If parents expected young people to behave like Ozzie and Harriet Nelson’s sons, the popular culture industry provided teenagers with alternative role models. In Rebel without a Cause (1955), actor James Dean portrayed a seventeen-year-old filled with anguish about his life. A sensitive but misunderstood young man, he muses that he wants “just one day when I wasn’t all confused . . . [when] I wasn’t ashamed of everything . . . [when] I felt I belonged some place.” The Wild One (1954), which starred Marlon Brando, also popularized youthful angst. The leather-outfitted leader of a motorcycle gang, Brando rides into a small town, hoping to shake it up. When asked by a local resident, “What are you rebelling against?” he coolly replies, “Whaddya got?” Real gangs did exist on the streets of New York and other major cities. Composed of working-class youth from various ethnic and racial backgrounds, these gangs were highly organized, controlled their neighborhood turfs, and engaged in “rumbles” (fights) with intruders. A romanticized version of these battles appeared on Broadway with the production of West Side Story (1957), which pitted a white gang against a Puerto Rican gang in a musical rendering of Romeo and Juliet.

Hollywood rarely portrayed women as rebels, but instead as mothers, understanding girlfriends, and dutiful wives. If they sought a career, like many of the women played by actor Doris Day, they pursued it only as long as necessary to meet the right man. Yet the film industry did offer a more tantalizing woman, a sexual being who displayed her attributes to seduce and outwit men. Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) revealed that women also had a powerful libido, though in the end they became domesticated or paid a terrible price.