As for sex? Surprise — They had it. Most sociologists today acknowledge that the ‘sexual revolution’ really began immediately post-WWII; having lived through years of deprivation, people were now more than ready to live in the moment… they just didn’t talk about it, at least not in public, which is what people really mean when they speak of the sexual repression of the era. Later generations’ rebellion was actually about being able to openly discuss sexual matters, which over the decades (as the rebellious kids’ recollections replaced their parents’) got Flanderized into ‘everybody back then slept in twin beds!’ — a sitcom trope enforced by Media Watchdogs that was considered a bit much even back then. ◦ However, if you wanted to cohabitate publicly with the opposite sex, lawfully wedded (not to say holy) matrimony was the only option that wouldn’t get you run out of town. Thus the average age of marriage was much lower than it is today, and the average couple dated only for a few months before marrying. It wasn’t considered right to wait for a long time unless the man had to complete university or a military obligation — otherwise, well, the longer a couple waited, the more likely they were to get impatient and start precipitating the situations mentioned below.
◦ A number of women ended up pregnant before their wedding day — or out-of-wedlock entirely — largely because they didn’t have very good contraception. The father in any instance could make an ‘honest woman’ of the girl if he loved her and/or thought it was the right thing to do (and many did), but there really wasn’t a lot of pressure on him to do so from society at large because pregnancy out of wedlock was largely seen as the woman’s fault. The supposition was often that the woman deliberately became pregnant to “trap” an unwilling man into marriage against his will, and it was a lucky man who could avoid this by leaving town.
◦ If a woman became pregnant out of wedlock and no man in sight, she had only two realistic options: an expensive, often dangerous back-street or overseas abortion, or a discreet disappearance for a few months with a plausible cover story, at the end of which the child would be adopted and none would be the wiser. Often, girls under 18 had to go through the latter option against their wills, so as not to ‘ruin their lives’. Girls and women of color had even fewer options; they usually couldn’t afford an abortion and charities usually wouldn’t help them with adoption — white babies had the market cornered.
◦ It was taken as obvious that marriage would last unto death, and most often it did. Divorce rates in the Fifties seem almost phenomenally low compared to more recent years, although whether this was due to people taking their specific relationships more seriously, or whether they were simply more conditioned to marriage as a concept, is still debated. While much easier to obtain than of old, divorce was still socially quite risque, and if children were involved the assumption was that the couple would, and should, make every effort to stay together for them.
◦ Large sections of the populace (especially women) had no idea of the existence of homosexuality, and especially lesbianism. The average person thought he’d never met a gay or lesbian person, even if he had. Gay men were generally considered to be creepy predatory pedophiles, and probably Commie-loving traitors too. This tended to be less blatant in more sophisticated and/or media circles, but otherwise it was dangerous to appear ‘arty’. (A classic example is the victim in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table: ‘Every healthy Englishman who met him longed earnestly… to kick him’.) Meanwhile, it was commonly believed that a lesbian could be turned straight through rape.
◦ All that said, the common subversion [Seemingly Wholesome Fifties Girl] isn’t really any more accurate, at least not for women (men weren’t as thoroughly tracked). Though of course there were many people in Real Life who acted like that, they were nowhere near as common as many 1970s+ portrayals of 1950s-era teenage life would have you think. The 1950s era was not, as often portrayed, just modern behavior with more hypocrisy, there really was significant differences between 1950s sexual behavior (especially for high-school aged people) and today’s. Less than 15% of women who came of age (18 years old) between 1948-1955 had had premarital sex by the time they were 18, less than 25% for those between 1956-61. The median age for for first premarital sex for men and women turning 15 in 1954-63 was 20.4 years old (it would be a bit older for women alone), by comparison for marriage for the 1950s, the average age was only 20.3. The Sexual Revolution of the (late) 1960s to 1970s of course changed all of this, with people having more premarital sex and doing so younger.
◦ The 1950’s had the highest instance of teen pregnancy in history, according to the CDC. The only explanation for that is that sexual activity amongst teens was far more common than we believe. Most of those types of statistics rely on data that has been collected through simply asking the subject a question and recording their answers, assuming that the answers are truthful. Chances are, they are not. It’s likely, in fact probable, that the teenagers LIED about whether or not they were sexually active. They certainly do today, and there is no reason to believe that it was any different in the Fifties, when the stigma was much greater.