Books - The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 by Alan Petigny

The Myth of the Fifties: 

The Permissive Society

by Allan C. Carlson

The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 by Alan Petigny 

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

• The era usually denoted as “the Fifties” generated a remarkable set of social indicators. 
• For the one hundred years prior to 1941, the American marriage rate was in decline. 
• The proportion of the adult population that was married also fell steadily, while the divorce rate began a seemingly inexorable rise; by 1910 (and thanks largely to Nevada), the United States was the divorce capital of the world.
• Fertility also showed relentless decline, falling more than 50 percent among the native-born population. 
• Meanwhile, income inequality grew in finance capitalism’s wake. 
• Great fortunes and grand mansions found their counterparts in the squalor of America’s urban slums. 
• A nation dominated by freehold farmers became a land of sharecroppers and urban tenants, as property ownership grew ever more concentrated.
• In political terms, conservative values and free markets gave way to secularism, progressivism, and moral individualism.

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