This document summarizes a research project analyzing short stories by American author Leonard Michaels from the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that Michaels' fiction provides sociohistorical commentary on the emerging counterculture of the time through its portrayal of marginalized female characters, in contrast to prevailing views of Michaels as apolitical. The analysis uses new historicist, Marxist, and narratological approaches to compare two works - the fictionalized memoir "Sylvia" and the story "Manikin" - to show how Michaels conveyed a subtle ideological resistance to progressive attitudes of the era through unstable narrative perspectives.