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Girls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction in 1950s America

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Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media

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Abstract

This chapter analyses the rise of ‘bad girl’ books in America during the 1950s. Chronicles of the criminal and sexual misdeeds of errant young women, ‘bad girl’ books were a subgenre in a broader flood of cheap and lurid ‘juvenile delinquency’ novels that traded on contemporary anxieties about youth crime and gang violence. The chapter shows how ‘bad girl’ books successfully exploited popular anxieties surrounding gender, morality and crime. It also demonstrates how their success was indebted to wider shifts in the fields of production, demand, reception and regulation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The two histrionic quotations are taken from the back-cover promotional blurbs for, respectively, Quandt (1952) and Brown (1954).

  2. 2.

    See Osgerby (2017) for a discussion of the whole genre of 1950s ‘delinquency’ fiction.

  3. 3.

    For accounts of the rise of the American paperback industry, see Davis (1984), Schreuders (1981) and Walters (1985).

  4. 4.

    A more detailed analysis of the development of the American teenage market can be found in Osgerby (2008).

  5. 5.

    Gilbert does not use the term ‘moral panic’, but it can be aptly applied to American responses to delinquency during the 1950s. Popularised in Stanley Cohen’s (1972) analysis of the ‘battles’ between mods and rockers at British seaside resorts during 1964, the concept of moral panic denotes episodes of overblown social alarm in which exaggerated and sensationalised media reports fan the sparks of an initially trivial phenomenon, creating a self-perpetuating ‘amplification spiral’ that steadily heightens the phenomenon’s social significance.

  6. 6.

    A full survey of 1950s ‘J.D.’ movies is provided in McGee and Roberston (1982).

  7. 7.

    See Heggarty (2008).

  8. 8.

    In this respect Ellson’s attitudes echo perspectives elaborated by liberal sociologists and criminologists of the day. For example, Albert Cohen (1955) and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960) argued that the poverty and privations of ghetto neighbourhoods excluded youngsters from mainstream routes to success and so, looking for an alternative source of status and security, they gravitated to street gangs. Given his position at Bellevue Hospital, it is likely that Ellson was familiar with such views.

  9. 9.

    For a history of America’s horror comic panic during the 1950s see Hajdu (2008).

  10. 10.

    Analyses of ‘lesbian’ pulp fiction of the 1950s exist in Foote (2005), Rabinowitz (2014, 184–208), Walters (1989) and Zimet (1999).

  11. 11.

    An overview of the campaign is provided in Speer (2001).

  12. 12.

    See Davis (1984, 216–247) and Rabinowitz (2014, 244–280).

  13. 13.

    See Osgerby (2018, forthcoming) for a discussion of ‘bad girl’ fiction in Britain and the US during the late 1960s and 1970s.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. London Metropolitan University, London, UK

    Bill Osgerby

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  1. Bill Osgerby
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  1. Keele University, Keele, UK

    Nick Bentley

  2. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Beth Johnson

  3. Keele University, Keele, UK

    Andrzej Zieleniec

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Osgerby, B. (2018). Girls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction in 1950s America. In: Bentley, N., Johnson, B., Zieleniec, A. (eds) Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73189-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73189-6_1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73189-6

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