She Got Away: The Rebel Girls of 1950s America

With its signature poodle-skirted sweethearts sipping milkshakes and saving themselves for marriage, the 1950s were supposed to be the golden age of American girlhood. It is often thought of as a decade obsessed with order and wholesomeness when everyone did as they were told. And yet, at this same time, thousands of teenage girls were running away. These girls were not on the run to chase fame or fortune but to escape control, confinement, and, oftentimes, abuse. Aside from mugshots or missing-person ads portraying them as delinquents, these girls’ remarkable and inspiring stories are rarely given as much credit as they should. For all their expectations of submissiveness, the rebel girls of the 1950s were anything but sweet.

The 1950s promised the American Dream of white picket fences, nuclear families, and obedient daughters. But for many young girls, that dream was not as picture-perfect as it was made out to be. The brightest future they were allowed to imagine was the glimmer of a wedding ring from a man who might beat them and years of changing diapers and tending to the house. This left the girls who didn’t dream of the typical tradwife lifestyle with a shackle of expectations. However, if they got pregnant before they hit the altar, acted out, or questioned authority, the only places in society that would accept these rambunctious girls were juvenile halls, reform schools, or homes for unwed mothers.

Female rebellion was treated as a criminal offense (literally). Girls were arrested for waywardness, incorrigibility, or loitering. However, these charges often were covered for being too loud, sexual, or independent. In 1958 alone, the FBI recorded over 39,000 cases of juvenile female runaways, most of whom weren’t Bonnie-and-Clyde outlaws. Instead, these were just girls looking for a way out of physical or sexual abuse, forced labor in state institutions, or the humiliation of being eyed for signs of sin. Many were even put on the street by their own families for being “too mouthy.” For girls of color, the pressures of racism and segregation made them all the more vulnerable.

Making matters worse, many reformatories were prison-like and abusive. The Georgia Training School for Girls in Adamsville, the Ventura School for Girls in California, and the New York State Training School at Hudson housed thousands of teens yearly. But once inside, girls often worked unpaid jobs and were forced into silence and underwent strip searches, solitary confinement, and even beatings. Reform schools sold themselves as moral correction centers but were often overcrowded and under-regulated. In some facilities, girls were required to take Thorazine to calm down, and in others, girls were outright sterilized. In 1956, for example, a 17-year-old Mexican American girl named Maria was institutionalized in Texas for “immorality” after being raped by her employer. She later testified she was forcibly sterilized without her consent. 

The ones who escaped this tragic fate adopted fake names, dyed their hair, and took off on buses, hitchhiked, or walked as far as their legs could carry them. Escaping their past and the regressive gender roles that had taken over 1950s America, these girls found work as waitresses, domestic workers, and babysitters. However, some had no other choice than to sell sex to older men in exchange for their “protection.” 

But it wasn’t all that bad, at least for everyone. Some girls found strange loopholes of freedom. These runaways played by their own rules, cutting their hair short, wearing men’s jeans, and reading pulp novels about other runaways. In runaway havens like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, girls found communities in queer bars, circuses, and cheap theaters where nobody would bat an eye at a girl making it all on her own. Still, life as a runaway meant staying constantly on edge. Getting caught by the police meant being returned to the same home or, worse yet, being institutionalized.

For some understandable reasons, mainstream media portrayed runaways in an overwhelmingly negative light. In 1950s magazines like True Confessions or Modern Romance, stories like “I Was a Runaway Bride!” or “My Road to Ruin” profited off the downfall of girls who strayed too far from the norm. Movie posters from the era were plastered with screaming headlines like “Too wild for her own good!” or “Born to be bad!” Novels like Reform School Girl, Juvenile Jungle, and The Wayward Bus showcased the lives of rebellious girls solely as stories of sex, scandal, and shame meant to warn readers of the consequences of women’s defiance.

Still, the brave girls who survived these ordeals often grew into even stronger women, many of whom became part of the counterculture or found their way into the women’s movement, civil rights organizing, or queer liberation. Having already learned how to speak for themselves and withstand harsh criticism and abuse, these women had all the tools in their toolkits to fight. They fought to expand rights and freedoms for women and advocated for women’s liberation from the patriarchy. 

While the 1950s are remembered as a time of blanket conformity, it was, in many ways, a decade of anything but. Their mugshots and fingerprints might still sit in dusty police files, but these runaways’ legacy of resistance has changed the course of history for women, minorities, and society at large. The teenage runaways refused to be good girls. They ran when told they couldn’t walk alone without a hand to hold them. They broke curfews, burned letters, renamed themselves, and rewrote history. Though they are rarely celebrated, the runaway girls of the 1950s should be remembered not only for their audacity and courage but also for the strides they made in social movements. 

Today, teenage rebellion is a socially acceptable and routine part of growing up. But not even a century ago, the cost of turning your cheek to society could be your family, home, and future. So, while history tends to pedestalize obedient women and rebellious men for playing their part, the girls who bent and broke the rules deserve just as much attention. They were the ones who dealt the final blow to the manicured façade of postwar America. Most importantly, they gave birth to the nation and its people, who had emerged stronger from the mid-century picket fence ruins of patriarchy.