Behind the romantic heart pumping love story and the fancy footwork in Dirty Dancing, there were some impressive points to be shown through a sociological perspective in this movie. First, gender roles and social stratification were obviously displayed and easily identified throughout the movie. Second, the not so obvious topic of abortion was an underlying substantive point, in which the movie brought to light. Finally, the most discreet issue, of the impending Civil Rights Movement of 1964, was demonstrated only through the music chosen on the soundtrack of the movie. There were actually a limited number of African Americans even seen in this movie, which portrays an inaccurate distortion of reality of society in the 1960s. The movement away from the conservative fifties continued and eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of American life (Goodwin and Bradley, 1999). This film was an obvious teenage coming of age tale based upon the reflections of a period of time in the early 1960s from the film’s writer, Eleanor Bergstein’s memory, to highlight the social issues of Upper Class Americans before the century’s tumultuous changes rocked American society.
The main character, Francis ‘Baby’ Houseman summarizes the societal backdrop for us by opening the movie with the following statement, “That was the summer of 1963, and everybody called me ‘Baby’ and it didn’t occur to me to mind. That was before President