SOCIETAL MORES

From the chapter "The Gentlest Decade"

SOCIETAL MORES

The idea of a female wearing a bathing suit that showed her navel was unheard of in the 1950s, except in the minds of the boys.  Dress codes for girls were unwritten, but, if a girl dressed inappropriately by wearing something that let more than a postage stamp size piece of skin show, a teacher or neighborhood busybody would let the offending girl’s parents know the girl’s clothing was unacceptable.  A change in style would be made almost immediately.  Skirt lengths ending between the knee and ankle were acceptable, and enough petticoats to provide ballast for a Navy Destroyer were generally the uniform of the day.  Blouses usually buttoned up to the neck and sweaters were worn draped around the shoulder.

About the only way we could see any thing remotely resembling flesh was to sneak-a-peek at the women’s underwear section in the Sears Roebuck catalogue.  It was better than nothing.  The coming of the two-piece bathing suit was welcomed by all males in Americus , regardless of religion or national origin.  Of course, none of the girls we knew had parents who would permit their daughters to wear such “low-rent looking” bathing attire.

 I wonder what those parents would think about what some of the well-dressed teenaged girls wear now.  The way teenage girls are allowed to dress today brings new definition to the term “trashy chic.”  I recently rode by a charity car wash being put on by what looked to be fourteen and fifteen year old high school girls.  They wore some right skimpy and revealing bikinis that left a lot of skin uncovered.  With the hip-hop music blaring from several boom boxes and the girls all showing off their prowess at extremely lewd dancing I thought I was ringside at a “Sluts R Us” convention.  There was more meat hanging out in that parking lot than in a Chicago butcher shop.

Tight sweaters took a long time to become déclassé.  That didn’t really matter, since most of the girls didn’t have enough equipment to properly fill out a tight sweater anyhow.  I once overheard two girls talking at their lockers between classes.  They were bemoaning the fact that none of the exercises they had been told to try increased their bra size.  I believe the chant that went with the exercises was, “I must, I must, I must increase my bust.”  The flat-chested girl told the other girl, “I got up late this morning and was dressing in a hurry.  I accidentally put my bra on backwards, and damned if it didn’t still fit.”

Americus and Sumter County were truly blessed with a large number of good-looking young women.  The only better looking Southern Belles than ours were those who hailed from the Ellaville area. They were fine.  The girls in Cordele were okay, but if you dated a Cordele girl you needed a very fast car so you could outrun the Cordele hoodlums back to the Lake Blackshear Bridge and the safety of Sumter County .  The Cordele girls were no problem, but the Cordele boys had a real bad problem with anyone from Americus or Sumter County dating one of the local bobby-soxers. 

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