In postwar American culture, teenage girls’ enthusiastic responses to rock and roll music, particularly screaming, crying, and fainting, were widely represented as irrational and excessive. This paper examines how media and cultural discourse interpreted these behaviors and why they were framed through the language of hysteria, mania, and loss of self-control. Drawing on popular magazines, media coverage, and social scientific frameworks, this study situates these reactions within broader historical developments, including the emergence of the “teenager” as a social category, the construction of controlled femininity, and postwar anxieties about youth culture and the rise of rock and roll.
Building on scholarship in cultural history and gender studies, this paper argues that teenage girls were encouraged to participate in consumer culture while simultaneously being expected to maintain emotional restraint. When girls expressed collective, public enthusiasm, particularly through loudness, these behaviors violated established norms of femininity and were frequently interpreted as signs of disorder.
Ultimately, this paper argues that media and cultural institutions played a central role in producing the figure of the “screaming girl,” transforming visible and audible enthusiasm into a legible marker of irrationality. In doing so, it reveals how gender, emotion, and sound intersected to shape the boundaries of acceptable female behavior in postwar American society.