Bobby soxer

Bobby soxer is a 1940s sociological coinage describing the often very zealous fans of traditional pop music, in particular its creators like singer Frank Sinatra. Bobby soxers were usually teenage girls and young adult women from about 12 to 25. Fashionable adolescent girls wore poodle skirts and rolled down their socks to the ankle. In high schools and colleges, the gymnasium was often used as a dance floor; however, since street shoes and street detritus might damage the polished wood floors, the students were required to remove their shoes and dance in their bobby socks, hence the phrase "sock hop".

Adopting (in her teenage years) an impressionable adolescent persona, former child actress Shirley Temple portrayed the type in the film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947).

See also

• Teenybopper