There is a stereotype against the 1950s. Women stayed at home, worked in the kitchen, and raised children. Men provided for their families by working for eight hours everyday, and coming home to a prepared dinner. Children were the result of how their mothers molded them, and were segregated according to subject. Boys were involved in sciences, while girls were involved in arts; boys played backyard football and baseball, while girls played hopscotch and tea party with their dolls. Everyone went to church on Sunday mornings, and religion was often the determining factor for which school the children attended. .
In the beginning of An American Childhood, there is a feeling of entrapment. The speaker describes how she lazily wanders the house, noticing all of the routine events occurring. However, once she "wandered outside," there was an overwhelming emotion of freedom, along with an elusion to what will come, as she grows up (411). This freedom was given to her "as soon as [she] could say [her] telephone number" (414). The concept of segregation by religion is a part of her freedom, but also a part of her entrapment. She memorizes her neighborhood, in one direction only, that opposite of the Catholic Church. While she is free to go where she pleases, she chooses to stay away from the Catholic end of town. Perhaps this fact is one of the reasons that she "had fallen in love with a tough Catholic, from an iffy neighborhood" (414). .
The freedom she has expressed, so far, leads to her future involvement of her chosen activities. While she does participate in girl-designed activities, she goes against the grain, trying her hand, and often succeeding, at boy-designed activities. She chooses to disobey her father by going to Frick Park, where she "watched the men and women lawn bowling" and studies the birds (414). She befriends a bum, stealing food from home to feed him. She collected salamanders, searched for panther tracks, and often came home "all beat up" (415).