Illegitimacy, Postwar Psychology, And the Reperiodization of the Sexual Revolution‪.‬

In the minds of most social historians, the sexual revolution was primarily the product of the 1960s. While acknowledging the earlier rise of Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner and an increasingly defiant youth culture, most scholars portray these pre-sixties developments as precursors of the rapid liberalization of sexual behavior that was soon to follow. This is to say, while most scholars identify a general loosening of sexual attitudes during the forties and fifties, they do not detect a significant upswing in premarital sexual behavior until the 1960s. In Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty, Arlene Skolnick sounds this very theme. Whereas the incidence of female premarital intercourse "leveled off in the 1940s and 1950s," Skolnick maintains that premarital sex soared during the 1960s, as "young women abandoned their desperate struggle to remain categorized as virgins." (1) Similarly, in Him/Her/Self, Peter Filene insists that "a 'revolution' in middle-class sexual behavior" did not take place during the 1950s. (2) Over the past two decades, a string of scholars, including John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Stephen Mintz and Susan Kellogg, John Heindry, Elaine Tyler May, Steven Seidman, and Robert Francoeur has joined Filene and Skolnick in positing a virtual explosion of premarital intercourse during the decade of the 1960s. (3)