Janelle Reston

Rainbow Snippets: Katharine Hepburn as role model in the 1950s

Decades before it became socially acceptable in the United States for women to wear pants anytime they liked, movie star Katharine Hepburn was doing it on-screen and off. She was also known for playing career women who refused to give up on their ambitions to please the men in their lives, whether it was as a lawyer in Adam’s Rib, a journalist in Woman of the Year, a professional athlete in Pat and Mike, or television network researcher in Desk Set.

It wasn’t just Katharine Hepburn’s characters who had a feminist streak. Hepburn had been raised in high-society New England by free-thinking parents: a suffragist mother who also campaigned for birth control, and a urologist father who co-founded the Social Hygiene Association, educating people about venereal diseases at a time when talking about sex was frowned upon.

As a girl, she’d been a tomboy and called herself “Jimmy”; as an adult, Hepburn refused to conform to the expectations put upon Hollywood starlets and was known for speaking her mind.

So it’s only natural that Harriet, the narrator of my 1950s coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy, thinks of Hepburn every time a woman bends gender roles.

Today as part of Rainbow Snippets, a Facebook group where readers and writers share six lines from a piece of LGBTQ+ fiction—one for each line of the rainbow flag—I’m sharing a few passages from Tomboy that highlight the late Hepburn.

Here’s Harriet at the age of nine. Her friend Jackie has a mother who lets her do as she wants, within reason. So Jackie cuts her hair as short as a boy’s and wears jeans all the time when she’s not at school. Harriet is jealous.

I didn’t want to cut my hair, but there were lots of girl things I could do without, like tight shoes and having to get married when I grew up. I didn’t want to get married and have kids. I wanted to be a private investigator like The Shadow or Philip Marlowe or Johnny Dollar, or maybe a lady lawyer like Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib. And I didn’t want to have to cross my legs when I sat. It made my thighs all sweaty.

And here’s Harriet in high school, surprised that Jackie doesn’t look like a boy anymore, despite the fact she continues to wear pants:

It surprised me how feminine she looked in them. Sort of like a younger version of Katharine Hepburn, though without the blue-blooded air.

There’s another mention of Hepburn in Tomboy, but it’s a little spoilery and besides, I’ve already hit seven sentences!

Before I leave off, have some pictures:

Katharine Hepburn wearing pants in The Philadelphia Story, 1940.

From the trailer for Adam’s Rib, 1949. Spoiler alert: The answer is “everybody.’

Katharine Hepburn at the Hotel Australia in Sydney, Australia, 1955. How I love her sensible shoes. And thank goodness Harriet never looked up to Hepburn’s smoking habit.

You can learn more about the context of Tomboy by reading through my posts about the 1950s.

Find more Rainbow Snippets on the Rainbow Snippets Facebook page or by looking for #rainbowsnippets and #rainbowsnippet on twitter. It’s a great way to discover new authors.

About Tomboy

Some kids’ heads are in the clouds. Harriet Little’s head is in outer space.

In 1950s America, everyone is expected to come out of a cookie-cutter mold. But Harriet prefers the people who don’t, like her communist-sympathizer father and her best friend Jackie, a tomboy who bucks the school dress code of skirts and blouses in favor of T-shirts and blue jeans. Harriet realizes she’s also different when she starts to swoon over Rosemary Clooney instead of Rock Hudson—and finds Sputnik and sci-fi more fascinating than sock hops.

Before long, Harriet is secretly dating the most popular girl in the school. But she soon learns that real love needs a stronger foundation than frilly dresses and feminine wiles.

Tomboy is a very sweet and delightful love story set in post-war America, following Harriet’s growing up and the gradually blossoming relationship between two school friends. … Beautifully written and genuinely touching – I loved it.Netgalley reader review

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Rainbow Snippets: Who got the best dress at Wanamaker's 1951 back-to-school sale ?

Harriet, the narrator of my coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy, never explicitly states where she grew up in the United States, but she drops some clues. Probably the biggest one is when she mentions her fellow classmates going back-to-school shopping at Wanamaker’s.

Politics of the 1950s: Revising the Pledge of Allegiance

In the first scene of my 1950s coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy, Harriet Little is at school for her first day of fourth grade. It’s 1951, and they start out the day by saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

The pledge recited by school children back then differed from the one Americans use today. If you’re from the U.S., you might be able to spot the difference:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I’ll talk about that difference soon, but first I want to note some other things about the way the Pledge was recited before 1954. By Harriet’s youth, it was common practice to start the days with the recitation of the Pledge in public schools all across the country. But the ways in which students saluted the flag varied. My dad began school prior to the US entry into World War II, and he loved to shock us kids by telling us how they used to salute the flag during the Pledge in his school. It looked something like this:

School students in Connecticut saying the Pledge of Allegiance with the Bellamy salute, May 1942. Photo is a work of the US federal government in the public domain.

And also like this:

School students saying the Pledge of Allegiance with the Bellamy salute, 1941. Photo is in the public domain.

Which looks an awful lot like this:

School children giving the Hitler salute in Berlin, Germany, 1934. Photo from the German Federal Archive and used through a Creative Commons 3.0 DE license.

As concerns about Nazism grew, the teachers in my dad’s school retaught the students how to say the pledge, this time with the right hands resting over their hearts, like this:

Photo of school children in San Francisco saying the Pledge of Allegiance in 1942. The children of Japanese ancestry were later moved to internment camps. Photo by Dorothea Lange and in the public domain.

That posture was enshrined into U.S. law by an act of Congress in December 1942. Wikipedia has an excellent summary of Pledge salute history if you’re interested.

After World War II, Nazism was replaced by communism as the largest perceived threat to American democracy. Communist partisans had gained control of the Russian government back in 1917, making it the first national government with a communist majority. Russia had a vast empire stretching east, west, and south, and most of those territories were officially incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1922.

Beginning around 1940, the Soviet Union expanded its influence in much of Eastern and Central Europe, either by invasion or political maneuvering. Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, parts of Finland, and the eastern part of Germany quickly came under Soviet control—changes that often violated treaties made with the U.S. government.

A key aspect of Soviet communism was the rejection of religion. The United States began to contrast itself with “godless communism” by emphasizing the role of religion in public life. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were many campaigns to add “under God” to the pledge, and several bills were introduced into the U.S. Congress to make that change. But it was in 1954, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended a church service where the pastor sermonized on the subject of adding “under God” to the pledge, that the idea finally took hold. Under a congressional Joint Resolution, the Pledge became:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

This change to the Pledge wasn’t an isolated incident. In 1956, Congress adopted “In God We Trust”—which had previously been used as an inscription on US coins at the Secretary of the Treasury’s discretion—as a new national motto to replace or be used in addition to the one that had been used for the previous 174 years: E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”). The legislation also required “In God We Trust” to appear on all US currency.

That wasn’t revolutionary as far as coins went; the Treasury had been stamping “In God We Trust” on all of them since 1938. But it was new for paper currency, which had never born the motto. The first American paper currency to read “In God We Trust” entered circulation in October 1957.

As for the Pledge of Allegiance, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in 1943 that students cannot be compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and in the 1970s the courts clarified that kids could not be compelled to stand, either. Nonetheless, news stories and court cases frequently arise after public schools punish students or intimidate them for not participating in Pledge rituals, and parents have filed a number of unsuccessful lawsuits over the use of the words “under God” in a school activity.

If you found this post interesting, check out my other Tomboy history posts.

Two words were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. What were they? Click To Tweet

Where to read Tomboy

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The Music of Tomboy: Ella Fitzgerald

Music plays in the background of several scenes in my 1950s coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy. Her father is a jazz aficionado and loves to play records every chance he gets. He’s particularly fond of Ella Fitzgerald.

There are three of her songs that appear in the story:

Black Coffee

This standard was published in 1948 and first recorded by Sarah Vaughan. Ella Fitzgerald recorded it as a single sometime between 1949 and 1954, and it was re-released on Miss Ella Fitzgerald & Mr. Gordon Jenkins Invite You to Listen and Relax from Decca Records. She recorded it again in 1960 for the soundtrack to the movie Let No Man Write My Epitaph.

They Can’t Take that Away from Me

Fitzgerald performed this with Louis Armstrong in their 1956 Verve Records album Ella and Louis—the first of three albums they would record for Verve before the decade was over.

I don’t call out this song by name in Tomboy, but I think you’ll figure out which scene it’s in if you pay attention to the lyrics.

Under a Blanket of Blue

This song plays directly after “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” on the Ella and Louis album and also in Tomboy. That’s a good clue for locating both songs in the story—just look for the place where two Ella and Louis songs get played in a row.

For more posts on the background to Tomboy, check out my Tomboy history tag.

Where to read Tomboy

Buy direct from the publisher

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Fashion of the 1950s: Dog collar ankle bracelets are the cat's meow

Back in the days before Claire’s, it wasn’t easy for a teenager to find contemporary accessories at an affordable price. We had to improvise by making cheap things fashionable. When I was young, it was jelly shoes made of stretchy see-through plastic and stretchy rubberband-like bracelets you could buy from gumball machines.

While researching my 1950s coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy, I was delighted to come across a similar—if less plasticky—long-forgotten budget-conscious fad from that era: dog-collar anklets.

Yup. Teenage girls wore dog collars around their ankles as a status symbol. Since bare ankles were a little risque then and might bring a girl in conflict with her school dress code, these anklets were always worn over socks, pulled snuggly around a folded sock cuff (do people still cuff their socks?) to prevent it from slipping.

The fad hit the big time in 1953, and whether you wore your dog collar on the left or the right was an announcement to the world about whether you were single or whether you were going steady with someone, though which side meant what varied depending on location. An Ohio newspaper reported that girls in Akron wore the dog collar on the left if they had a steady love interest, but in Dallas it was just the opposite.

Naturally, I had to include the dog-collar trend in Tomboy. So Harriet, the main character, and the girl she’s secretly dating/fooling around with buy matching ones. Even though Harriet has a girlfriend, she still thinks of herself as single. She’s so indoctrinated in the culture of her age that “going steady” is something that girls do with boys, and if that’s the case, she never wants to go steady:

We went to the pet store and bought matching dog collars. It was the fashion for teenage girls to wear them around their ankles—the right ankle if a girl was single, the left if she was going steady. I figured mine would stay on my right ankle my whole life. I was happy with that.

The dog collar shows up again in the story, but I can’t tell you about that without spoiling the book for you. I guess you’ll just have to go ahead and read it …

By the way, if you like reading story snippets as a way to learn about authors new to you, check out Rainbow Snippets on Facebook, a public group where readers and writers share six lines from a piece of LGBTQ+ fiction—one for each line of the rainbow flag. (Yeah, I know I only shared three, but that’s to make up for all the times I’ve gone over in my other Rainbow Snippets!)

And here’s where to read my other posts about the 1950s.

Where to read Tomboy

Buy direct from the publisher

Buy from Smashwords, the world’s largest independent ebook store

Buy from Amazon

Buy from Barnes & Noble

Buy from other ebook stores worldwide, including Kobo and iBooks

Language in the 1950s: Dungarees, not blue jeans

When I was writing my 1950s coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy, which is being released today by NineStar Press, I had to pay special attention to language. The words we use tend to change over time, and nothing illustrates this better than the fluctuating popularity of “blue jeans” versus “dungarees.”

I can’t remember when, exactly, it came to my attention that “dungarees” was the preferred term during much of the 1950s, but the video on school dress codes that I shared a few days ago is one example that brings the usage to light. So when did dungarees become blue jeans?

Kids in dungarees, early 1950s. From author’s private collection.

Actually, they’d been blue jeans all along. In English, the word “jean” goes back to the fifteenth century and originally referred to a twilled cotton cloth that was manufactured in Genoa (in what is now Italy). It came to English through French, and we had all sorts of crazy ways of spelling it, including “Geayne” and “Gene.”

“Jean” changed to “jeans” in the mid-1800s, but it still didn’t have the meaning it does today. It could refer to any garment made of denim. Indigo was commonly used to dye denim a dark blue that did a decent job of obscuring stains and was relatively cheap, being manufactured by enslaved workers in the South; “blue jeans” came into use to signify garments made of blue denim.

In 1873, Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss patented riveted blue denim trousers, and within a few years “blue jeans” became synonymous with the garment.

As a word for blue denim pants, “dungarees” is slightly older than “blue jeans,” but not by much. “Dungaree” came into English in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century as “dongerijns,” an Anglicization of the Hindi word “dungri.” Both the English and Hindi words meant “coarse calico”; Dungri was an Indian village that gave the cloth its name. Dungaree gained popularity during the British colonization of India, when large amounts of dungri were exported to England. By the end of the 1860s, people were saying “dungarees” to indicate blue denim pants.

The popularity of “dungarees” and “blue jeans” have fluctuated over the years, with “blue jeans” outcompeting “dungarees” until the 1910s in print sources. Then “dungarees” began to climb, hitting its peak at the end of World War II. It remained the more popular word (at least in print) until 1956.

Why? That remains a mystery to me, though I’d guess marketing and the 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause played important roles in popularizing “jeans.” Up until then, wearing denim had mostly been restricted to younger kids’ raucous outdoor play and physical jobs like mining, carpentry, and farming. To the young rebels of the 1950s, “dungarees” would have been a word used by uppity parents who sneered at practicality and comfort. Embracing the word “jeans” was a way to distinguish the new generation from the old and claim the fashion as their own. At least, that’s my postulation.

Check out my other Tomboy history posts for more about the 1950s.

The words we use tend to change over time, and nothing illustrates this better than the fluctuating popularity of 'blue jeans' versus 'dungarees.' Enjoy a little lesson in etymology: Click To Tweet

Where to read Tomboy

Buy direct from the publisher

Buy from Smashwords, the world’s largest independent ebook store

Buy from Amazon

Buy from Barnes & Noble

Buy from other ebook stores worldwide, including Kobo and iBooks

Language in the 1950s: Dungarees, not blue jeans

When I was writing my 1950s coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy, which is being released today by NineStar Press, I had to pay special attention to language. The words we use tend to change over time, and nothing illustrates this better than the fluctuating popularity of “blue jeans” versus “dungarees.”

I can’t remember when, exactly, it came to my attention that “dungarees” was the preferred term during much of the 1950s, but the video on school dress codes that I shared a few days ago is one example that brings the usage to light. So when did dungarees become blue jeans?

Kids in dungarees, early 1950s. From author’s private collection.

Actually, they’d been blue jeans all along. In English, the word “jean” goes back to the fifteenth century and originally referred to a twilled cotton cloth that was manufactured in Genoa (in what is now Italy). It came to English through French, and we had all sorts of crazy ways of spelling it, including “Geayne” and “Gene.”

“Jean” changed to “jeans” in the mid-1800s, but it still didn’t have the meaning it does today. It could refer to any garment made of denim. Indigo was commonly used to dye denim a dark blue that did a decent job of obscuring stains and was relatively cheap, being manufactured by enslaved workers in the South; “blue jeans” came into use to signify garments made of blue denim.

In 1873, Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss patented riveted blue denim trousers, and within a few years “blue jeans” became synonymous with the garment.

As a word for blue denim pants, “dungarees” is slightly older than “blue jeans,” but not by much. “Dungaree” came into English in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century as “dongerijns,” an Anglicization of the Hindi word “dungri.” Both the English and Hindi words meant “coarse calico”; Dungri was an Indian village that gave the cloth its name. Dungaree gained popularity during the British colonization of India, when large amounts of dungri were exported to England. By the end of the 1860s, people were saying “dungarees” to indicate blue denim pants.

The popularity of “dungarees” and “blue jeans” have fluctuated over the years, with “blue jeans” outcompeting “dungarees” until the 1910s in print sources. Then “dungarees” began to climb, hitting its peak at the end of World War II. It remained the more popular word (at least in print) until 1956.

Why? That remains a mystery to me, though I’d guess marketing and the 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause played important roles in popularizing “jeans.” Up until then, wearing denim had mostly been restricted to younger kids’ raucous outdoor play and physical jobs like mining, carpentry, and farming. To the young rebels of the 1950s, “dungarees” would have been a word used by uppity parents who sneered at practicality and comfort. Embracing the word “jeans” was a way to distinguish the new generation from the old and claim the fashion as their own. At least, that’s my postulation.

Check out my other Tomboy history posts for more about the 1950s.

The words we use tend to change over time, and nothing illustrates this better than the fluctuating popularity of 'blue jeans' versus 'dungarees.' Enjoy a little lesson in etymology: Click To Tweet

Where to read Tomboy

Buy direct from the publisher

Buy from Smashwords, the world’s largest independent ebook store

Buy from Amazon

Buy from Barnes & Noble

Buy from other ebook stores worldwide, including Kobo and iBooks

Rainbow Snippets: Learning to 'duck and cover' from atomic bombs in the 1950s

This week’s Rainbow Snippet takes place right at the beginning of Harriet’s school year in 1951, the year the Federal Civil Defense Administration was set up to teach Americans ways to survive atomic attacks. One popular survival tactic was “duck and cover,” which began to be taught widely in schools.

The history of Tomboy: Dress codes in the 1950s

One of the main characters in my 1950s coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy, Jackie, goes against convention by wearing pants whenever she can get away with it—and for a lot of her childhood, she can’t get away with it. During that period in the United States, school dress codes crimped the style of their students, but especially of girls.

The History of Tomboy: All about the 1950s

Today, my coming-of-age romance novella Tomboy debuts at Ninestar Press. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be talking here about the historical details that show up in Tomboy. Let’s get started!

Rainbow Snippets: High school girls get caught up in the 1950s space race!

In this snippet from my 1950s coming-of-age lesbian romance Tomboy, a pair of high school girls get caught up in the excitement over the US/Soviet space race.