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Looking at the Feminist View and Gender Contexts at the time of Damon Runyon and Guys and Dolls

                When Damon Runyon first wrote these stories set in the 1920s and 1930s, this was towards the end of the first wave of feminism. First-Wave Feminism, which occurred in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, focused on women’s suffrage and rights, as well as overcoming legal obstacles to owning property and equal treatment.

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              Guys and Dolls premiered in the 1950s, very close to the beginning of the second wave of feminism (1960s-80s). In the Second Wave, the feminist movement broadened the focus to other issues within the workplace and family, as well as sexuality and reproductive rights.​ During this time, feminist politics grew into a larger social movement. Different branches of feminism also started to form: liberal feminism, cultural feminism, and material feminism.

Gender Roles in the 1950s:

  • Gender roles were among the most conservative of any period in U.S history. Following a period of relative flexibility during WWII, when women were needed to fill many jobs left empty when men went to war, employers during the 1950s replaced working women with the men who returned from abroad, especially in factory and manual labor jobs.

    • ​Middle-class women in the 1950s were expected to be wives and mothers. “Just as Rosie the Riveter’s flexed bicep advertised women as workers in the early 1940s, June Cleaver’s apron told women that their realm was the kitchen."

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Wolf, S. E. (2011). Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. Oxford University Press.

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