Cautiously Negotiating Social Divides: A Conservative Student Body (1950–1969)

Abstract

Within divided and dividing institutional spaces, some male and female students in the 1950s and 1960s practiced crossing class and race borders in their imaginations when they could not do so in reality. Overall, however, students’ opportunities for developing friendships across gender, race, and class divides were restricted and shaped by institutional norms. Some students willingly embraced those norms; other students, by dropping out or doing time, perpetuated and reinforced those norms, making the Divided Generation the most conservative of the three generations.