Continued Contemplation

Thus began the 1950’s era of the "eternal virgin" and "dizzy blonde bombshell," in which popular culture reinscribed the ideal female as desirable either for her asexuality and domestic potential or for her naïve, yet overt, sexuality. As such, the postwar U.S. constructed "the ideal American woman as [either] a dependent and happy homemaker . . .[or] sex object, kept childlike by a permanently arrested development."