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xviii Background and Introduction culture that became very strongly identified with the coastal communities of Southern California in par­tic­ u ­ lar. Likewise, some of the soldiers who had served in Eu­rope and had remained ­there during the postwar occupation of Germany had found it easy to “see Eu­rope” from a motorcycle, and when they returned to the states, they formed motorcycle clubs. That some of ­these clubs catered to vets who felt alienated from mainstream American life is reflected in the fact that ­ those clubs became increasingly associated with antisocial be­hav­ior and involvement in criminal activities. In the nightclubs in Paris and other major French cities, American jazz and African American jazz musicians had been very popu­lar since the 1920s, and in the 1950s, the Beat Movement emerged from the jazz “scene,” the jazz clubs in major American cities that ­ were typi- cally located on the margins of African American neighborhoods, and the Beats became a broader literary and artistic movement. The “beatnik” was a mainstream caricature of the Beat subculture that commonly blended into the mainstream caricature of the hippie that emerged in the late 1960s. Nota- bly, although some Beats, most notably Allen Ginsberg, essentially became hippies, other Beats, most notably Jack Kerouac, adamantly rejected not just many of the ideas associated with the Counterculture but also the notion that the Beat Movement was a forerunner to it. Between 1945 and 1965, about 65 million babies ­were born in the United States, and this “baby boom” had a profound effect on ­ family structures and social mores. Births had declined during the ­ Great Depression, and so the increase in the birthrate (which some commentators have argued began just before or during the Second World War) seemed especially dramatic by contrast. Although the popu­lar culture celebrated the suburban ­family unit as the embodiment of American aspirations and ideals, the real­ity was not always defined by such contentment. For one ­thing, during the war, unpre­ce­dented numbers of ­ women had not only entered the workplace but had assumed jobs that had previously been restricted to men, and in most instances, they dem- onstrated that they ­ were ­ every bit as capable as men in ­ doing ­ those jobs. ­ After the war, the combination of the need to reabsorb 16 million veterans into the workforce and the increase in the average number of ­ children per ­family dur- ing the baby boom relegated most ­ women to being homemakers. ­ Because ­there was no pre­ ce ­ dent for the baby boom, ­ there ­ were no alternatives in place for most ­ women who would have liked to continue working ­ after having ­children—no child care centers for preschoolers or after-­school arrangements for somewhat older ­ children. The migration to the suburbs also meant that extended fami- lies within the same ­ house­hold became less common. So, almost by default, the responsibility for child care fell largely, if not entirely, on ­ mothers. When their ­ children ­ were almost grown, many ­women did return to the workforce, but in most cases, the only jobs available to them ­were relatively low-­skilled and low-­ paid ser­vice jobs. At the one extreme ­ were the ­ women who ­ were perfectly con- tented being wives and ­mothers, and at the other extreme ­were ­ women who felt that their lives ­ were very unfulfilling—­that their potential had been sacri- ficed to conventional social expectations. In between ­those extremes, most ­ women likely felt that although it was difficult to imagine how they might have managed to do more with their lives, it was at least somewhat disappointing