The entire concept of Ruth Handler’s Barbie doll (introduced in 1959) revolutionized toys by allowing a “much needed play pattern that had never before been offered by the doll industry to little girls,” namely role-playing outside of motherhood. Despite significant opposition—not the least of which was to the fact that the doll had breasts—forty years later the Economist would write, “Of all the forces against which resistance is futile, Barbie ranks near the top.” Barbie only reflected the prominence of sexy female movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Brigitte Bardot. Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which appeared in 1953, indicated that women were having sex before marriage in large numbers, perhaps—if Kinsey’s statistics were to be believed—up to half of the six thousand women he had interviewed. Certainly men thought about sex all the time, or at least that was the premise behind the launch of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine in 1953, wherein photos of nude women were legitimized for viewing by middle-class men by packaging with interviews, fiction, and “serious reporting.”… As if to follow Hefner’s lead, in 1957 the Searle pharmaceutical company brought out the birth-control pill, which proved instrumental in delinking sexual intercourse from childbearing or, put another way, in separating consequences from actions.
Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pg.681-682
