Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

by Elaine Tyler May

In the 1950s, the term ”containment” referred to the foreign policy-driven containment of Communism and atomic proliferation. Yet in Homeward Bound May demonstrates that there was also a domestic version of containment where the ”sphere of influence” was the home. Within its walls, potentially dangerous social forces might be tamed, securing the fulfilling life to which postwar women and men aspired. Homeward Bound tells the story of domestic containment - how it emerged, how it affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it unraveled in the wake of the Vietnam era's assault on Cold War culture, when unwed mothers, feminists, and ”secular humanists” became the new ”enemy.” This revised and updated edition includes the latest information on race, the culture wars, and current cultural and political controversies of the post-Cold War era.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Feminism, 20th Century, Sociology, School

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Jessica DeWitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that made me want to become a historian.

[Rick Roseberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 Cold War Era provides a walk down memory lane. While we all experienced the “duck and drop” drills at school and remember watching “I Love Lucy” and “Leave it to Beaver” on television, May has tied the international and domestic situations of the time together as 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 against the “American way of life” and containment of the fears created by a world fraught with uncertainty by a withdrawal into the nuclear family. She asserts, “With security as the common thread, the cold war ideology and the domestic revival reinforced one another.” (198) The United States looked for security from Soviet missiles, bombers, and nuclear warheads; the American family looked for security as well, from communists, homosexuals, divorce, childlessness, dissent, and nonconformity. “To alleviate these fears,” she contends, “Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety in an insecure world.” (9)
While we hear politicians yearn for the “simpler” and “traditional” way of life of the 50s and 60s, it is intriguing to note that May considers the era an aberration rather than a time 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, but an era unique in its own way. Nor does she view this era as a return to Victorian ethos; her examination of the sexual mores of the day reveals that there was a containment of sexual expression to within the marriage contract and nuclear family rather than a repression of sexuality.
May makes use of the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS) throughout the book. The KLS was a survey of the interaction between the ideals and the behavior of about six-hundred men and women who formed families during the 1940s and 1950s. E. Lowell Kelly, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, who was interested in the long-term personality development among married persons, conducted it. Of particular 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 point that the nuclear family of the era, in spite of the nostalgia, may have not been as homogeneous as appears on the surface. While men went to often tedious and uninspiring jobs to fulfill their position as breadwinner for the family, women sometimes considered their “jobs” as homemaker and wife equally tedious and uninspiring. However, there was no other choice; 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 marriage and family, her wistful “what ifs” appear unscholarly. She bemoans the “widespread challenges to traditional gender roles” brought about by the Great Depression and the Second World War that “could have 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 document and establish her thesis that “the evidence 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 about “domestic containment” during the cold war, she carefully traces the evolution of the American family from the Great Depression, through World War II, and to the postwar era, which is the focus of her work. While she would have hoped that American society might have looked at the resulting increase of women in the workforce as a fundamental change in postwar society, the fact is that the increased participation of women was viewed as a temporary situation in reaction to crisis. To her chagrin, the domesticity of women became the norm, and the man became the undisputed king of his castle.
May continues to tie her domestic and international “containment” theories together in the final chapter detailing the baby boomers’ coming of age. “As domestic containment began to crumble at home,” she maintains, “the antiwar movement gave rise to the first large-scale rejection of the containment policy abroad.” (210) She concludes, “It is clear that in the later years of the cold war, the domestic ideology and cold war militance rose and fell together.” (216)
May’s book is an important addition 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 case studies. For those of us whose intellects were formulated during the postwar era, her book helps us understand who we are and from whence we came.

[Simon Purdue · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Homeward Bound Elaine Tyler May seeks to explain the phenomenal rise of the nuclear family in post war America. In the years following the end of WWII marriage rates soared to all time highs, divorce rates dropped and birth rates exploded in what came to be known as the ‘baby boom’. Previous scholars had dismissed this societal reorientation as a product 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 society could explain this boom’. Indeed she suggests that the reconfiguration of American society before and after the war- with the surge of women into the workplace and the earlier manifestations of a sexual revolution- made it more likely that marriage and birth rates would fall in peacetime. Thus instead of looking at the wartime/peacetime dichotomy that previous scholars have used, May examines the wider cultural milieu of the early 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 late 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. As these Americans were children of the great 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 society was, May argues, a defence mechanism designed to reaffirm American values and provide a social and economic safety 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 self-protectionist form of social conservatism that sought to gain security in the family, rather than through the national project. At home as on the global stage, ‘containment’ was the name of the game.
May’s book offers a surprisingly broad and deep exploration of the family in the early Cold War era. She accepts the distinctly white and middle class 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 post war social order promised the end of class stratification and a new mobility, it only served to bolster racial and gender stratification, creating the environment in which the new radicalism of the 1960s could foster and flourish.

[Teri · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very interesting topic with very interesting information that some people might find dry but left me wanting to read more. Homeward Bound looks at the relationships of husbands and wives during the Cold 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 get their thoughts on family dynamics including home life, work life, sex, and children. Attitudes obviously changed from the 30s to the 50s. The author put the data in context with the state of the nation throughout the Cold War showing how families changed and evolved. Attitudes on personal safety (the A-bomb / duck and cover drills / personal fallout shelters), dating, contraception, family roles (a woman's place is in the home....or is it?), and children were also discussed.

There's no humor here but I thought the book was somewhat engaging but at times repetitive or just too much data being thrown at the reader. What was most interesting to me was to see how attitudes changed over time. What I came away with is that many people were unhappy in their marriages and often 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 have children, wait on their husbands, and run the house. Men simply treated women as lesser beings that were there to be at their beck 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 school. By the time the 50s and 60s rolled around, 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 understand how far we have come and how family life has changed since the 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 country? Were they all urban, suburban, or rural couples? Financial and educational status was lightly discussed, but I didn't get a feel for whether the respondents were representative of the whole country or a specific area. It may have mentioned it in the Appendix, but 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 II.

[Simon Kissam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started reading before online classes, put down for 6 weeks, then finished. Very readable book on postwar American culture. Focuses pretty much only on white families, but is very good on that front. Like many older books, a lot of this had kind of filtered down to me already, but still interesting nonetheless.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps my expectations were poorly formed, but 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 after the war. Her insight on the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACS) and the Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) is equally pertinent to a discussion of the contribution women made to the war effort. In fact, this treatment 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 example, women serving as test pilots - which truly stretched the boundaries of mid-century notions of sexed occupations.

However, May’s discussion of the challenges which faced returning male veterans, both in terms of their economic and occupational situations, as well as their medical, psychological, and educational/vocational needs, was, at best, perfunctory. Mention is made of male notions of the quintessential young woman waiting “back home” as a sustaining ideal during service abroad, with important attention allocated to the response of American women to this pressure placed upon them. This point deserved expansion, as the readjustment of returning veterans to post-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 war would not only follow the veteran for many years after the cessation of hostilities, but would in fact influence family life, sometimes through drug and alcohol abuse, emotional distance, or anger and abuse problems. Finally, the generation of men which fought World War II 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 particular facet of American family life sadly and critically undeveloped.

This last item, the cementing of a particular notion of American male masculinity, is the other side of a coin well-developed by May - the seeming promise of expanded socioeconomic roles for women during the Depression and World War II which prematurely was curtailed with the return of American servicemen following the war. That May specifically references in her Epilogue, the post-9/11 “elevation 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 War, and most significantly, the challenges to this perception which began in earnest around the Vietnam War. The heated political rhetoric, saturated with overtones of male virility, that surrounded the 2004 presidential election, which pitted John Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran decorated for combat valor, against a fellow Baby Boomer who rode out his generation’s 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 post-war "ideal" middle class, white American domestic situation with the actual lived experience of married couples matching that description, based nearly entirely on the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS), which surveyed precisely this demographic. May's book is rather shortsighted to contemporary eyes 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 just as effectively as women, limits the utility of May's work in this book.

[AskHistorians]

A very interesting history of the post-war family, women's roles, and the fifties-era cult of "domesticity." A classic, and a very interesting read.

[Abby Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

god have i read so many books about women during World War II - Cold War era for my classes this year
this one was pretty good, maybe repetitive and verbose at times but still an easy enough read for class

[Rebecca Crunden]

⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I’m going to be labelling the books I’m using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elaine May’s Homeward Bound asks why Americans made so much of family after World War Two. The book makes an important contribution in that it historicizes the mid-20th century family. May notes that, and this certainly speaks to my own experiences growing up toward the end of the Cold War, it is widely believed that the 1950s was the last hurrah of a longstanding form of the family. In fact, the turn to family after World War Two was precisely that, a turn, a change.

Homeward Bound starts relatively late in the period it analyzes, opening with the famous "kitchen debate" between Nixon and Kruschev. While it late returns to the 1950s, the book moves backward in time from the kitchen debate, focusing first on how the Depression and then the Second World 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 and work.

One central factor which fed into the creation the 1950s family was people’s perception of relative insecurity between the Depression, the Second World War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation after the war. Family became a way to achieve some feeling of security, and the drive toward family was in part a drive toward feeling secure. May stresses that other historical avenues were possible, even if they were ultimately not taken. By eroding men’s monopoly of the role as the so-called breadwinner, the Depression and Second World War could have given rise to a more egalitarian family 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 rise to a suspicion surrounding autonomous women.” (77.)

The book draws on a variety of sources, including movies, popular magazines about celebrities, demographic data, and a series of surveys conducted with middle class families about their satisfaction with and thoughts about their marriages. The surveys allow May a remarkable window onto might be an otherwise difficult to grasp part of life. They also allow her to tell people’s very personal stories about marital happiness and unhappiness. The surveys allow a look at aspects of people’s lives which are simultaneously uniquely individual as well 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 one part of society with other social and cultural sites, and use 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 society. This could be a useful model for some of my on workplace injuries, law, and insurance in the early 20th century United States. I would like to look at the theme risk and security across policy debates over workers’ compensation, juries’ attitudes toward work, and popular perceptions of war. Just as 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’s compensation programs ultimately offered more or less opportunities for women and disabled people.

[Rebecca Dobrinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elaine Tyler May opened her book, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold 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 by consumer goods, the couple enters the bomb shelter for two weeks and will have nothing more for entertainment than canned goods and each other. As May writes in the introduction, the couple epitomizes the image of the post-war family as “isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected against impending doom.” (1)

As the book progresses, May’s thesis is clear: the Cold War/anti-communism/domestic bliss of the 1950s may have been ideal for men and children, but was detrimental to women, their sexuality, and their personal fulfillment. She connects the Cold War and anti-communism to the oppression of women. A whole generation was inundated with propaganda describing the ideal domestic life and anything that deviated from the norm was “bad”. To support her conclusions, May draws from popular culture, 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 first time in decades, the birth and marriage rates increased, and the age of marriage and divorce rates decreased. Pundits, scientists, and so-called specialists advocated traditional gender roles and the submissiveness of women as a way to battle the spread of communism throughout the world. May shows how American domestic life mirrored the need for security with the boxy ranch-style home, fenced in back yard, and the family spending time indoors in front of the television – 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 continued working in war industries during the 1940s. At the time, even Hollywood contributed to the image of the strong, independent female with role models like Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn.

One of the more fascinating sources May uses is the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS). The KLS is a long-term study 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 “picture perfect” 1950s family, which shows that the picture wasn’t so perfect. Unfortunately, as May points out in her introduction, this study is limited to the affluent, white middle class and their experiences with marriage and family life. Her book is a great start to open further research into the KLS study as well as the lasting affects of the repression of women in the 1950s have had on later generations of women.

[Robert Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

May looks at the new structures of white domesticity that arise after World War II, in relationship to the cold 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 old forms of family. Although most of her work draws on the material from the KLS longitude study to see how middle class husbands and wives considered their positions in the family, the history shows how these structures were also a product of state policy, from subsidies for housing to a variety of other policies. She then maps how this structure partially collapses in the 1960's and 1970's, although not completely. Worth the read.

[kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read with great first-hand accounts on marriage, sex, family culture, and consumerism.

[Hubert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incisive social history of family life during the Cold War containment of 1950s America. Investigates attitudes towards family, parenting, sex, consumerism. Particularly strong at connecting the rhetoric of the atomic age to the traditionalist attitudes towards family and gender prevalent at the time. Communism itself was branded as 'deviant' (similarly homosexuality was deemed Communist and subversive); those who repudiated the Cold War consensus were seen as traitors (though the book doesn't really discuss McCarthyism).

The last chapters of the book are particular sad - the author implicates a number of factors, including the field of professional psychology, as a force in preventing women from being fully content, entering marriages early in life, taking on the burden of maintaining a home and raising a family, having given up too much of their aspirations in sacrifice of maintaining the nuclear family. Any was sense of ambition from women was deemed a "neurotic tendency."

The earlier parts of the book are more fascinating and in my view more interesting and successful, particularly the chapters that describe how the containment era evolved from the Depression and WWII.

Much of Professor May's evidence derives from the KLS survey; at times the writing relies too much on this survey data at the expense of other forms of evidence, reading like a results / discussion section of an academic journal article. But I do concede the possibility that this methodology might have represented a breakaway from prior work by focusing on the voices of the individuals who lived during that period.

Overall, May has written an authoritative history that is still relevant decades after initial publication - in a newly composed epilogue, this current edition connects the national political and social response to 9/11 to the Cold War attitudes of the mid-20th century. I'm glad to have read this.

[hans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Das Buch zeigt, dass die kulturelle Dominanz und die gesellschaftliche Stabilität des Kernfamilienmodells mit getrennten Geschlechterollen in den 1950er Jahren erklärungsbedürftig und nicht Ausdruck einer vermeintlichen Normalität ist. Nie waren Geburten- und Heiratsraten in der US-Geschichte so hoch. May erklärt dies als Reaktion auf den Zweiten Weltkrieg und den Kalten Krieg. Dass Frauen im Krieg vermehrt Erwerbsarbeit leisteten, wurde als Bedrohung der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung gedeutet und einflussreiche Beobachter förderten deshalb rigide Vorstellungen über Geschlechtertrennung, die gesellschaftlich auch auf Resonanz stießen. Zwar ließ der Grad der Erwerbsarbeit von Frauen in den 1950er nicht nach, doch war dies weniger Ausdruck eines Arbeitswunsches als einer Notwendigkeit. Frauen hatten in der Arbeit zwar teilweise mehr Unabhängigkeit erlebt, aber gleichzeitig als zusätzliche Belastung, da diese noch zur Hausarbeit hinzukam. Außerdem standen ihnen nur die am schlechtesten bezahlten Job, ohne Karriereaussichten offen. Die Familie war in dieser Zeit aber mehr als eine Norm, die den Menschen von außen aufgezwungen wurde. In Zeiten extremer Unsicherheit bot sie vermeintlich einen Schutzraum, in dem die Zukunft planbar schien. Zudem hatten sich Familienvorstellungen verändert. Nun gehörte auch sexuelle Erfüllung (auch von Frauen) zum Leitbild. Sex wurde nicht mehr grundsätzlich verteufelt. Ihm wurde eine positive Funktion für eine gesunde Familie zugewiesen. Legitim war er allerding nur in der Ehe, was auch das Sinken des Heiratsalters erklärt.

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Peace and affluence alone are inadequate to explain the many complexities of the post-World War Il domestic explosion. The demographic trends went far beyond what was expected from a return to peace. Indeed, nothing on the surface of postwar America explains the rush of young Americans into marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought about widespread challenges to traditional gender roles that could have led to a restructured home. The war intensified these challenges and pointed the way toward radical alterations in the institutions of work and family life. Wartime brought thousands of women into the paid labor force when men left to enter the armed forces.” (5)

“These widely held beliefs and the public policies they generated led to some dramatic transformations in American society, beyond the rush into marriage, childbearing, and domesticity. Most important, they blurred class lines while sharpening racial divisions. The massive infusion of federal funds into the expansion of affordable single-family homes in suburban developments made it possible for white working-class families to achieve a middle-class lifestyle.” (9)

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the past 40 years or so, the 1950s has been held up as some kind of "normal" in contrast to the 1960s and everything that followed. Particularly concerning the two-parent family with full-time homemaker mom, which many people seem to think represents an American norm.
As May shows, that's not true. The 1950s (and to some extend the 1940s) were a break from the past with couples marrying younger than ever before and many women making housework and childcare their "career," some with joy, some because even with a college degree they had no other path. May's book looks at the attitudes of the day, the cultural roots from which they grew and the burden it imposed on women. Some women, even though they said their marriages were worth it, described problems (cheating husbands, domineering husbands, an inability to use their brains) that sound anything but happy.
Much to digest in this interesting work.

[Austin Nicholson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important but unusual history. I re-read this book as I was interested in perusing it more deeply after initial exposure to its introductory arguments when studying for comps last year. First published in 1988, May introduces original concepts and an interesting framework of domestic containment. But a close reading reveals repetitive and heavy reliance on the same few sources throughout and a very unusual, almost other-disciplinary approach (for a history book). May seems more interested in presenting a snapshot in time buttressed by sociological data, but with very little emphasis on historical actors, narrative storytelling, or change over time. But sufficient historical context, and clear, enjoyable writing are major strengths.
— In all, the book relays vital and interesting information but is not a compelling historical work.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I didn’t like the book…after reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, I mistook May’s scholarly writing style as almost anti-feminism. May merely explained the Kelly Longitudinal Study, (a comprehensive sociological study that began in the 1930s and continued through 1955, involving three hundred couples). This study is crucial to understanding the societal norms and gender roles of the time. The book explained precisely what Friedan described as leading to the feminist revolt. The prescribed gender role expectations of the time, men had to be masculine and work outside the home. Women were expected to be feminine and happy housewives. If a person wasn’t married, something was wrong with them. It explains why family TV shows and movies looked the way they did back then.

This was recommended reading for my American Studies course. I’d recommend it!!!

[kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really liked this book! i learned a lot about women and the cold war, domestic ideologies, and sexual containment. one of the only downfalls, though, and something i wished i was able to read more about, is people of color and how they were affected by tensions of the time. i do realize that the KLS May writes about did kind of steer the book in the direction of focusing on white middle class americans (and the KLS was pretty centralized to the NE region of the US… i’m also interested in west coast americans or those living along country borders. how harshly did the region in which they lived affect societal expectations and ways of living ?). overall— great book! i had a great discussion with my professor about it. going to be thinking about this one for a while!

[Turnipboys]

This is a really interesting analysis on the emergence of the "nuclear family" and (white) suburban lifestyle. I wrote a whole paper about this for a class but overall I really enjoyed this and despite some of the data limitations, found that it gave a really good insight into some of the overlooked perspectives of the 1950s, like the varied opinions of housewives across class, race, and ethnicity.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very disappointing book on a very important topic: namely, gender roles and family duties in the 1950s. While there is some helpful data here from the KLS, the conclusions here are ultimately fairly slight and obvious (men pressured into being "responsible fathers" with women in tow, with particularly awful patriarchal cues promulgated by the likes of Claudette Colbert). But this volume needed the journalistic rigor of a Susan Faludi.

[Jim Gulley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent examination of traditional family life during the Cold War. May drew from period surveys for a “bottom-up” assessment of American mores and attitudes toward marriage, family, sex, children, and gender roles. Her findings make a persuasive argument for the stability the society enjoyed due to nuclear family formation and “sexual containment.”

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A non secular primer that embodies the Doctrine of the Family. A great discussion about how families, especially women, weren’t really happy in the 1950s and why a return to “family values” didn’t work then and won’t work now.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a good overview of the historical viewpoints of families during the Cold War.

For that reason, it's a must-read for historians studying the time period.

However, it's pretty dry and at times, boring. Reads like a textbook.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of fascinating research in here and this is such an important book for how it disseminates the KLS research from the 40s and 50s, but much of the analysis has certainly run its course. still very glad i read.

[Hal]

Recommended on Cracked.com podcast

[bhavab+n1amazon.com]

Good to read. very interesting.

[Kiley Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting take on daily American life during the Cold War, it especially dives into gender issues.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

2022 GSHNJ Staff Book Challenge: A book about a family, families, or family life.