Joyce Johnson Minor Characters

The Beat movement may have been apolitical but the female writers of this movement-whether intentional or unintentional-helped to fuel the desire for change for women.  To be able to contribute a female voice to a male-dominated style of writing-the Beat movement, Johnson knew she would need to share in the same experiences.  She would need to live on her own and go on the road with all that that implies, drugs, unmarried sex, alcohol.  Most of those ideas do not seem so radical now. But, as Johnson writes in, Minor Characters, about living on her own, "Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home.  The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all-as well as what she'd be up to in that room of her own."  Her need to write from a new female perspective had her living like her male counterparts from the Beat movement and not one of "good" girl who lived at home until she marries and the living under her husband's roof and obeying him.  She lives a unconventional life for a woman in the 1950s and shares those experiences through published writings.  She, as well as other female writers of the Beat movement, gave women of the time a new way of living their lives.