Cultural Receptions and Disillusionment in 1960s Suburban America

From Introduction: 'Romanticized in the paintings of Normal Rockwell and iconic Coca-Cola ads, the 1950s strike many today as a time when America was simpler and quaint. American nostalgia remembers the post-World War II “ideal” of the white, suburban, nuclear family. Yet, even as the culture of the suburbia came into maturity in the 1960s, the grounds for its collapse were already established. Women, confined to the home, were quickly losing sight of their purpose and of themselves. Men looked to their families to define their masculinity and struggled to maintain the image of a perfect life. Children, who were the center of their parents’ lives, couldn’t grow up and thus left behind responsibilities in favor of the counterculture. The commonality across these three pillars of the nuclear family was disillusionment with the American perfect portrait. Though the Rockwell paintings failed to illustrate the suburban crisis of identity, some artists and authors did capture this disintegration. This essay will analyze the music of Simon and Garfunkel in the 1960s and put them in conversation with stories that trace the unraveling of traditional family roles including: *The Graduate*, *Feminine Mystique*, “S.C.U.M Manifesto”, *Dispatches*, *The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test*, and “The Psychedelic Experience”.'