Leaving Home: Rebelling Against the Norm

Leaving Home: Rebelling Against the “Norm”

The repressive conformity and gender roles of the 50s weren’t embraced by everyone. The Beat generation quickly grew to rebel against the tightly bound constraints that society was trying to enforce upon them. “Thus the fervor of the Beat Generation arose from the repression and rampant consumerism of the 1950s society” (Love 6).

But, where did the women of the fifties fit into this rebellion?

For many young women, “being a Beat was far more attractive than staying chained to a brand-new kitchen appliance” (Knight). Joyce Johnson, along with many others female Beats, left behind the common assumption that women were merely capable of being good wives and mothers and sought independence. Women like Joan Vollmer, Carolyn Cassady, and Edie Parker rebelled in the only way that they knew how –by ignoring mainstream society’s propagandized gender roles and jumping into the Beat movement, consequently becoming role models for future feminists.

In Johnson’s memoir, Minor Characters, she explains how the patriarchal, conformist ideology of the fifties constrained women, influencing her to rebel and join the Beat movement:

In the late 1950s, young women –not very many at first –once again left home rather violently. They too came from nice families, and their parents could never understand why the daughters they had raised so carefully suddenly chose to live precarious lives. A girl was expected to stay under her parents’ roof until she married, even if she worked for a year or so as a secretary, got a little taste of the world that way, but not too much. Everyone knew they would involve exposure to sex. Sex was for men. For women, it was as dangerous as Russian roulette; an unwanted pregnancy was life-threatening in more ways than one. As for art –decorative young women had their place as muses and appreciators.

Those of us who flew out the door had no usable models for what we were doing. We did not want to be our mothers or our spinster school teachers or the hard boiled career women depicted on the screen. And no one had taught us how to be women artists or writers. We knew little about Virginia Woolf, but did not find her relevant. She seemed discouragingly privileged, born into literature, connections and wealth. The “room of one’s own” that she wrote presupposed that the occupant had a small family income. Our college educations enabled us to type our way to fifty dollars a week –barely enough to eat and pay the rent on a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village or North Beach, with little left over for shoes or the electric bill. We knew nothing about the novelist Jean Rhys, an earlier runaway from respectability, dangerously adrift in the Parisian bohemia of the 1920s; we might have identified with Rhys’ lack of confidence in her writing, found a warning to take to heart in the corrosive passivity of her relationships with men. Though no warning would have stopped us, so hungry were we to embrace life and all of reality. Even hardship was something to be savored.

Naturally, we fell in love with men who were rebels. We fell very quickly, believing they would take us along on their journeys and adventures. We did not expect to be rebels all by ourselves; we did not count on loneliness. Once we have found our male counterparts, we had too much blind faith to challenge to old male/female rules. We were very young and we were in over our heads. But we knew we had done something brave, practically historic. We were the ones who had dared to leave home.

If you want to understand Beat women, call us transitional –a bridge to the next generation, who in the late 1960s, when a young woman’s right to leave home was no longer an issue, would question every assumption that limited women’s lives and begin the long, never-to-be-completed work of transforming relationships with men.

Joyce and other beat women rebelled in different ways than the Beat men did. Given the constraints of the female gender role, Beat women had rebel on a smaller level by moving out of their parents home before marriage and seeking their own economic independence before partaking in Bohemian activities, such as privileging intellectualism and adventure above domesticity, and experimenting with sexuality (and sometimes drugs). Having sex before marriage, something that the men were already doing without as many repercussions, was a type of sexual revolution that Beat women eagerly accepted.

“To leave home, to sleep with a man on what in 1950s terms was their ‘first date,’ at a time when birth control was imperfect if not unavailable, was to commit an ‘actegratuit,” another early favored Beat term, a deliberate, decisive break with the established order” (Douglas xxv). Although these women were making huge steps, there actions were even less acceptable to society than the rebellious acts of the male Beats. “But in taking such a step, Johnson was not a candidate for glamorization, as Kerouac was when he left Columbia College in 1942 to write and hand out with drug addicts, petty thieves, and homosexual hustlers…Deliberate downward mobility was one thing for men, another for women. Discarding her traditional garb, the woman Beat, unlike the male, had at hand no garments of cultural myth to don in its place” (Douglas xxv). These women quietly made progressive steps to become independent and to try to obtain gender equality. Indeed they fit into the Beat movement but in a much different yet equally important way than the men.

Works Cited:

Douglas, Ann. Introduction: “Strange Lives, Chosen Lives: The Beat Art of Joyce Johnson.” Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir. Joyce Johnson. New York: Penguin, 1999 (reprint).

Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters, A Beat Memoir. New York: Penguin Group, 1983

Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation. New York: Conari, 2000.

Love, Jennifer. “No Girls Allowed: Women Poets and the Beat Generation.” Women Writers: A Zine. Editor, Kim Wells. Online Journal. Published: May 11, 2001. Available at: