In many ways, the two decades between 1945 and 1965 were a period of cultural conservatism that reflected the values of domesticity. At the dawn of the 1960s, going steady as a prelude to marriage was the fad in high school. College women had curfews and needed permission to see a male visitor. Americans married young; more than half of those who married in 1963 were under the age of twenty-one. After the birth control pill came on the market in 1960, few doctors prescribed it to unmarried women, and even married women did not enjoy unfettered access to contraception until the Supreme Court ruled it a “privacy” right in the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut.

Alfred Kinsey Yet beneath the surface of middle-class morality, Americans were less repressed than confused. They struggled to reconcile new freedoms with older moral traditions. This was especially true with regard to sex. Two controversial studies by an unassuming Indiana University zoologist named Alfred Kinsey forced questions about sexuality into the open. Kinsey and his research team published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and followed it up in 1953 with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — an 842-page book that sold 270,000 copies in the first month after its publication. Taking a scientific, rather than moralistic, approach, Kinsey, who became known as “the sex doctor,” documented the full range of sexual experiences of thousands of Americans. He broke numerous taboos, discussing such topics as homosexuality and marital infidelity in the detached language of science.

Both studies confirmed that a sexual revolution, although a largely hidden one, had already begun to transform American society by the early 1950s. Kinsey estimated that 85 percent of men had had sex prior to marriage and that more than 25 percent of married women had had sex outside of marriage by the age of forty. These were shocking public admissions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and “hotter than the Kinsey report” became a national figure of speech. Kinsey was criticized by statisticians — because his samples were not randomly selected — and condemned even more fervently by religious leaders, who charged him with encouraging promiscuity and adultery. But his research opened a national conversation with profound implications for the future. Even if Kinsey’s numbers were off, he helped Americans learn to talk more openly about sex.

The Homophile Movement Among the most controversial of Kinsey’s claims was that homosexuality was far more prevalent than most Americans believed. Although the American Psychiatric Association would officially define homosexuality as a mental illness in 1952, Kinsey’s research found that 37 percent of men had engaged in some form of homosexual activity by early adulthood, as had 13 percent of women. Even more important, Kinsey claimed that 10 percent of American men were exclusively homosexual. These claims came as little surprise, but great encouragement, to a group of gay and lesbian activists who called themselves “homophiles.” Organized primarily in the Mattachine Society (the first gay rights organization in the country, founded in 1951) and the Daughters of Bilitis (a lesbian organization founded in 1955), homophiles were a small but determined collection of activists who sought equal rights for gays and lesbians. “The lesbian is a woman endowed with all the attributes of any other woman,” wrote the pioneer lesbian activist Del Martin in 1956. “The salvation of the lesbian lies in her acceptance of herself without guilt or anxiety.”

Building on the urban gay and lesbian communities that had coalesced during World War II, homophiles sought to change American attitudes about same-sex love. They faced daunting obstacles, since same-sex sexual relations were illegal in every state and scorned, or feared, by most Americans. To combat prejudice and change the laws, homophile organizations cultivated a respectable, middle-class image. Members were encouraged to avoid bars and nightclubs, to dress in conservative shirts and ties (for men) and modest skirts and blouses (for women), and to seek out professional psychologists who would attest to their “normalcy.” Only in the 1960s did homophiles begin to talk about the “homophile vote” and their “rights as citizens,” laying the groundwork for the gay rights movement of the 1970s.

Media and Morality The homophile movement remained unknown to most Americans. But other challenges to traditional morality received national media attention, and the media themselves became a controversial source of these challenges. Concerned that excessive crime, violence, and sex in comic books were encouraging juvenile delinquency, the U.S. Senate held nationally televised hearings in 1954. The Senate’s final report, written largely by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, complained of the “scantily clad women” and “penchant for violent death” common in comic books aimed at teenagers. Kefauver’s report forced the comics industry to tame its wildest practices but did little to slow the growing frankness about both sex and violence in the nation’s printed media and films.

A magazine entrepreneur from Chicago named Hugh Hefner played a leading role in that growing frankness. Hefner founded Playboy magazine in 1953, in which he created a countermorality to domesticity: a fictional world populated by “hip” bachelor men and sexually available women. Hefner’s imagined bachelors condemned marriage and lived in sophisticated apartments filled with the latest stereo equipment and other consumer products. While domesticated fathers bought lawn mowers and patio furniture, Hefner’s magazine encouraged men to spend money on clothing and jazz albums for themselves, and for the “scantily clad women” that filled its pages. Hefner and his numerous imitators became powerful purveyors of sex in the media. But Hefner was the exception that proved the rule: marriage, not swinging bachelorhood, remained the destination for the vast majority of men. Millions of men read Playboy, but few adopted its fantasy lifestyle.