ABSTRACT
The marginalization of the intellectual is registered under the heading “seeking a feeling society”; a pathological fear of elitism, under “fairness to others”; the brushing aside of civil liberties, under “sensitivity to the people’s needs.” The sexes require common ground upon which to mate and to raise offspring. A key to understanding the myriad changes leading up to the sexual crisis of the 1950s is a much older social innovation—money. Dispirited women compensate their inner emptiness by tyrannizing their husbands with insatiable sexual demands, by living through children they smother into neurosis, by obsessing over housework, and by chasing fugitive pleasures of adultery, shopping, tranquilizers, and alcohol. Even in marriage, sex was becoming the only thing between men and women. Sex was a chance for heightened experience, an opportunity for yet another “kick” or “high.” Sex, marriage, and family were wilder in the middle-class suburb than on the communal farm.
