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This paper investigates how key social issues related to American culture, social character, and politics are addressed in the work of two of America's leading liberal sociologists, David Riesman and Daniel Bell. It maps out the trajectory of Riesman's and Bell's early contributions to a critique of mass society in post-war America, as well as Bell's later formulation of “liberalism in crisis” and his assessment of culture in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . This analysis pays particular attention to the intellectual, biographical, and social settings that helped to shape the often conflicting ideas of each thinker, and examines the discursive shifts within liberal thinking as it attempted to explain and deal with perceived new social crises from the 1950s to the present. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the literature considered for issues pertaining to gender in the 1950s is David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), John Seeley, et al., Crestwood Heights (1956), William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (1956), Jules Henry, Culture against Man, and essays by Talcott Parsons on the family. The paper shows how the authors apparently document the modernization of gender and the family by ignoring or downplaying conventional and conservative factors. In fact, they were more sanguine than even their own evidence warranted, although they seemed unaware of this. By seeing only progressive indicators they neglected the constraints on women, often identified as the "feminine mystique." Three gender and family issues are considered for actual evidence about what was happening in the 1950s but also for contradictions in the authors' work that yield insights as well. These are whether feminine and masculine sex roles were converging in modern America, the development of companionship marriage, and the issue of "maternal overinvolvement" (or the domineering mother) in childrearing. The work under consideration suggests contradictory gender messages and developments in the postwar period, indicating a period in which possibilities for equality between the sexes were being both created and denied to women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]