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Homeward Bound: American Families In The Cold War Era

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Elaine Tyler May's text "Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era", remains a classic in American Studies-and example of relevant, clear, well-written scholarship utilizing a variety of data to make a interesting and important case. This is not to say that the work has no weaknesses, but it remains in many ways an enduring, if somewhat superceded landmark in American cultural studies.

Tyler May's central thesis of the book is that the foreign policy of the "containment" of communism, summarized and popularized by Secretary John Foster Dulles, paralleled the rise of a domestic politics of containment, where the home space became a way to contain the economic, sexual, and social desires of both women and men. Moreover, the construction of this home space necessitated the casting of gender, sexual, and social roles in rigorous, socially compulsory terms that effectively marginalized many people from ethnic, sexual, and ideological minorities. These roles, constructed through the politics of domestic containment, were held in majority American culture to be necessary to the social survival and maintenance of capitalism in the Cold War struggle against the Soviets. Women in particular, are focused on, as the strong, independent, single role models of the 1930's gave way to increased imagery of the married, safely domesticated woman, who were under heavy societal pressure to give birth and raise children. Men too were constrained by corporate superiors, and looked to home as the one place they could exercise full influence over their wives and children. Not everyone, of course, was happy with this.

A number of surprising arguments are made and defended in this book as sub-theses to the greater point. Birth control achieved social acceptance quickly during this time, albeit "contained" in such a way as to officially promote family expansion and lower the marriage age. Fulfilled eroticism, albeit only in marriage, becomes a central point of majority discourse, to the point that women were counseled to pour more energy into their mates' fulfillment, sexual and otherwise, than the children of the household. (this is not to say those actual sexual attitudes and practices always reflected these images, as she points out on pg. 102) The Cold War demanded that the excesses of capitalism (in promoting huge differentials between rich and poor) had to be checked, lest communism breed and flourish in the nation's slums (147). Fewer African-American women went to college than white, but more of them graduated proportionately. May even shows that the so-called Baby Boom didn't start after the war, but rather in the early part of WWII, thus dispelling the common notion peace and affluence alone created the baby boom (these conditions also existed after WWI, but with no population boom.)

Another excellent aspect of this study, besides nuancing the role of the Cold War, is the inclusion and careful use of quantitative data, the Kelly Longitudinal Studies---these were surveys taken among housewives and husbands (white ones, to be sure) and they reveal a wealth of data. Rather than painting a picture of comfortable domesticity, these surveys reflect a great deal of dissatisfaction among women (and men) coping with these rigid gender roles. Women who worked in industry during the war had mixed feelings at best being relegated back to the home. Sexuality, motherhood, all of these things proved ultimately unfulfilling for many women in the surveys, causing guilt and resentment in the supposedly "placid" generation.

Tyler May leaves important parties out of her study. Black women, for example, are discussed rarely, and the labor and civil rights movements (which start in the 1950's, not the 60's) are not part of this story. Subsequent scholarship ("Not June Cleaver", "Tupperware") has demonstrated that even in this time, women created counternarratives to compulsory domesticity, that allowed many to ameliorate and contest, if not wholly counter, these discourses. But what Tyler May demonstrates is that these majority discourses of political and domestic containment maintained a definitive hegemony over the public discussions of the day, and held wide sway in the larger culture. Especially through media representations of that time period, these operative models of domestic containment and placidness tend to guide, somewhat incorrectly, popular collective memories of that time period. This fact only serves to further underscore their continued influence.

Christopher W. Chase - PhD Fellow, Michigan State Univ.

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988, New York: Basic Books, Inc., rev. and updated edn., 1999)

In the introduction to this provocative study of an important facet of American social history during the Cold War, author Elaine Tyler May, who is Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, asks: "Why did postwar Americans turn to marriage and parenthood with such enthusiasm and commitment?" Her answer is that, in an era when United States foreign policy attempted to "contain" the expansion of Communism, it was quite natural for white, middle-class Americans, the dominant segment of the society, to adopt the ideology May calls "domestic containment." According to May, Americans embraced domesticity during the early years of the Cold War because "the home seemed to offer a secure private nest removed from the dangers of the outside world." May proceeds to explain: ""Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety in an insecure world." Furthermore, according to May: "Domestic containment was bolstered by a power political culture that rewarded its adherents and marginalized its detractors."

The period from 1929 through 1945, which encompassed the Great Depression and World War II, had been an age of great anxiety. But May makes a convincing case that "the end of World War II brought a new sense of crisis" and that the postwar world was full of its own stresses. According to May, "the freedom of modern life seemed to undermine security." As a result, from the late 1940s and well into the 1960s, she writes that Americans "wanted secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country." In both its international and domestic manifestations, according to May: "Containment was the key to security." Indeed, in May's view: "With security as the common thread, the cold war ideology and the domestic revival reinforced each other." According to May: "The ideological connections among early marriage, sexual containment, and traditional gender roles merged in the context of the cold war," and "much of the postwar social science literature connected the functions of the family directly to the cold war." According to May: "Strong families required two essential ingredients: sexual restraint outside marriage and traditional gender roles in marriage." May writes: "The sexual containment ideology was rooted in widely-accepted gender roles that defined men as breadwinners and women as mothers." It is critical to May's thesis that "marriage itself symbolized a refuge against danger." According to May, most Americans believed that "a successful marriage depended on a committed partnership between a successful breadwinner and his helpmate."That belief was reinforced by a Cold War-era study funded by the Ford Foundation and conducted by two Harvard sociologists which concluded that the key to successful families "was stable homes in which men and women adhered to traditional gender roles." It is clear that this conclusion was not just descriptive; it was intended to be normative. May explains the postwar baby boom in these terms: "Procreation in the cold war era took on almost mythic proportions." A large family offered the possibility of escape: "For men who were frustrated at work, for women who were bored at home, and for both who were frustrated with the unfulfilled promise of sexual excitement, children might fill the void." Furthermore, according to May, "procreation was one way to express civic values," and there was an "intense and widespread endorsement of...the positive value of having several children." May reports that, [t]he message in the public culture was clear: motherhood was the ultimate fulfillment of female sexuality and the primary source of a woman's identity." In contrast, according to the Cold War's conventional wisdom, "[c]hildlessness was considered deviant, selfish, and pitiable." According to May, for white middle-class couples, "viable alternatives to domestic containment were out of reach" because the "cold war consensus and the pervasive atmosphere of anticommunism made personal experimentation... risky endeavors." But "[m]ost seemed to agree that a less-than-ideal marriage was much better than no marriage at all." According to May, "the popular literature was filled with articles that warned of the evils of divorce," and a psychology professor writing in Parents Magazine noted that "the `delinquent' child comes from a family where `the parents don't get along and that his home has been or will be broken by separation, desertion or divorce.'" If traditional gender roles and domesticity were prized, it is not surprising that early Cold War society was Intolerant of deviation from sexual and family norms. According to May: "The popular culture gave full play to the fears of sex and communism running amok," and "[t]he most severe censure was reserved for gay men and lesbians." She explains: "The persecution of homosexuals was the most blatant form of sexual paranoia linking `perversion' to national weakness." May also writes: "To escape the status of pariah, many gay men and lesbians locked themselves in the stifling closet of conformity, hiding their sexual identities and passing as heterosexuals." In the "Postscript to the 1999 Edition," May added: "With communism so widely feared and linked in the public imagination to everything from domestic spies to homosexuals, it is no wonder that evidence of non-conformity during the era of containment appeared as a threat to the democracy itself." She proceeds to explain: "Anticommunism gave a modicum of legitimacy to the harassment of individuals whose sexuality did not conform to the norm; `deviants' were persecuted in the name of national security."

In summary, this book is an important contribution to the literature of the effects of the Cold War on American society. It is well-researched and carefully reasoned, but it also is easy reading and should be of interest to member of the baby-boom generation who want to know more about the world in which they were raised.

From the 1940s through the early 1960s, Americans married in greater numbers, at a younger age, and with a greater resistance to divorce than either their parents' or their children's generation. There occurred a remarkable dash into the domestic embrace of marriage and parenthood as American women abandoned their wartime jobs and joyfully rushed into the arms of returning World War II soldiers.

But what provided the impetus for this yearning? The World War II generation was raised by parents who had come of age basking in the hedonistic pleasures of the Roaring Twenties following their return from the First World War. And their Baby-Boom counter-culture offspring were certainly no traditionalists. Both of these generations had in fact challenged conventional sexual norms while pushing the divorce rate up and the birth rate down. What then made the World War II generation different? What motivated them to embrace the roles of the traditional family with such desperate fervor and commitment? Homeward Bound is Elaine Tyler May's attempt to explain this sociological phenomenon by linking it to international politics.

According to Tyler May, it was the Cold War that provided the impetus. Americans embraced domesticity during the early years of the Cold War because "the home seemed to offer a secure private nest removed from the dangers of the outside world." This mass retreat to the privacy and security of the home was in response to the twin threats of communist encroachment and potential nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Specifically, Tyler May contends that the U.S. foreign policy of communist "containment" gave rise to the parallel societal view that the home could effectively contain the economic, sexual, and social desires of American women and men.

To this end, the dynamics of the home required the rigid adherence to gender roles. Specifically, societal pressure induced women to marry young, give birth early and often, shun career aspirations, and stay home to raise their multiple offspring. Men, for their part, were expected to provide a steady and reliable stream of income for their growing families, regardless of the frustrating and stifling constraints imposed by their employers.

Rather than painting a Norman Rockwell picture of comfortable domesticity, Tyler May chronicles a smoldering dissatisfaction with these rigid gender roles, causing guilt and resentment in the supposedly "happy days" world of the World War II generation.

The book is divided into nine chapters covering a variety of topics relating to home life, career choices, sex, reproduction, and consumerism. It concludes with a chapter relating how and why the Baby Boom generation rebelled against their parent's obsession with security.

Effective use is made of magazine articles, books (both popular and scholarly), newspaper reports, documentary films, government publications, and Hollywood movies. A revealing poll in which periodic surveys were taken among housewives and husbands - called the Kelly Longitudinal Studies - provides a wealth of fascinating and insightful data that is skillfully woven throughout the book

Tyler May makes a convincing case that the Cold War created a uneasy state of mind among Americans, fostering a "bunker mentality" that coerced the World War II generation into opting for security over independence and personal fulfillment: secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country.

This work contends that there was an anomalous rise in "marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles" in the post-World War II United States that was pan-racial, pan-economic, pan-ethnic, and pan-regional. It attributes this to social constructions of home and family that responded to governmental policy aims and cold war anxieties. The work seeks unearth what, precisely, drives the anxieties behind these social formations and why they dramatically distort the post-World War II child bearing generation from the radicalism that preceded and proceeded them.

May ascribes the geopolitical parlance of "containment" to the domestic cultural policies of the cold war United States. She asserts that the rhetoric and practice of the nuclear family served to contain subversive sexual and political behavior that might evoke contestation of gendered postwar consumerism, masculinist renderings of science qua exceptionalist prosperity, and endanger the social practices of unity, security, and stability that were understood to confer qualitative global advantage in the cold war. The author also engages the nuclear family as an aspiration that mobilized the majority of United States residents who were racially, economically, or otherwise excluded from its suburban actualization. The capacity of family to frame the intelligibility of "prosperity" for economic actors who were conferred unequal advantage is key, May suggests, to its postwar centrality in visions of an abundant and classless society.

In this context, May's suburbs emerge as liminal spaces that both enact and resolve the contradictions between pre-and postwar culture, replacing the aspiration for equal condition with the condition of uniform aspiration, reifying romance as the mutual consent of liberal individuals yet encasing it in an exclusionary propertization of private life, and substituting ethnic kinship and working class consciousness that situated life in power with a homogenous whiteness that rendered power unintelligible. This is artfully demonstrated as the text traces the dispositions and cohesions of families from the New Deal era thru the early 1960s.

The author's hybrid methodology combines statistical demographic data with qualitative analysis of cultural texts. May notes assiduously the key contradiction within this data; that while the imagery of suburban familial prosperity presented a level of prosperity that was realistically inaccessible for the majority of United States residents who encountered it, it nonetheless correlates with a strong voluntary entrance into the social formations of that aspiration that is evident across demographics. May goes as far as to entertain that the disconnect between the consumer aspirations of marginalized peoples and their social reality may have contributed to their motivation to pursue social change, also noting the strong political incentives to resolve visible racial inequality during the cold war. Indeed, the phenomenon through which the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement became centered around an actualization of the postwar patriarchal family and economic opportunity--it was examples of consumer exclusion from diners, hotels, and municipal services as well as his daughter's weeping at a whites-only amusement park that Martin Luther King rooted his initial moral appeals in-would constitute an entirely separate study. This, if anything, is the question one is left with at the conclusion of Homeward Bound. To what extent has the lasting postwar articulation of the nuclear suburban home as the fruit of prosperity become the constantly greener grass to marginalized peoples, and how has this interfaced with social movements, rebellion, and self-destruction?

The book Homeward Bound properly illustrates the hardships that women had to endure throughout the depression, WWII, and the Cold War era. It shows that though women were given brief moments of emancipation they were always held back by a Male dominant society paranoid of their unrestrained freedom and sexuality. It was not until the feminist movement and the erosion of the Cold War Ideology that women realized they deserved more than the status quo and fought for their equality. This book illustrates that women were not housewives because they were well suited due to their differences from men; instead, it was male domination that caused difference and ultimately forced women in to submission. Elaine Tyler May is very convincing in her arguments about the ties between the various eras and their effect on the American family and gender roles/gender inequality. At times she may rely too much on the KLS study, which only covers the more affluent part of society during the 40's, 50's, and 60's. Nonetheless her book makes bold thought provoking claims that shed new light on the "Happy Days" of the 1950's.

The main idea of Homeward Bound is that society's definition of an ideal family structure, and the role of women in the family, in bed, and in the workplace, evolved throughout much of the 20th century based on perceptions of society's needs to respond to major events (the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War). The author concentrates in particular on the end of World War II through the mid-1960s, and argues that the desirable construct of the family (father-as-breadwinner/mother-as-childrearer; sexual containment within the marriage; early marriage and emphasis on childrearing, etc.) was in large part influenced by the Cold War.

The book's general discussions of the impact of the Depression and World War II on the people who lived through those eras, and of womens' role in these two crises, appear to be accurate. Most historians agree that these events had a major impact on everyone who lived through them. The strongest chapters were those that dealt with these two eras (Chapters 2 and 3).

The discussion of the baby boom in the 1960s and the end of traditional female roles (Chapter 9) was also strong. May asserts that baby boom mothers, frustrated at their own diminished opportunities, contributed to the feminist uprising in the late 1960s by raising their daughters' expectations.

Chapter 4 (Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb) is by far the weakest chapter. The author's effort to link the development of domestic patterns in the 1950s with fear of nuclear war is extremely weak. Social historians seem to love quoting from civil defense manuals, training films, and brochures to portray society as obsessed with nuclear war and civil defense. And, these films and brochures are certainly easy to lampoon. However, I believe this view of the 1950s and early 1960s is wrong.

In the 1970s I worked for a congressional committee that looked at civil defense programs over the previous 25 years. We found that from 1950 onward, there always was a constituency advising more emphasis on civil defense, but that these recommendations were seldom accepted by the President or funded by Congress. Presidential requests for civil defense funding declined from year to year throughout the 1950s, and Congress usually cut even the increasingly modest Presidential requests by half or more. May makes much of the supposed nationwide mania about fallout shelters, but in fact, this program never received much public or political support. A 1957 Presidential Commission recommended a national fallout shelter program, but President Eisenhower ignored this recommendation, and, while President Kennedy briefly supported a major fallout shelter program, funding had been all but eliminated within less than a year. The civil defense movement was never politically effective, nor did it ever have the traumatic impact on U.S. society as suggested by May.

Instead of the view espoused by May, I believe that the postwar rush to domesticity, early marriage, homeownership, and conformity was largely driven by the desire of people who had lived through the Depression and World War II to "build a normal life."

I believe the book is useful as a source of information and provides an interesting perspective on family life in the middle of the 20th Century. Much of the work's general narrative (the central impact of the Great Depression and World War II on the lives of people born in the first third of the 20th Century; the causes of the retreat to "traditional roles" in the immediate aftermath of World War II; and the ultimate obliteration of "sexual containment," traditional male/female roles, and other artifacts of this era in the late-1960s) appears to be accurate.

However, the author's attempt to link these attitudes and behaviors to the Cold War is weak. Instead, I believe it is much more likely that the post-World War II rush to domesticity and conformity was stimulated by a desire on the part of Americans to attain a "normal" life after so many years interrupted by the Depression and World War II.

Throughout the book, May also uses examples drawn from popular culture (movies, magazine articles, etc.) to show society's thinking on the family, the role of women, etc. The use of such anecdotal materials as an indicator of social trends is pretty questionable, because at any time in history, a researcher can probably find examples to prove whatever he/she wants to prove. For example, one person could argue that the success a few years ago of Lord of the Rings and Master and Commander indicates that society was in the mood for big, heroic epics. Someone else could argue that the success in the same year of Whale Rider and City of God indicates that society favored small movies with insights about different cultures. The use of these anecdotal sources does not increase confidence in her conclusions about cultural norms.

If you lived through this era, and wondered what was going on or what continues to go on. You will enjoy the insight of this book which puts many things in historic perspective.

Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era encapsulates the life of the average American family from the decade prior to World War II through the decade of the 1980s, primarily focusing on the Cold War period of the 1940s through the 1960s. Although the threat of the Cold War and use of atomic weapons always loomed in the background, May's work essentially emphasized the social and economic happenings of the time. Homeward Bound is an easy read with each chapter following a format that introduces the reader to the chapter's subject, backs it with statistical data, and provides a summary. And lest the reader think the book is balanced and fair to men and women, later chapters show the author's true intent which is to show how American women were trapped into becoming housewives and not being able to explore their own interests or careers in favor of their husbands'. Nine chapters guide the reader through the Great Depression, World War II, the Eisenhower years, the turbulent decade of the 1960s and ends with the election of Ronald Reagan. Since the book was originally published in 1988, there is a follow-up section for the new 1999 edition. Further, there are several appendices with statistical data describing the demographics of the people about whom it is written. Also, the questionnaire from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which is the basis for the data provided in the text, is also included.

Vice President Richard Nixon's "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is the opening salvo in a book that paints a bleak picture for American women in the 1940s and 1950s. Much of the information provided to support the author's thesis is from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which consisted of surveys of six hundred white middle-class families and spanned the period from the late-1930s to about 1955. Families actually began in the 1930s and 1940s for security and economic reasons and "...laid the foundation for a commitment to a stable home life...." Even though women worked outside the home and were in many ways functional within the job market, they were discouraged from working during the time of the Great Depression, since working women took jobs away from men. This changed after America's entry into World War II where full employment existed and the need for workers to drive the military production machine required that women enter the workforce. However, once the war ended and veterans returned from overseas, many women left the job market on their own or were forced out so that men could be employed. The expectation was for women to become housewives and mothers and cater to their families rather than have a career of their own. In fact, many government officials, like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, stated that being a housewife was one of the most important careers a woman could have to provide stability in the country as an attempt to thwart the growth of communism.

Many women were not satisfied with that life. Although the marriage rate increased significantly and the birth rate jumped after WWII (producing the "Baby Boom" generation), women from the survey experienced a sense of despair in their lives due to their societal subservience to their husbands. Though many believed raising a family and keeping a happy home was quite satisfactory to them, many women were depressed and unsatisfied with their lives in general. May describes in great detail the miserable lives of many of these women whose husbands treated them badly, were not affectionate or sexually gratifying, and who were inattentive fathers. The life of the average housewife was gloomy because she worked where she lived whereas men worked away from the house and saw their home as a sanctuary for them to relax and, seemingly, be waited on hand-and-foot by their jobless wife. Certainly divorce was available for these women; but, unless their husband was abusive or adulterous, most did not exercise that option since a high social stigma was attached to it during that era. Further, from an economic standpoint, most women with children could not survive on their own. Indeed, the economic fortunes of divorced women declined while that of divorced men increased.

Consumerism and the ideal American family bring the reader back to the Nixon - Khrushchev debate. New appliances, new homes, new cars, and other "big ticket" items were the staple of American life and what separated the U.S. from the U.S.S.R. and made American appear more affluent then their Communist counterparts. Not only did Americans want more things, they also wanted more children. Couples who had no children were seen as unsuccessful. "Large families were an indication of a man's potency and ability to provide and a woman's success as a professional homemaker." Women should be able to manage a larger household, after all, because many of the appliances (e.g., washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric irons) were invented to make their lives easier and thus enable them to have more time to raise children and keep a clean house.

This era of the nuclear family began to unravel in the early 1960s with the publication of the best-selling book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. In it, she questioned the status quo and "...spoke for thousands like herself whose dreams and desires withered under the weight of domesticity." Moreover, as the children of the baby boom era came of age themselves, they rebelled against the lifestyles of their parents and turned the 1960s in a decade that saw "free love" and the move away from the nuclear family. This brought about cohabitation without marriage, premarital sex, and an increase in the divorce rate. The author concluded that the conservative movement that helped Ronald Reagan to become elected president and harkened to return to the days of the nuclear family and the stable 1950s was misguided because that era actually diminished the role of women and prevented them from realizing their potential.

As stated earlier, the author shows herself as a feminist whose goal was to prove that women were kept down in subservience to men after World War II. From a statistical standpoint, since the surveyed families were mostly located in the New England area of the country it is debatable that the data the survey provided is applicable to the rest of the country. Basically, twelve hundred adults were surveyed from a 1950 population of over one hundred and fifty million. Does that really represent the American population as a whole, especially when the survey is geographic specific? Further, May is critical of the conservative movement and the supporters of Reagan which further paints her as a liberal feminist. Although there is nothing wrong with having that viewpoint, it diminishes the work in general. What starts out to be a statistical analysis of married couples during a specific time period results in a generalization of the country as a whole and sheds a negative light on men of that time. Although Homeward Bound gives the reader a glimpse of a time in recent American history, it should not be considered the decisive work for which to judge that generation.

The whole concept of "momism" was embedded throughout western culture in films stemming after World War II from work of popular novelists like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. "Momism," is a female condition caused by an overdose of freedom which slowly spread among women while their men were preoccupied with war and other manly pursuits. Women were able to experience some sort of social and economic mobility after World War II. The development of wartime and postwar period economy had given women more freedom than they had ever had before. As the society became evermore feminists after World War II, measured by open acceptance to the jobs pre-owned by men, the protection of civil rights, and their preponderance over family and outside, the society evidenced more and more Momism, its emergence of Mother-Nature, the great care giver. But the problem arose when "Momism" made its shift to "bossism":- authority by a single individual, within few decades. Mothers who contributed to problems in self-development by pressuring their children, emphasizing on external measures of success, being overly critical about smaller things, forging their expectations over their children's identity and being emotionally unavailable when the children needed them the most. This became particularly difficult for children under these critical circumstances, as result difficulties such as boredom, vagueness, unhappiness, reliance on others started in the very foundation of their psychological development. They suffered failure of their adolescents to reach full maturity and disarray of independence, initiative, and identity. The danger of such overly powerful mothers is also portrayed in films like Rebel without a Cause (1955), Psycho (1960).
American society was rapidly becoming a matriarchy in which domineering and overly protective mothers disrupted the Oedipal structure of the middle class nuclear family by smothering their sons with `unnatural' affection"...

Being a gen-xer, this book, revealed so much about my parents and grandparents. Elaine Tyler May tells the stories of families, and women, in particular, during the cold war from a perspective that really grabs the attention of the reader. I never would have read a book like this, had it not been required for a political history class I am involved in at college, however, it was one text that I would seriously enjoy reading again. (For most college students this says it all!!) This was a great book!!!