I'm glad it was a good period of your life but I spent enough time wondering about why so many people idealize that time that I had to do some research and write about it - because it's pretty clear that what was really happening at that time never matched the hype. The women's movement of the 60s and 70s is a direct result of the stringent gender roles of the 50s - an era of needing "Mother's Little Helper' just to get through the day for a lot of women. Playboy magazine was envisioned as an alternative to the things that were being demanded of men at that time.
"Poor women, including most Black women, always had to work outside the home as well as in it. They weren’t vacuuming in shirtwaist dresses and high heels like June Cleaver, but then really who was? Marriage boomed, and at a younger age in the 50s, but in the decades to come, a third of those marriages that took place in the 1950s ended in divorce."
I think the fact that the economy was so strong and that many more people became "middle class" at this time helps with the idealization but also that for the first time large number of people had televisions and were constantly being bombarded with how life was supposed to be (even if it wasn't actually that way in their lives). After so much privation and upheaval at the first part of the century, people desperately wanted to be happy, whether they actually were or not.
