During the postwar era, Western society and culture witnessed remarkably rapid change. Computers, television, jet planes, contraceptive devices, and new surgical techniques all dramatically and quickly altered the pace and nature of human life. The rapid changes in postwar society, fueled by scientific advances and rapid economic growth, led many to view it as a new society.
The structure of European society was altered after 1945. Especially noticeable were the changes in the middle class. Such traditional middle-class groups as businesspeople and professionals in law, medicine, and the universities were greatly augmented by a new group of managers and technicians as large companies and government agencies employed increasing numbers of white-collar supervisory and administrative personnel. In both Eastern and Western Europe, the new managers and experts were very much alike. Everywhere their positions depended on specialized knowledge acquired from some form of higher education. Everywhere they focused on the effective administration of their organizations. Because their positions usually depended on their skills, they took steps to ensure that their own children would be educated.
A SOCIETY OF CONSUMERS Changes also occurred among the traditional lower classes. Especially noticeable was the dramatic shift of people from rural to urban areas. The number of people working in agriculture declined dramatically, yet the size of the industrial labor force remained the same. In West Germany, industrial workers made up 48 percent of the labor force throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Thereafter, the number of industrial workers began to dwindle as white-collar and service jobs increased. At the same time, a substantial increase in their real wages enabled the working classes to aspire to the consumption patterns of the middle class, leading to what some observers have called the consumer society. Buying on the installment plan, introduced in the 1920s, became widespread in the 1950s and gave workers a chance to imitate the middle class by buying such products as televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and stereos. Shopping for everyday commodities, such as food products, also became easier and cheaper with the introduction of supermarkets (see Images of Everyday Life on p. 893). But the most visible symbol of mass consumerism was the automobile. For the most part, only the European upper classes could afford cars before World War II. In 1948, there were 5 million cars in all of Europe, but by 1957, the number had tripled. By the 1960s, there were almost 45 million cars.
MASS LEISURE Rising incomes, combined with shorter working hours, created an even greater market for mass leisure activities. Between 1900 and 1960, the workweek was reduced from sixty hours to a little more than forty hours, and the number of paid holidays increased. In the 1960s, German and Italian workers received between thirty-two and thirty-five paid holidays a year. All aspects of popular culture – music, sports, media – became commercialized and offered opportunities for leisure activities, including concerts, sporting events, and television viewing.
Another visible symbol of mass leisure was the growth of mass tourism. Before World War II, mostly the upper and middle classes traveled for pleasure. After the war, the combination of more vacation time, increased prosperity, and the flexibility provided by package tours with their lower rates and less expensive lodgings enabled millions to expand their travel possibilities. By the mid-1960s, 100 million tourists were crossing European boundaries each year.
One of the most noticeable social developments in postwar Europe was the creation of the welfare state. In one sense, the welfare state represented another extension of the power of the state over the lives of its citizens, a process that had increased dramatically as a result of the two world wars. Yet the goal of the welfare state was to make it possible for people to live better and more meaningful lives. Advocates of the welfare state believed that by eliminating poverty and homelessness, providing medical services for all, ensuring dignity for older people, and extending educational opportunities for all who wanted them, the state would satisfy people’s material needs and thereby free them to achieve happiness.
Social welfare schemes were not new to Europe. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, some states had provided for the welfare of the working class by instituting old-age pensions, medical insurance, and unemployment compensation. But these efforts were piecemeal and were by no means based on a general belief that society had a responsibility to care for all of its citizens.
The new postwar social legislation greatly extended earlier benefits and created new ones as well. Of course, social welfare benefits differed considerably from country to country in quantity and quality as well as in how they were paid for and managed. Nevertheless, there were some common trends. In many countries, already existing benefits for sickness, accidents, unemployment, and old age were simply extended to cover more people and provide larger payments. Men were generally eligible for old-age pensions at age sixty-five and women at sixty.
Affordable health care for all people was another goal of the welfare state, although the methods of achieving this goal varied. In some countries, medical care was free to all people with some kind of insurance, but in others, people had to contribute toward the cost of their medical care. The amount ranged from 10 to 25 percent of the total cost.
Another feature of welfare states was the use of family allowances, which were instituted in some countries to provide a minimum level of material care for children. Most family allowance programs provided a fixed amount per child. Family allowances were also conceived in large part as a way to increase the population after the decline suffered during the war. The French, for example, increased the amount of aid for each new child after the first one.
Welfare states also sought to remove class barriers to opportunity by expanding the number of universities and providing scholarships to allow everyone to attend an institution of higher learning. Overall, European states moved toward free or only modest tuition for university attendance. These policies did not always achieve their goals, however. In the early 1960s, most students in Western European universities still came from privileged backgrounds. In Britain, 25 percent of university students came from working-class backgrounds; in France, the figure was only 17.6 percent.
The welfare state dramatically increased the amount of money states expended on social services. In 1967, such spending constituted 17 percent of the gross national product of the major European countries; by the 1980s, it absorbed 40 to 50 percent. To some critics, these figures proved that the welfare state had produced a new generation of citizens overly dependent on the state. But most people favored the benefits, and most leaders were well aware that it was political suicide to advocate curtailing or seriously lowering those benefits.
GENDER ISSUES IN THE WELFARE STATE Gender issues also influenced the form that the welfare state took in different countries. One general question dominated the debate: Should women be recognized in a special category as mothers, or should they be regarded as individuals? William Beveridge, the economist who drafted the report that formed the basis for the British welfare state, said that women had “vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race.” “During marriage,” he said, “most women will not be gainfully employed. The small minority of women who undertake paid employment or other gainful employment or other gainful occupations after marriage require special treatment differing from that of single women.”10 Accordingly, the British welfare system was based on the belief that women should stay home with their children: women received subsidies for children, but married women who worked were given few or no benefits. Employers were also encouraged to pay women lower wages to discourage them from joining the workforce. Thus, the British welfare system encouraged wives to be dependent on their husbands. So did the West German system. The West German government passed laws that discouraged women from working. In keeping its women at home, West Germany sought to differentiate itself from neighboring Communist countries in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where women were encouraged to work outside the home. At the same time, to help working women raise families, Communist governments also provided day-care facilities, as well as family subsidies and maternity benefits.
France sought to maintain the individual rights of women in its welfare system. The French government recognized women as equal to men and thus entitled to the same welfare benefits as men for working outside the home. At the same time, wanting to encourage population growth, the government provided incentives for women to stay home and bear children as well as day-care and after-school programs to assist working mothers.
Despite their enormous contributions to the war effort, women were removed from the workforce at the end of World War II to provide jobs for the soldiers returning home. After the horrors of war, people seemed willing for a while to return to traditional family practices. Female participation in the workforce declined, and birthrates began to rise, creating a “baby boom.” This increase in the birthrate did not last, however, and birthrates, and thus the size of families, began to decline by the end of the 1950s. Largely responsible for this decline was the widespread practice of birth control. Invented in the nineteenth century, the condom was already in wide use, but the development in the 1960s of oral contraceptives, known as birth control pills or simply “the pill,” provided a reliable means of birth control that quickly spread to all Western countries.
WOMEN IN THE WORKFORCE The trend toward smaller families no doubt contributed to the change in the character of women’s employment in both Europe and the United States as women experienced considerably more years when they were not involved in rearing children. The most important development was the increased number of married women in the workforce. At the beginning of the twentieth century, even working-class wives tended to stay at home if they could afford to do so. In the postwar period, this was no longer the case. In the United States, for example, in 1900, married women made up about 15 percent of the female labor force; by 1970, their number had increased to 62 percent. The percentage of married women in the female labor force in Sweden increased from 47 to 66 percent between 1963 and 1975. Figures for the Soviet Union and its satellites were even higher. In 1970, fully 92.5 percent of all women in the Soviet Union held jobs, compared to around 50 percent in France and West Germany.
But the increased number of women in the workforce did not change some old patterns. Working-class women in particular still earned salaries lower than those of men for equal work. In the 1960s, women earned only 60 percent of men’s wages in Britain, 50 percent in France, and 63 percent in West Germany. In addition, women still tended to enter traditionally female jobs. As one Swedish female guidance counselor remarked in 1975, “Every girl now thinks in terms of a job. This is progress. They want children, but they don’t pin their hopes on marriage. They don’t intend to be housewives for some future husband. But there has been no change in their vocational choices.” 11 Many European women also still faced the double burden of earning income on the one hand and raising a family and maintaining the household on the other.
SUFFRAGE AND THE SEARCH FOR LIBERATION The participation of women in the two world wars helped them achieve one of the major aims of the nineteenth-century women’s movement-the right to vote. Already after World War I, many governments acknowledged the contributions of women to the war effort by granting them suffrage. Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia did so in 1918, followed by the United States in 1920. Women in France and Italy did not obtain the right to vote until 1945. After World War II, European women tended to fall back into the traditional roles expected of them, and little was heard of feminist concerns.
A women’s liberation movement would arise in the late 1960s (see Chapter 29), but much of the theoretical foundation for the postwar women’s liberation movement was evident in the earlier work of Simone de Beauvoir (see-MUHN duh boh-VWAR) (1908-1986). Born into a Catholic middle-class family and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, she supported herself as a teacher and later as a novelist and writer. She maintained a lifelong relationship (but not marriage) with Jean-Paul Sartre (ZHAHNH-POHL SAR-truh). Her involvement in the existentialist movement, the leading intellectual movement of the time (see “The Philosophical Dilemma: Existentialism” later in this chapter), led to her involvement in political causes. De Beauvoir believed that she lived a “liberated” life for a twentieth-century European woman, but for all her freedom, she still came to perceive that as a woman she faced limits that men did not. In 1949, she published her highly influential work The Second Sex, in which she argued that as a result of male-dominated societies, women had been defined by their differences from men and consequently received second-class status: “What peculiarly Signalizes the situation of woman is that she-a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.”12 De Beauvoir played an active role in the French women’s movement of the 1970s, and her book became a major influence on both sides of the Atlantic (see the box on p. 895).
Many artists and writers struggled to understand the horrors of World War II. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno believed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
ART Many artists and writers, particularly the Surrealists, fled to the United States during World War II to avoid persecution for their revolutionary ideas. Following the war, the United States dominated the art world, much as it did me world of popular culture (see “The Americanization of the World” later in this chapter). New York City replaced Paris as the artistic center of the West. The Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modem Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, together with New York’s numerous art galleries, promoted modem art and helped determine artistic tastes throughout much of the world. One of the styles that became synonymous with the emergence of the New York art scene was Abstract Expressionism.
Dubbed “action painting” by one critic, Abstract Expressionism was energetic and spontaneous, qualities evident in the enormous canvases of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). In works such as Convergence (1952), paint seems to explode, enveloping the viewer with emotion and movement. Pollock’s swirling forms and seemingly chaotic patterns broke all conventions of form and structure. His drip paintings, with their total abstraction, were extremely influential with other artists, and he eventually became a celebrity. Inspired by Native American sand painters, Pollock painted with the canvas on the floor. He explained, “On me floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in, work from four sides and be literally in the painting. When I am in the painting, I am not aware of what I am doing. There is pure harmony.”
The 1950s and early 1960s saw me emergence of Pop Art, which took images of popular culture and transformed them into works of fine art. Several British art students, known as the Independent Group, incorporated science fiction and American advertising techniques into their exhibitions. “This Is Tomorrow,” an exhibit held in 1956 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, was the group’s crowning achievement. It featured environments inspired by advertisements as well as mural-sized reproductions of movie characters like Robby the Robot.
Andy Warhol (1930-1987), who began as an advertising illustrator, became the most famous of the American Pop artists. Warhol adapted images from commercial art, such as Campbell’s soup cans, and photographs of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe. Derived from mass culture, these works were mass-produced and deliberately “of the moment,” expressing the fleeting whims of popular culture. The detached style of Warhol’s silk-screened prints put Pop Art at odds with the aggressive, painterly techniques of the Abstract Expressionists.
LITERATURE The most significant new trend in postwar literature was called the “Theater of the Absurd.” This new convention in drama began in France in the 1950s, although its most famous proponent was the Irishman Samuel Beckett (1906-1990), who lived in France. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), the action on stage is not realistic. Two men wait incessantly for the appearance of someone, with whom they mayor may not have an appointment. No background information on the two men is provided. During the course of the play, nothing seems to be happening. The audience is never told if what they are watching is real or not. Unlike traditional theater, suspense is maintained not by having the audience wonder what is going to happen next but by having them ask, what is happening now?
The Theater of the Absurd reflected its time. The postwar period was a time of disillusionment with ideological beliefs in politics or religion. A sense of the world’s meaninglessness underscored the desolate worldview of absurdist drama and literature. This can be seen in the novel The Tin Drum (1959) by Gunter Grass (b. 1927), which reflected postwar Germany’s preoccupation with the seeming incomprehensibility of Nazi Germany.
The sense of meaninglessness that inspired the Theater of the Absurd also underscored the philosophy of existentialism. It was born largely of the desperation caused by two world wars and the breakdown of traditional values. Existentialism reflected the anxieties of the twentieth century and became especially well known after World War II through the works of two Frenchmen, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (ahl-BAYR ka-MOO) (19l3-1960).
The central point of the existentialism of Sartre and Camus was the absence of God in the universe. The death of God, though tragic, meant that humans had no preordained destiny and were utterly alone in the universe, with no future and no hope. As Camus expressed it:
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.13
According to Camus, then, the world was absurd and without meaning; humans, too, are without meaning and purpose. Reduced to despair and depression, humans have but one source of hope – themselves.
Though the world might be absurd, Camus argued, it could not be absurd unless people judged it to be so. People are unique in the world, and their kind of being is quite different from that of all others. In the words of Sartre, human “existence precedes essence.” Humans are beings who first exist and then define themselves. They determine what they will be. According to Sartre, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.” People, then, must take full responsibility for what they are. They create their values and give their lives meaning. And this can only be done by their involvement in life. Only through one’s acts can one determine one’s values.
Existentialism, therefore, involved an ethics of action, of involvement in life. But people could not define themselves without their involvement with others. Thus, existentialism’s ethical message was just as important as its philosophy of being. Essentially, the message of existentialism was one of authenticity. Individuals true to themselves refused to be depersonalized by their society. As one author noted, “Existentialism is the struggle to discover the human person in a depersonalized age.”
Existentialism was one response to the despair generated by the apparent collapse of civilized values in the twentieth century. The attempt to revive religion was another. Ever since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Christianity and religion had been on the defensive. But a number of religious thinkers and leaders attempted to bring new life to Christianity in the twentieth century.
One expression of this religious revival was the attempt by the Protestant theologian Karl Barth (BAHRT) (1886-1968) to infuse traditional Christian teachings with new life. In his numerous writings, Barth attempted to reinterpret the religious insights of the Reformation era for the modern world. To Barth, the sinful and hence imperfect nature of human beings meant that humans could know religious truth not through reason but only through the grace of God.
In the Catholic Church, an attempt at religious renewal also came from a charismatic pope. Pope John XXIII (18811963) reigned as pope for only a short time (1958-1963) but sparked a dramatic revival of Catholicism when he summoned the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Known as Vatican II, the council liberalized a number of Catholic practices. For example, the liturgy of the Mass, the central feature of Catholic worship, was now to be spoken in the vernacular, not in Latin. New avenues of communication with other Christian faiths were also opened for the first time since the Reformation.
But these attempts to redefine Christianity were not necessarily successful at rekindling people’s faith. Although many churches experienced an upswing in involvement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, no doubt as a response to the war, by the late 1950s and 1960s, attendance was declining at European churches. Even in Italy, regular attendance by members of the Catholic Church fell from 69 percent in 1956 to 48 percent in 1968.
Since World War II, popular culture has played an increasingly important role in helping Western people define themselves. The history of popular culture is also the history of the economic system that supports it, for this system manufactures, distributes, and sells the images that people consume as popular culture. As popular culture and its economic support system have become increasingly intertwined, industries of leisure have emerged. As one historian of popular culture has argued, “Industrial societies turn the provision of leisure into a commercial activity, in which their citizens are sold entertainment, recreation, pleasure, and appearance as commodities that differ from the goods at the drugstore only in the way they are used.” 14 Thus, modern popular culture is inextricably tied to the mass consumer society in which it has emerged.
THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE WORLD The United States has been the most influential force in shaping popular culture in the West and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the world. Through movies, music, advertising, and television, the United States has spread its particular form of consumerism and the American dream to millions around the world. Already in 1923, the New York Morning Post noted that “the film is to America what the flag was once to Britain. By its means Uncle Sam may hope some day . .. to Americanize the world.” 15 In movies, television, and popular music, the impact of American popular culture on the Western world is pervasive.
Motion pictures were the primary vehicle for the diffusion of American popular culture in the years immediately following the war, and they continued to dominate both European and American markets in the next decades (40 percent of Hollywood’s income in the 1960s came from the European market). Nevertheless, the existence of a profitable art-house circuit in America and Europe enabled European filmmakers to make films whose themes and avant-garde methods were quite different from those of Hollywood. Italy and Sweden, for example, developed a tradition of “national cinema” that reflected “specific cultural traits in a mode in which they could be successfully exported.” The 1957 film The Seventh Seal, by the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), was a good example of the successful European art film. Bergman’s films caused him to be viewed as “an artist of comparable stature to a novelist or playwright.” So too were François Truffaut (frahnh-SWAH troo-FOH) (1932-1984) in France and Federico Fellini (1920-1993) in Italy; such directors gloried in experimenting with subject matter and technique and produced films dealing with more complex and daring themes than Hollywood would attempt.
Although developed in the 1930s, television did not become readily available until the late 1940s. By 1954, there were 32 million sets in the United States as television became the centerpiece of middle-class life. In the 1960s, as television spread around the world, American networks unloaded their products on Europe and the Third World at extraordinarily low prices. For instance, the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) could buy American programs for one-tenth the cost per viewer of producing its own. Only the establishment of quota systems prevented American television from completely inundating these countries.
The United States has dominated popular music since the end of World War II. Jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and rock ’n’ roll have been by far the most popular music forms in the Western world – and much of the non-Western world – during this time. All of them originated in the United States, and all are rooted in African American musical innovations. These forms later spread around the globe, inspiring local artists who then transformed the music in their own way. Often these transformed models then returned to the United States to inspire American artists. This was certainly the case with rock ‘n’ roll. Through the 1950s, American artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley inspired the Beatles and other British performers, who then led an “invasion” of the United States in the 1960s, creating a sensation and in part sparking new rockers in America. The availability of cheap personal music players in the 1960s transformed the music industry, making albums more accessible to wider audiences instead of relying on radio broadcasts and concerts. Rock music itself developed in the 1950s. In 1952, white disc jockeys began playing rhythm and blues and traditional blues music performed by African Americans to young white audiences. The music was popular with this audience, and record companies began recording watered-down white “cover” versions of this music. It was not until performers such as Elvis Presley mixed white “folkabilly” with rhythm and blues that rock ‘n’ roll became popular with the larger white audience.
At the end of a devastating world war, a new kind of conflict erupted in the Western world as two of the victors, the United States and the Soviet Union, emerged as superpowers and began to argue over the political organization of a Europe liberated from Nazi Germany. Europeans, whether they wanted to or not, were forced to become supporters of one side or the other. The Western world was soon divided between supporters of a capitalistic West and adherents of a Communist East. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created by the United States, Canada, and ten nations of Western Europe as a defensive alliance against Soviet aggression. In 1955, the Soviet Union formed a military alliance with seven Eastern European states, and Europe was once again divided into hostile alliance systems.
Western Europe emerged as a new community in the 1950s and the 1960s and staged a remarkable economic recovery. While the Western European economy boomed, Eastern Europe seemed to stagnate under the control of the Soviet Union. The economic integration of the Western European nations began in 1951 with the European Coal and Steel Community and continued in 1957 with the formation of the European Economic Community, also known as the Common Market. Eastern European states had made their own efforts at economic cooperation when they formed the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1949. Regardless of their economic differences, however, both Western and Eastern Europeans were well aware that their future still depended on the conflict between the two superpowers.
A new European society also emerged after World War II. White-collar workers increased in number, and installment plan buying helped create a consumer society. Rising incomes, combined with shorter working hours, created an ever-greater market for mass leisure activities. The welfare state provided both pensions and health care. Birth control led to smaller families, and more women joined the workforce.
In addition to the Cold War conflict, the postwar era was also characterized by decolonization. After World War II, the colonial empires of the European states were largely dissolved, and the liberated territories of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East emerged as sovereign states. All too soon, these newly independent nations of ten found themselves caught in the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the United States fought in Korea to prevent the spread of communism, the ideological division that had begun in Europe quickly spread to the rest of the world.