‘Someone to Love’: Teen Girls’ Same-Sex Desire in the 1950s United States

Abstract

In the 1950s, Americans who read newspapers, perused paperbacks or flipped through magazines encountered a robust discussion of female homosexuality. Diverse forces inspired this discussion: anxiety about wartime disruptions of sexual norms, Cold War fears about hidden threats to American family life, the influence of Freudian psychology, women’s growing social and economic mobility and Kinsey’s studies of 1948 and 1953. A central claim of this literature was that women who desired other women were psychologically immature, frozen in a state of permanent adolescence.