Homeward Bound American Families in the Cold War Era Summary
For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in American suburbia, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Common cold War Era provides a walk down memory lane. While we all experienced the "duck and drop" drills at school and think watching "I Love Lucy" and "Leave it to Beaver" on television, May has tied the international and domestic situations of the time together every bit cause and effect using her concepts of "containment" and "security." She hypothesizes that when Truman proclaimed the doctrine of containment for international communism, the reaction of the American family was containment on the home front - containment of any dissent confronting the "American way of life" and containment of the fears created by a world fraught with uncertainty past a withdrawal into the nuclear family. She asserts, "With security as the common thread, the cold state of war ideology and the domestic revival reinforced one some other." (198) The The states looked for security from Soviet missiles, bombers, and nuclear warheads; the American family unit looked for security besides, from communists, homosexuals, divorce, childlessness, dissent, and nonconformity. "To alleviate these fears," she contends, "Americans turned to the family unit equally a breastwork of condom in an insecure earth." (9)
While we hear politicians yearn for the "simpler" and "traditional" style of life of the 50s and 60s, it is intriguing to note that May considers the era an aberration rather than a fourth dimension of normalcy. She asserts that the period, sandwiched between the roaring 20s, the depression, and the reawakening of activism in the late 60s and 70s, does not represent the benchmark for American culture, just an era unique in its own manner. Nor does she view this era equally a return to Victorian ethos; her test of the sexual mores of the day reveals that in that location was a containment of sexual expression to inside the marriage contract and nuclear family rather than a repression of sexuality.
May makes utilize of the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS) throughout the book. The KLS was a survey of the interaction between the ethics and the behavior of near six-hundred men and women who formed families during the 1940s and 1950s. E. Lowell Kelly, a psychologist at the Academy of Michigan, who was interested in the long-term personality development among married persons, conducted it. Of detail interest were the comments, written by the survey participants in their own words, describing their personal opinions about their satisfaction with their marriages and their sexuality. These comments, even more than the statistical data, seem to reveal that women were much less satisfied with the state of domestic affairs of the era. She makes the betoken that the nuclear family unit of the era, in spite of the nostalgia, may accept non been every bit homogeneous as appears on the surface. While men went to often slow and uninspiring jobs to fulfill their position as breadwinner for the family, women sometimes considered their "jobs" as homemaker and married woman as boring and uninspiring. However, there was no other option; married women who worked outside the home were ostracized and viewed with suspicion.
While she well documents the paucity of opportunities available to women during the postwar era, other than union and family, her wistful "what ifs" appear unscholarly. She bemoans the "widespread challenges to traditional gender roles" brought most by the Great Low and the 2d Globe War that "could take led to a restructured home."(5) "If opportunities had expanded," she laments, "the number of women holding jobs would have risen dramatically. Viable long-term job prospects for women might have prompted new ways of structuring family roles [italics mine:]" (57)
May does, however, thoroughly certificate and institute her thesis that "the prove overwhelmingly indicates that postwar American society experienced a surge in family life and a reaffirmation of domesticity that rested on distinct roles for women and men." (6) Beginning with her initial chapter almost "domestic containment" during the cold war, she carefully traces the evolution of the American family from the Great Depression, through World War Two, and to the postwar era, which is the focus of her work. While she would accept hoped that American society might accept looked at the resulting increase of women in the workforce as a central change in postwar society, the fact is that the increased participation of women was viewed every bit a temporary situation in reaction to crisis. To her chagrin, the domesticity of women became the norm, and the homo became the undisputed rex of his castle.
May continues to tie her domestic and international "containment" theories together in the last chapter detailing the babe boomers' coming of age. "Equally domestic containment began to crumble at home," she maintains, "the antiwar motility gave rise to the first large-scale rejection of the containment policy abroad." (210) She concludes, "It is articulate that in the later on years of the common cold state of war, the domestic credo and cold war militance rose and fell together." (216)
May'south book is an important add-on to scholarship on the era. It was well written, documented, and researched. Her inclusion of photos and posters help illustrate her points. She statistically documents her premises as well as including numerous example studies. For those of usa whose intellects were formulated during the postwar era, her book helps us understand who nosotros are and from whence we came.
In Homeward Bound Elaine Tyler May seeks to explain the phenomenal rising of the nuclear family unit in mail service state of war America. In the years following the finish of WWII matrimony rates soared to all time highs, divorce rates dropped and nativity rates exploded in what came to be known as the 'baby nail'. Previous scholars had dismissed this societal reorientation equally a production of the return to peace, but May argues that it was much deeper. Noting that a similar familial boom did not occur in the aftermath of the First World War, May argues that 'nothing on the surface of postwar guild could explain this boom'. Indeed she suggests that the reconfiguration of American order earlier and after the war- with the surge of women into the workplace and the before manifestations of a sexual revolution- made it more than probable that spousal relationship and birth rates would fall in peacetime. Thus instead of looking at the wartime/peacetime dichotomy that previous scholars take used, May examines the wider cultural milieu of the early on Cold War to explain this search for security in the home and the family. Crucially May suggests that the generation that married and reproduced in the tardily 1940s and 1950s represented an anomaly in demographic trends, arguing that their children- those of the 1960s generation- had much more in common with their socially revolutionary grandparents than they did with their parents.
At the core of May's analysis is the suggestion that this familial moment was the product of a truly national anxiety and sense of insecurity. A new scepticism, fuelled by political scaremongering and a wariness of the fragility of postwar booms, led Americans to retreat to the security of the nuclear family unit. Equally these Americans were children of the swell depression, the perceived dangers of postwar profligacy loomed prominently in the minds of many. Further, the fear of internal threats to the 'American way of life' and a perceived international instability on a new scale were pervasive (as demonstrated by McCarthyism and the red scare). This anomalous re-orientation of order was, May argues, a defence mechanism designed to reaffirm American values and provide a social and economic prophylactic net. A wariness of the 'decadence' of New Deal politics and the perceived dangers of national overspending led to the rise of a new economic conservatism and with it a new cocky-protectionist grade of social conservatism that sought to gain security in the family, rather than through the national project. At dwelling equally on the global stage, 'containment' was the proper name of the game.
May'due south book offers a surprisingly wide and deep exploration of the family in the early Cold War era. She accepts the distinctly white and middle form limitations of her study, arguing that African Americans were systematically excluded from the 'promises' of the new nuclear family through such policies as redlining, de facto segregation, and systemic racial discrimination. Her book argues that although the new postal service state of war social order promised the end of grade stratification and a new mobility, it merely served to bolster racial and gender stratification, creating the surround in which the new radicalism of the 1960s could foster and flourish.
This is a very interesting topic with very interesting data that some people might find dry just left me wanting to read more. Homeward Jump looks at the relationships of husbands and wives during the Cold State of war years. Elaine Tyler May uses data from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which was conducted from 1935 - 1955. The KLS surveyed hundreds of married couples to go their thoughts on family dynamics including home life, piece of work life, sexual practice, and children. Attitudes plain inverse from the 30s to the 50s. The author put the information in context with the state of the nation throughout the Cold War showing how families changed and evolved. Attitudes on personal rubber (the A-bomb / duck and cover drills / personal fallout shelters), dating, contraception, family roles (a woman's place is in the abode....or is it?), and children were also discussed. In that location's no humor here but I thought the volume was somewhat engaging but at times repetitive or but as well much data beingness thrown at the reader. What was most interesting to me was to see how attitudes changed over time. What I came abroad with is that many people were unhappy in their marriages and frequently married due to social norms and pressures to "have the ideal family life." Women hated being stuck at home to run the house when they had ambitions in life. They were expected to go to college to find a husband, then bail on school or any other thoughts on a career to accept children, wait on their husbands, and run the house. Men simply treated women every bit lesser beings that were there to be at their brook and call. They were unequal partners who needed to stay at home and make sure the kids were taken care of and sent off to schoolhouse. By the fourth dimension the 50s and 60s rolled effectually, women began to find their voice and feminist attitudes began to challenge the old norms. Many of the survey respondent's comments were eye-opening and entertaining. This book will certainly make you lot empathise how far we have come and how family life has inverse since the Common cold War. What I didn't get a feel for, was the diversity of the surveyed couples. That is, were they all from a certain part of the land? Were they all urban, suburban, or rural couples? Financial and educational condition was lightly discussed, but I didn't go a feel for whether the respondents were representative of the whole country or a specific area. It may accept mentioned it in the Appendix, only I missed it if it did. I did like that the Appendix included the survey that was given. Recommended for anyone interested in family dynamics post World War Two.
This is the book that made me desire to go a historian.
Perhaps my expectations were poorly formed, merely I found the chapter which dealt with the aftermath of World War II, "War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires," to be somewhat uneven. May quite thoroughly lays out the occupational and economic changes for women workers both during and later on the state of war. Her insight on the Women'south Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACS) and the Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) is as pertinent to a discussion of the contribution women fabricated to the war effort. In fact, this handling in particular could have been expanded to examine some of the very particular non-traditional roles women performed in military service at the time - for case, women serving every bit examination pilots - which truly stretched the boundaries of mid-century notions of sexed occupations. However, May'south discussion of the challenges which faced returning male person veterans, both in terms of their economic and occupational situations, every bit well every bit their medical, psychological, and educational/vocational needs, was, at all-time, perfunctory. Mention is made of male notions of the quintessential young woman waiting "dorsum abode" as a sustaining ideal during service away, with important attention allocated to the response of American women to this pressure placed upon them. This point deserved expansion, equally the readjustment of returning veterans to post-state of war America was linked to the reception they received by the women they had idolized during the war. At the same time, wounds, whether physical or mental, sustained during the state of war would not only follow the veteran for many years subsequently the abeyance of hostilities, merely would in fact influence family life, sometimes through drug and alcohol abuse, emotional distance, or acrimony and abuse issues. Finally, the generation of men which fought World War Two became the baseline for American masculinity by which their sons, who faced the crucible of Vietnam twenty years later, were judged by themselves, their fathers, and American society. May leaves this detail facet of American family life sadly and critically undeveloped. This concluding item, the cementing of a item notion of American male masculinity, is the other side of a money well-adult by May - the seeming promise of expanded socioeconomic roles for women during the Low and World State of war 2 which prematurely was concise with the return of American servicemen following the state of war. That May specifically references in her Epilogue, the mail service-9/11 "peak of male heroism" as a "widespread invocation of traditional gender roles" without substantially connecting the popular perpetuation of these roles to their reification during the immediate post-WWII years and the early portion of the Cold State of war, and most significantly, the challenges to this perception which began in hostage around the Vietnam War. The heated political rhetoric, saturated with overtones of male virility, that surrounded the 2004 presidential ballot, which pitted John Kerry, a Vietnam State of war veteran decorated for combat valor, against a fellow Baby Boomer who rode out his generation'south crucible of masculinity in the Texas Air National Guard, should have merited some comment on the continuation of these distinctive Cold War gender mores into the Global War on Terror. The remainder of the book is a fairly useful contrast of the mail-war "platonic" middle grade, white American domestic situation with the actual lived experience of married couples matching that description, based about entirely on the Kelly Longitudinal Report (KLS), which surveyed precisely this demographic. May's book is rather shortsighted to gimmicky optics because it lacks substantive analysis of non-white couples, and particularly lacks enough focus on non-white women, a consequence of relying on the KLS. This last shortcoming, combined with a fairly alarming lack on analysis on the constrictive gender norms which trapped returning male WWII veterans but equally effectively equally women, limits the utility of May's work in this book.
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September thirty, 2015A very interesting history of the post-war family, women'due south roles, and the fifties-era cult of "domesticity." A classic, and a very interesting read.
Elaine May'south Homeward Bound asks why Americans made so much of family after World War Two. The book makes an important contribution in that information technology historicizes the mid-20th century family. May notes that, and this certainly speaks to my own experiences growing up toward the finish of the Cold War, it is widely believed that the 1950s was the terminal hurrah of a longstanding form of the family. In fact, the turn to family after World State of war Two was precisely that, a plow, a alter. Homeward Bound starts relatively tardily in the period it analyzes, opening with the famous "kitchen contend" betwixt Nixon and Kruschev. While it late returns to the 1950s, the volume moves backward in time from the kitchen debate, focusing first on how the Depression and and so the 2d Globe War impacted family structures. Both events changed the participation of women in the workforce. Women worked more outside the home, which shaped attitudes and desires around women's roles in family unit and piece of work. 1 cardinal factor which fed into the cosmos the 1950s family unit was people'due south perception of relative insecurity between the Depression, the Second World War, and the threat of nuclear anything later on the war. Family unit became a way to achieve some feeling of security, and the drive toward family was in part a bulldoze toward feeling secure. May stresses that other historical avenues were possible, fifty-fifty if they were ultimately not taken. By eroding men's monopoly of the function as the so-called breadwinner, the Depression and 2d Globe State of war could have given ascent to a more egalitarian family unit as opposed to the traditional - though new - family of the 1950s. In some respects, the unfulfilled potentials of war time became an engine for reaction against those potentials. As May writes, "sudden emancipation of women during wartime gave rising to a suspicion surrounding autonomous women." (77.) The book draws on a variety of sources, including movies, popular magazines virtually celebrities, demographic data, and a series of surveys conducted with middle class families almost their satisfaction with and thoughts about their marriages. The surveys allow May a remarkable window onto might be an otherwise difficult to grasp function of life. They as well allow her to tell people's very personal stories about marital happiness and unhappiness. The surveys let a await at aspects of people'south lives which are simultaneously uniquely individual too as exemplary of larger social trends. May's work offers useful examples of how a historical argument and narrative can link issues of policy and attitudes in ane office of guild with other social and cultural sites, and utilize very different sources. May links feelings of insecurity during and after World War Two with the increasingly widespread view that women's independence posed a danger to masculinity and thus to guild. This could exist a useful model for some of my on workplace injuries, police, and insurance in the early on 20th century United States. I would similar to look at the theme gamble and security across policy debates over workers' compensation, juries' attitudes toward work, and popular perceptions of state of war. Just every bit May looked a gendered component of the Cold War and assessed the expansion and contraction of the range of opportunities for women, I would like to see if worker'due south compensation programs ultimately offered more or less opportunities for women and disabled people.
Elaine Tyler May opened her book, Homeward Leap: American Families in the Cold State of war Era, with a description of a 1959 publicity stunt. A young couple, recently married, chooses to spend their honeymoon in a bomb shelter. Surrounded past consumer goods, the couple enters the bomb shelter for two weeks and volition have cipher more for amusement than canned appurtenances and each other. As May writes in the introduction, the couple epitomizes the image of the post-war family as "isolated, sexually charged, cushioned past abundance, and protected against impending doom." (1) Equally the book progresses, May's thesis is articulate: the Common cold War/anti-communism/domestic bliss of the 1950s may have been ideal for men and children, only was detrimental to women, their sexuality, and their personal fulfillment. She connects the Cold State of war and anti-communism to the oppression of women. A whole generation was inundated with propaganda describing the platonic domestic life and anything that deviated from the norm was "bad". To support her conclusions, May draws from popular civilisation, Hollywood, politics, and the Kelly Longitudinal Survey. These examples show how messages infiltrated the American psyche and helped form the attitudes of a generation of men and women towards marriage, child bearing, and life in the suburbs. The 1950s was an era when, for the commencement time in decades, the nascence and matrimony rates increased, and the age of union and divorce rates decreased. Pundits, scientists, and so-called specialists advocated traditional gender roles and the submissiveness of women as a style to battle the spread of communism throughout the world. May shows how American domestic life mirrored the demand for security with the boxy ranch-fashion home, fenced in back m, and the family spending time indoors in front of the boob tube – all protected from the evils of the outside world. May describes how the needs of 1950s women are suppressed and subservient to the needs of their husbands and children. May explains that this contradicted the previous gains women had made in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Women's emancipation movements started in the 1920s with suffrage. In the 1930s women went to work during the depression to help support their families and connected working in war industries during the 1940s. At the time, even Hollywood contributed to the image of the potent, independent female with role models like Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn. One of the more than fascinating sources May uses is the Kelly Longitudinal Report (KLS). The KLS is a long-term written report interested in personality development as well as the subjects' attitudes towards marriage, family life and social situations. Questions were answered in detail, often taking more room than allotted on the surveys. It is a window into the life and psyche of the "pic perfect" 1950s family, which shows that the picture wasn't so perfect. Unfortunately, as May points out in her introduction, this written report is limited to the flush, white middle class and their experiences with marriage and family life. Her volume is a bully start to open further research into the KLS study every bit well as the lasting affects of the repression of women in the 1950s have had on subsequently generations of women.
May looks at the new structures of white domesticity that arise after World State of war II, in relationship to the cold state of war. She argues that these are new structures, in response to the pressures of the cold war and the radical activism of the 1930's, rather than a throwback to one-time forms of family. Although most of her work draws on the fabric from the KLS longitude study to see how heart course husbands and wives considered their positions in the family, the history shows how these structures were besides a production of country policy, from subsidies for housing to a variety of other policies. She then maps how this structure partially collapses in the 1960'southward and 1970's, although not completely. Worth the read.
I had most forgotten how good this book is. I just reread it considering I assigned two capacity to my Postwar America class. Next time I will probably have them read the whole book, or at least I will add the intro in because it is solid. This is such a great case of accessible cultural history. For those of you who have thought primarily about the Common cold War in terms of foreign policy or anticommunist politics a la McCarthy, Homeward Bound is a fantastic and quick read that will expand your ideas virtually the Cold War home front, gender, sexuality, and class. It's one of the few academic histories I would recommend to admittedly anyone. Read it!
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