Beatniks

Location: Act II, Scene I, "The Big Doll House"

Reference: Beatnik chick in prison

This lovely lady, a Brooklyn College student, was selected "Miss Beat 1959". The Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called "beatniks"). Central elements of "Beat" culture included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, and a rejection of materialism. The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. During the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation spread and turned into the Counterculture of the 1960s, with a change in popular terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie".

There is typically very little mention of women in a history of the early Beat Generation, and a strong argument can be made that this omission is largely a reflection of the sexism of the time, rather than a reflection of the actual state of affairs. Gregory Corso, the youngest writer in the inner circle of the Beat Generation, insisted that there were many female Beats. In particular, he claimed that a young woman he met in mid-1955 (Hope Savage, also called "Sura") introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to subjects such as Li Po and was in fact their original teacher regarding eastern religion. This claim may be an exaggeration, though, as a letter from Kerouac to Ginsberg in 1954 recommended a number of works about Buddhism.
Corso insisted that it was hard for women to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era: they were regarded as crazy, and removed from the scene by force (e.g. by being subjected to electroshock).

This is confirmed by Diane DiPrima in a 1978 interview:
"Potentially great women writers wound up dead or crazy. I think of the women on the Beat-scene with me in the early '50s, where are they now? I know Barbara Moraff is a potter and does some writing in Vermont, and that's about all I know. I know some of them ODed and some of them got nuts, and one woman that I was running around the Village with in '53 was killed by her parents putting her in a shock-treatment-place in Pennsylvania..."
However, a number of female beats did persevere and inspired later women involved in the hippie, punk and grrl power movements, as well as being an important force in the first-wave feminist movements.

The term "Beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on 2 April 1958, a portmanteau on the name of the recent Russian satellite Sputnik and Beat Generation. Caen's coining of this term appeared to suggest that beatniks were (1) "far out of the mainstream of society" and (2) "possibly pro-Communist". His column reads as follows:

"...Look magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only Beat, y'know, when it comes to work..."

Caen's new term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype of men with goatees and berets playing bongos while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance. The term Beatnik was really a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s, a cartoonish twisting of the real-life people and spiritual aspects in the Beat Generation, like the modern stereotypes of "emo" or "thug" culture. Beatniks were portrayed in the media and entertainment as lazy, negative, drug-addled, and even violent.Jack Kerouac criticized this stereotyping and twisting of the term created by the original group of writers, "Beat." The adjective "beat" was introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke, though Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term. "Beat" came from underworld slang—the world of hustlers, drug addicts and petty thieves, where Ginsberg and Kerouac sought inspiration. "Beat" was slang for "beaten down" or down-trodden, but to Kerouac, it also had a spiritual connotation as in "beatitude". In Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation, Kerouac criticized what he saw as a distortion of his visionary, spiritual ideas:

"The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization..."

At the time that the terms were coined, there was a trend amongst young college students to adopt the stereotype, with men wearing goatees and berets, rolling their own cigarettes and playing bongos. Fashions for women included black leotards and wearing their hair long, straight and unadorned in a rebellion against the middle class culture of beauty salons. Marijuana use was associated with the subculture, and during the 1950s, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception further influenced views on drugs.

The ladies shown here are also contestants for Miss Beat 1959. Check out the heavy eyeliner, loose hair with heavy bangs, casual clothes, and slouchy posture. The fashions of the Beat Generation have seen quite a return with the rise of the modern hipster.

SOURCES:
http://www.beatmuseum.org
http://www.jennyhaniver.com/?cat=14
http://www.dianediprima.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatnik