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Madisyn is a typical eight year old. It seems that she is always
asking for something but today she wants a puppy. Well today is her
day. Madisyn promises to take care of her puppy and be very careful
to watch her at all times. Everything was going great until that
one day. Madisyn took her eyes off of her puppy for one second and
everything changed in one moment. Her puppy is missing. Will
Madisyn ever find her puppy and will she ever be happy again? Let's
read together and find out.
Middle-class family life in the 1950s brings to mind images of
either smugly satisfied or miserably repressed nuclear families
with breadwinning husbands, children, and housewives, much like the
families depicted in "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best."
Jessica Weiss delves beneath these mythic images and paints a far
more complex picture that reveals strong continuities between the
baby boomers and their parents. Drawing on interviews with American
couples from the 1950s to the 1980s, Weiss creates a dynamic
portrait of family and social change in the postwar era. She pairs
these firsthand accounts with a deft analysis of movies, television
shows, magazines, and advice books from each decade, providing an
unprecedented and intimate look at ordinary marriages in a time of
sweeping cultural change.
Weiss shows how young couples in the 1950s attempted to combine
egalitarian hopes with traditional gender roles. Middle-class women
encouraged their husbands to become involved fathers. Midlife wives
and mothers reshaped the labor force and the home by returning to
work in the 1960s. And couples strove for fulfilling marriages as
they dealt with the pressures of childrearing in the midst of the
sexual and divorce revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. By the
1980s, they were far more welcoming to the ideas of the women's
movement than has often been assumed. More than simply changing
with the times, the parents of the baby boom contributed to
changing times themselves.
Weiss's excellent use of family interviews that span three decades,
her imaginative examination of popular culture, and her incisive
conclusions make her book an invaluable contribution not only to
our understanding of the past but also to our understanding of
men's and women's roles in today's family.
"Weiss has written an enlightening book that examines the dynamics
of American families past and present. . . . Since Weiss is a
historian, she provides analyses of her arguments that are factual
rather than emotive, and her use of family interviews further
contributes to a strong presentation. Overall, this is a unique
works because its multidisciplinary approach informs but never
preaches on the emotionally charged topic of the American
family.--Sheila Devaney, " Library Journal"
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