

and you can see the fertility rates, the number of women per 1,000 in the population having children that from 1930 to 1957 that's a substantial increase. from 79 to 122 women per thousand having children. all the statistics bare out what the adds and the promotion of values suggest and that is marriage and parenthood are part of this value system that's emerging with anti-communism itself, and we've already said that church attendance is expanding and increasing substantially. it's part of the mindset that we got fight this godless communism in a world that could be destroyed at any minute by some sort of atomic or nuclear exchange. finding peace, inner peace, outer peace in this period is

very much tied to adhere answer to these traditional values. religion becomes intertwined with patriotic belief. if you are going to be a good american or if you are going to be a good christian, as billy graham said in 1950, you also have to be a good american. all of a sudden right in the middle of this sort of celebration of traditional values, religion and family and hit row sexuality and patriotism, et cetera, and this growing consensus or effort to bring americans together under this set of ideals for fight the cold war, we get the beginnings of challenges to this perception and this identity that americans are a people who believe in god, who believe in traditional values, and who are ready to

undertake the anti-communist crusade, and interestingly, the first sort of shot fired in this early wave of dissent or challenge to these values comes from a biologist at indiana university bloomington named altread kinsey. kinsey's two books "sexual behavior in the human male," 1948, and" and sexual behavior in the human female," 1953, are sort of earth-shaking in the impact that they have on american society and american culture. why? because kinsey's data from his research showed that while americans talked about adhering to traditional gender roles, sexual roles,ing containing sex

within marriage, the necessity for heterosexuality, the data showed that americans were not practicing what they were preaching where, now, people challenged kinsey's data. he is a scientist. he was rendering what he thought was the results. he had a research team of what he found. he had researchers going out all over the country. chicago, new york, midwest, et cetera. talking to people of all kinds of sexual orientations. it reports the data, and he says in 1948 60% of american men are having sexual intercourse before marriage. maybe it's true. maybe it's not entirely accurate. it challenged the public perception that americans were these virtuous people. this was tied to the sense of who they were as they fought communism. to fight communism meant you also adhered to traditional values. if, in fact, there are people

not adhering in some way, then maybe they're not also adhering to the patriotic crusade to fight communism itself. 37% of the men he reported had homosexual encounters. this is hugely controversial in 1948. everybody is picking up on what kinsey is saying. i mean, this guy -- they're saying he is going to destroy the morals of the country. he doesn't know what he is talking about. i mean, he is obviously going to evoke substantial criticism because, in part, people don't want to hear or are reluctant to accept what he sees as reality and they see as a distortion because it distorts the view of what the cold war says and thinks about who americans are. >> if the book on human male sexual practices was controversial, it was even more

controversial to come out with documents in 1953 and data in 1953 about the practices of american women because american women were perceived to be or expected to be virtuous, contained sexual practices to families, to marriage, et cetera. and he is talking -- he is coming up with data showing that half the women he talked to had sex before marriage or half the women -- or i'm sorry -- a quarter of the women had committed adultery after marriage once married. this provokes even a more controversy in hostile reaction for the public from religious leaders, from newspapers, from educators, et cetera, than even his data on american men. so kinsey is beginning to sort of make a crack within the structure of cold war america

with its delicate balance between political anti-communism and cultural moral traditional values. he is saying he is not coming out and he is not probably even thinking that he is critiquing the cold war, but he is critiquing part of the sort of structure of our identity of who we thought we were and why we were fighting the cold war, which was, in part, to preserve these values. he is basically saying not all americans are adhering to them, and that's why he is so controversial. kinsey began his thinking about marriage and sexuality in 19 -- the late 1930s. he started a marriage course at indiana university. students have the option in the course to have private and separate meetings about their marriage plans or sexual behavior and histories with

kinsey. and in his course -- by the way, there were many college courses in the late 1930s and early 1940s on marriage, et cetera. kinsey more than most of the others, maybe more than all the others, also delved into sexual practices. how did people have sex? when do they have sex? do they have can outside of marriage? who are their partners, et cetera? was it heterosexual, homosexual? these are things that interested him, and he bra ut thought this the discussion of his marriage class, and, of course, he pursued it as well with individual discussions with some of the students. as you would expect, this is going to create turmoil on the bloomington campus. and other professors, some add

mores -- administrators, people in the state, et cetera, are questioning what kinsey is doing and trying to do with his marriage course. faculty members are complaining to the president. especially when he talks about issues like homo sexuality and mast masturbation in class. no one did this in the 1930s. herman wells, who was the president of indiana university in dealing with all the, you know -- kinsey had his supporters. he had his critics. wells calls kinsey in and said make a choice. you want to keep teaching the marriage course, stop the research, stop the interview, collecting interview data on sexual practices, or drop the course and just do the research. figuring if he was just doing the research and his critics not seeing it -- these issues discussed and presented in class, then he would dif fuse the criticism. kinsey decided to drop the class, 1940, and just -- but he did decide to continue to do the

research, and all through the 1940s now kinsey is going to amass this team that's going to go all over america and talk to people about their sexual histories and compile any of this data. he was always going up to chicago. he was always going to gay communities in new york. he was talking to ordinary families in the midwest. he was sort of totally devoted, obviously, to this -- for him, this scientific research project. it's a picture of kinsey conducting one of his interviews, but he had other sbufds. he didn't do all the interviews himself. that's a photograph of kinsey and herman wells who continually had to defend academic freedom. kinsey is right as a scholar and researcher to do his research because he was -- wells was always getting pressure from religious authorities, state legislators, et cetera, to put a stop to what was seen as such a controversial scholarly work and research. wells was an astute politician.

when it was team for kinsey to publish his second book on human sexual behavior and the human female in 1953, wells arranged for the publisher to have the book released in the summer when the state legislature was not in session so that it would take them a while to gather their forces and come back. there's criticism, of course. they did in time, but by that time the book was out for a while. kinsey became fascinated with the play and then the movie. the play came out in 1947, and the movie in 1951 starring marlon brando. "street care named desire." "street car named desire" was authored by tennessee williams, who was gay. in his writing he was interested in exploring variations in sexual activity. if you know the story, if you have seen the play, or you have seen the movie, it was

controversial. it was top lar. et cetera. it was a play about a very aggressive sexual behavior. marlon brando was in the play and the movie. in the play beats his wife and rapes his sister-in-law. he this take the rape scene out of the play -- that was in the play. they don't put that in the movie. they suggest that they don't make it explicit in any way, although they do have this one episode where he strikes his wife. interesting topic today, and it was certainly a topic that was not talked about much either in the late 1940s or late 1950s, but it hits the screen. kinsey is fascinated by the fact that williams in this play and movie are actually bringing -- exposing, if you will, this sort of deviant or sexual problems --

kinsey goes to see the play in new york actually. gets to know tennessee williams. then he begins to take the sexual histories of all the people in the play, so the data at the kinsey center is coated so you can't tell who you are reading about if you had access to that, but i would presume that he has marlon brando and maybe even vivian lee's sexual histories in there, but you would have to check for sure if, in fact, that could be -- that information could be confirmed. it is true, though. he was trying to interview and did interview most of everybody bho w who was in the play and the film. is there any question so far? the reaction of kinsey are predictable, as i have said. he is criticized by religious leaders.

interestingly, that gallop poll shows that in a large public sample, about half of the u.s. population approves what kinsey is doing. his critics are vocal, but in a pure, raw sampled data, if you will. there is a sense here that in a willingness to begin to question or move beyond the imposition of simply traditional values, traditional practices. that's what kinsey was saying. that americans are doing this anyhow and the sort of public opinion poll is suggesting there is some sympathy and not total embrace even though this was the dominant idea of anti-communism, traditional values. people were beginning to question the cold war, but not directly. more about the values that were wrapped around this cold war ideology. kinsey's data is sort of

nonjudgmental. he is not condemning anyone. he is not condemning a woman who committed adultery, or he is not condemning someone who had a same-sex relationship. he is simply reporting the data and accepting it. in a sense his acceptance is the beginnings of a more diverse outloot look or acceptance of a more diverse world in terms of sexual practices. we would say that today he may not have said it quite the way i just said it, but that's exactly what he was doing. he was challenging what was perceived to be the norm. the norm from which you are not expected to deviate. it's a cartoon from "the new yorker." of course, the good women in the cartoon from upper montclair, new jersey, suggesting a sort of upper class setting are agas by what kinsey says and has done and while you may or may not be able to read the wording at the bottom, the one woman is saying,

well, i'm sure dr. kinsey never spoke to anyone in upper montclair, suggesting that he must have been collecting his data from less reputable places within the united states, but not in this noble and virtuous upper class community. margaret sanger was another adult who began to bring to bear challenges to the norms of sexual practice. she was a social worker who early in the 20th century had worked with poor immigrant women in manhattan, lower manhattan in new york. she was struck by a number of things. their impoverished conditions, for sure, but also the number of pregnancies that many of these women had and how hard -- the hardship that came with these people living in chronic

conditions, these women especially, having so many children. all the health issues that were involved then, and really the medical problem of many of these women trying to induce their own abortions and causing infections from which many of them were harmed or were killed. she came away from her social work with the sympathetic view of women in marriage, a critical view of the domestic arrangements where women had no control over the -- or little control over the number of children that they were to bear. and so she began to -- she set up a clinic earlier in the 20th century to give -- pass out birth control information. officials close the clinic down. birth control information was seen as a transgression of obscenity laws. information of birth control was seen as obscene, and, therefore, they shut the clinic down because she was giving out this information, but over time she kept at it, and eventually

secured financial support especially from a philanthropically-minded woman in chicago, catherine mccormick. catherine mccormick was married to a wealthy industrialist in chicago. she was sympathetic to what margaret sanger wanted to do, and mccormick provided the necessary or fundamental financing for researchers at clark university in massachusetts to develop a pill that would block ovulation and lead to and finally become the birth control pill, which was officially ok'd by the government in 1960. now, it's going to take time after 1960 for it to -- its use to spread and become disseminated, but the challenge to -- the notion that a woman in marriage had to have children or had no control over the number of children she had, et cetera, really begins obviously earlier than the 1950s, but the development of the pill, the

financing and the sort of ideals and ideas of sanger come together so that the pill now becomes -- is one of the things that's happening in the 1950s, as is kinsey's books, to move against this traditional notion of motherhood, child bearing, domestic relations. and if you are going to be talking about a challenge to marriage and conventional sexual normz in the early 1950s, you can't leave out hugh hefner. does anyone know where hefner went to college? not far away. no, it wasn't indiana. he probably wishes he did, because hefner loved the kinsey reports. i mean, he devoured the kinsey books. kinsey was telling him about all the stuff that he sort of was thinking anyhow. that you didn't have to live your adult sexual life through conventions of marriage.

and so hefner as a veteran back from the war, from world war ii, as a student at the university of illinois, at champagne, urbana started his own magazine in college. he called it "shaft," and the magazine had a feature called "co-ed of the month." he is clearly laying out and figuring out the blueprint of what eventually will become, as you all know, "playboy magazine." he was engrossed with kinsey. he thought kinsey was totally on the right track. his track to sort of explode conventional perceptions about what sexual behavior should be. he eventually moved on from

that. first issue of "play boy" was 1953. those are just some sample issues. marilynn monroe was on the front cover in the center fold of the first issue of "play boy magazine." et cetera. he didn't have -- he didn't take a picture of marilynn monroe. there was a picture already being used on a widely circulated calendar. he brought the rides and threw it in the magazine, and he didn't put it on the date of the very first cover of "play boy" because he didn't know if it would be a second issue. he didn't know if it was going to succeed. he did. he sold 50,000 some of the first issue, and from then on it kept building and growing. play boy, like kinsey, was one of those -- kinsey's books was one of those.

>> that would not study any of you in this class, fear of alimony, but it was what "play boy" was preaching at the time. questioning, if you lrk the viability of marriage itself. he attacked the idea of marriage saying half of the men were free men, and the other half are free only in spirit. he makes it clear in his first issue, first page, it's not a family magazine. he told women who -- needed to get back to lady's home companion. he is trying to appeal to men who don't want to be married. who don't want to be tied to family responsibilities and fatherhood. >> that man who doesn't want to be tied to family responsibilities and fatherhood is the play boy. it's the play boy magazine.

the play boy is the man. it's the image. he is a man who is interested in pleasure. he is not interested in family roles and responsibilities. he should enjoy sports cars and consumer goods and dating many girls, et cetera. that was the play boy. he was adapting to this wave of change that was challenging conventional values, and interestingly, kinsey, sanger, and hefner are all questioning marriage. you can say, well, these are not the -- this is not the rebellion of the 1960s, but it's the beginning of the attack against the entire structure of cold war values, which will then die involve a -- divolve and trickle down. before we had the counter culture with kids, we had the rebellion of adults who were challenging conventional moral pripgs.

>> the beats. the beats were artists, writers, poets. they became very popular in the 1950s. they, too, were popular because, in part, they refused to adhere to or conform to traditional values. that's a theme of the entire discussion. they produced poetry. they wrote fiction. it was about people who were moving from place to place. they were not settled. it was about a number of people who had different sexual encounters. it was about people who had critical perspectives on america. to have a critical perspective on america -- let's just say you raise the issue of racism or drug use or homo sexuality, that was to run the risk of being seen as unamerican. not sufficiently patriotic in an

era of mccarthyism where people were losing their jobs for being seen as unpatriotic. or not practicing conventional sexual norm -- following conventional sexual normz. writers like alan ginsberg, a poet, became increasingly popular. people were reading their stuff, but their stuff, like kinsey and hefner and sanger, were all about another sort of life in america that wasn't so virtuous, wasn't so patriotic, and was more willing to question the established authorities of the time which were mobilizing to fight the communist crusade. that's a picture of jack carawack. >> well, right here. that's his buddy, neil cassidy.

on the road was a sensational best seller, especially among younger people, and college students in the 1950s. it was about men who -- a story of two men who are moving across america. they are not fixed on work routines or trying to get ahead, not trying to live in the suburbs. they just split up from marriages. there's no domestic bliss here. there's a variety of sexual partners. there's poverty and racism in america. this is not what the true believers in the cold war -- mccarthy, for example, or others would want to see and hear in our culture and our politics because it ran against the idea that we were fighting a force in the world communism that was threatening america and its traditional values. it's faith in god. it's solid families. it's virtuous people.

that's from ginsberg's poem, "howell." those are just excerpts. you can read them and look at them. i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness dragging themselves through streets looking for an angry fix. he is being metaphorical. he is trying to create images. the point is he is talking about people in america who are adrift, who are perhaps drug addicts. he used a lot of references to drug addiction, homo sexuality. it's a more disturbing view of america. it's a dissent from the tradition of values, and that's why, of course, why it's popular with some, many people would be quite hostile towards what he was writing or even what begi ginsberg was writing. one person who really was at this stage he was about 15, 16

years old who was really absorbing a lot of this more critical perspective. the time he is a young person at the time. he becomes a sort of really tuned in to the sort of literature of the beats. as bob dylan. that's bob dylan and ginsberg in the 1960s. they're buddies. they're together a lot, talking a lot, in greenwich village. in the 1950s dylan is reading "howell" and reading "on the road" and he is being influenced by this stuff. these ideas of dissent which dylifficult dillon will convert to his albums in the early 1960s for a number of reasons, that we're going to look at later in the course. these ideas, are, in part, being drawn from these adults, these writers in the 1950s. dillon is drawing from karawack

and ginsberg. these ideas are spreading. we're not yet at the level of the counter culture of the 1960s, but we are at the level of a significant dissent from the set of traditional values of the cold war. >> well, despite the popularity and the controversy that kinsey created and despite the popularity of the beats, et cetera. if you counted up all the news print that was devoted to a single subject in 1952, 1953, it probably would add up to christine jorgenson being the most talked about person in

america. now, if you want a story and an example of how an individual advocating nontraditional ways -- or nontraditional gender roles on american culture in society, maybe more than kinsey, is pretty hard to top christine jorgenson. what did christine jorgenson do? do you know? christine jorgenson, like hefner was a veteran of world war ii. part of the greatest generation. christine jorgenson decided that she wanted -- that he wanted to be a woman. and she had a sex change operation with the denmark, and this becomes huge news. this is the veteran back from the war. this is after the operation.

of course, there could be no greater challenge to the traditional gender roles than for someone to change their gender completely, which is what -- i mean, kinsey is upsetting the apple card. sanger is looking for a way to affect marriage. hefner is challenging marriage. jorgenson is more than challenging marriage. he is challenging the very idea of sexual gender roles themselves. as i said, christine jorgenson -- he was -- christine was born george jorgensen. g.i. served in world war ii. always claimed his desire to be a woman was overwhelming, very powerful and strong. made huge news in 1952 when he had surgery in denmark. apparently he was the most written about person in the u.s. press in 1953.

it reminds us of that public opinion poll that was taken on kinsey's book where about half the population was somewhat sympathetic to opening up the discussion about sexual roles and sexual practices. look at the interest here in this jorgensen's sex change operation. that's substantial. if, in fact, to the extent that's true, that the most talked about person in 1953 in the press. and, of course, as i have said, it's certainly a challenge to prescribed roles. gender roles. those are some news clippings, just to give you a flavor or a sample of what people were sag seeing and reading. ex-gi becomes blonde beauty. md's rule. christine is now 100% a woman, et cetera. you can understand why this would grab a lot of attention, but it really did.

it was grabbing the attention in conjunction with all these other things that were grabbing attention, like kinsey and hefner and you can see a sort of something perculating within the culture and society which was not simply following in lock step to the anti-communist -- or behind the anti-communist crusade. there are other instances and examples or suggestions that the attitudes of many americans were changing. look at those, for example -- those points. single motherhood is increasing significantly. it was more likely from 1940 to 1960 that a woman would bear a child out of wed lock. that always happened, but it was happening in increasing numbers. so that kinsey had a point. people were increasingly and had been practicing in ways that we

had not acknowledged or not realized. and we see much more discussion and even training of medical professionals in issues of planned parent hootd and birth control in the 1950s. it's still controversial. it's not like today. it's not, you know, birth control in any way you want it. i mean, it wasn't prevalent, et cetera. there are ways to do that. the information now was being disseminated. sanger's project is moving forward in the 1950s to develop the pill and medical professionals are being trained in ways, especially from planned parenthood, which, by the way, was an organization that evolved out of the early work started by margaret sanger. birth control is one of those issues that is being pushed forward to challenge convention.

there's another way to see the sort of slow but persistent evolution of change or change within the early 1950s in regard to conventional and traditional values. that's in the polls that the gallop poll organization and others took at the time about who the most admired women were in america. usually the most admired man was the president, but the most admired women were women who had careers. were women who were working. even though this is an age that has been celebrated as the age of the suburbs, the age of the baby boom, the age of more and more people getting married, et cetera, when women were asked who they admired most, they admired women who had careers

outside the household. almost every year in the 1950s, the most admired woman in america usually at the top of these polls was eleanor roosevelt. many of you know she was the widow of franklin roosevelt who died at the end of world war ii. she was active and a political figure for the rest of her life, but certainly after she died. she was a delegate to the u.n. in 1946. she chaired the united nations relation on human rights. she drafted the u.n. designate largs on human rights that was commissioned in 1948. she was an outspoken supporter of liberal causes throughout the 1950s, et cetera, and in a sense it would be fair to say she was something of a liberal political icon in the 1950s. she was not on the most admired

list for women in the 1950s because she was a liberal icon. she was on the most admired list because, in fact, she was a woman with a public -- highly public, in this case, career. that's a photograph actually of eleanor roosevelt visiting with herman wells, the president of indiana university, and that's here in bloomington in 1950. right between the publication of kinsey's first book and a second book. while kinsey is working on a second book, and i don't know if kinsey came out to any reception or celebration for eleanor rooseve roosevelt, she was here and embl emblematic wherever she went, of women finding active careers outside traditional marriage. another woman who often appeared on these lists in the 1950s was

claire booth luce. we get the impression that women, even though the dmsic arrangements predominated the way most men and women are living their adult lives, domestic marital relations, claire booth luce, while she's married, married to a man -- married to the owner of time magazine, henry luce, but she also is widely admired because she has a public career. serveed in congress. she was a writer. she advocated careers for women. she was a journalist in world war ii. she wrote from the war zones. widely admired. like eleanor roosevelt, these women are suggesting, as is some of the public opinion response to kinsey's books, and the popular interest in christine jorgensen, that, in fact, people while maybe living under the rubriks of conventional values

are living under some of, if not all, the alternative values. finally, there is the interesting and unpredictable or unintended perhaps consequence of this growing desire for consumer goods within married families themselves. the point here is this. we know that after world war ii there was this wave of marriages, pregnancies, births, home buying, suburbanization, and this consumerism. remember, i've said this earlier, during the war americans are only producing war goods. planes, tanks, and guns. they were producing cars, tv sets, new housing, all that

consumer stuff. and during world war ii people were working, but they didn't have a lot of opportunities to spend the money they were made. the savings were increasing. that pent up savings fuels this consumer buying and this return of our economy to consumer production after the war. now, in this sort of system, this new consumer system, if you will, that's taking hold after the war, women are getting married. they're getting married earlier, and, therefore, they're trying to stop or end their child bearing at an earlier point in their lives. earlier marriages, earlier pregnancies, and a tendency, therefore, after a number of years of this to try to end pregnancies and to look for other opportunities within their married life. they're not all necessarily moving out of their marriages, but they're now increasingly in the 1950s looking for jobs.

outside of domestic relations, jo bz that will allow them to earn the extra money to buy television set here in this sort of quintessential image of a contented consumerist traditional 1950s family. or cars or furniture for the house. consumerism in a sense is beginning to propel some women out of their traditional domestic lives and looking for part-time or full-time jobs. there is a steady increase of women working outside the home. that is consistent with what we see. we see in this first decade or more of the cold war and this effort to bring together americans behind the banner of anti-communism and the banner of

traditional values we see an underlying sense of dissent or change or discontent or stepping back from those values. kinsey expoises the fact that we don't practice what we preach. sanger wants to challenge traditional notions married women simply being mother after mother after mother. hefner wants to challenge marriage completely and celebrate alternative lifestyles for men. people are fascinated by sex change operations. starting to leave the home for consumer goods. women are wildly admiring other women who work outside the home. while the overlay of the cold war 1950s is grounded in patriotism, hit heterosexuality,

religion, marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood, the underlay, the sort of undercurrent is going in a slightly different direction. as you'll see as we move in the weeks ahead, that this sort of crack in the cold war etiface begins with challenging and changing perspectives on sexual behavior. eventually it will become more political. eventually it will deal more with racial issues and eventually it will explode in the 1960s. the seed bed of the counter culture of the 1960s which totally challenges the cold war can be seen quite clearly in the early efforts of these dissenters from traditional sexual and cultural values in the late 1940s and early 1950s. that's our lecture today, and i thank you all for attending. are there any questions before we finish?

okay. i'll see you next week. thank you. >> american history tv airs on c-span 3 every weekend telling the american story through events, interviews, and visits to historic locations. this month american history tv is in primetime to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on c-span 3. our features include lectures in history, visits to college classrooms across the country, to hear lectures by top history professors. american artifacts takes a look at the treasures at u.s. historic sites, museums, and archives. real america, revealing the 20th century through archival films and newsreels. the civil war where you hear about the people who shape the civil war and reconstruction, and the presidency focuses on u.s. presidents and first ladies. to learn about their politics, policies, and legacies. all this month in primetime and

every weekend on american history tv on c-span 3. this week during american history tv in primetime we feature our lectures in history series taking you into college classrooms across the country. each night we debut a new lecture, and wednesday it's native americans. at 8:00 eastern we take you to dartmouth college for an overview of american indian history. at 9:20 the colonial west in the 1700s from a class at the college of william and mary, and that will be followed at 10:30 eastern with a florida state lecture on the creek indians and the first seminole war. that's wednesday night on american history tv primetime. >> with the house and senate returning from their summer break next week, on thursday at 8:00 p.m. eastern we'll preview four key issues facing congress this fall. federal funding to combat the zika virus. >> women in america today want

to make sure that they have the ability to not get pregnant. why? because mosquitoes ravage pregnant women. >> but today they turn down rav pregnancies. >> today, they decide to gamble with the lives of children like this. >> the annual defense policy and program bill. >> all of these are vital to the future of our nation in a time of turmoil and the greatest number of refugees and world war ii. >> gun violence legislation and criminal justice reform. >> every member of this body, every republican and democrats must see less gun violence. >> demand of sense less killing everywhere. >> and a resolution for congress to