Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

by Elaine Tyler May

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786723461
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/23/2008
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	211,211
Lexile:	1340L (what's this?)
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Elaine Tyler May is the Regents Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. The award-winning author of five books and the former president of the American Studies Association, May lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth 19

2 Depression: Hard Times at Home 39

3 War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires 58

4 Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb 89

5 Brinkmanship: Sexual Containment on the Home Front 109

6 Baby Boom and Birth Control: The Reproductive Consensus 129

7 The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home 153

8 Hanging Together: For Better or for Worse 174

9 The End of Containment: The Baby Boom Comes of Age 198

Epilogue Post-Cold War America 217

Appendices 231

Notes 251

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

May (history, Minnesota) seeks to reconcile two prevailing but contradictory images of the 1950s: the notion of domestic tranquility and happiness amidst the fears and tensions of the Cold War. She does so by locating American family life within the larger political culture and by arguing that the retreat to the privacy and security of the home was a response to the era's political insecurities. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including data on 300 couples, she finds ideological connections between Cold War policies and conservative social ``norms.'' A provocative thesis that will stir debate. Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J.

Library Journal

"A major addition to the literature on the history of the family [that] significantly enhances our understanding of American society in the 1950s."
-New York Times

"As Elaine Tyler May...has explained, marriage was not necessarily a positive expression of love or family values in the '50s; it was also an expedient means of 'containing' sex among the young."
-Frank Rich, New Republic

"Skillfully piecing together a social history of sex roles and mores governing data, parenting, birth control, consumerism, and divorce from the Depression to the late '60s, May supports her thesis with a wide range of unusual evidence, from Hollywood scripts and movie magazines to opinion surveys, economic studies, and federal employment and civil defense policies."
-Constance Perin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"May sets a new standard for social history by linking intimate family life of the 1950s with the larger imperatives of the Cold War. Homeward Bound should lay to rest forever the notion that the '50s represent some sort of benchmark for 'traditional values'...a fascinating look at this unique, even aberrant, decade."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Dancing in the Streets

"Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound is a revelatory and path-breaking work, a brilliant excavation of the gender bedrock beneath the surreal landscape of Cold War American life. By connecting the bomb and the bedroom, the fallout shelter and the nuclear family, May links the personal with the political on profound new levels."
-Susan Faludi, author of The Terror Dream

"A provocative, always entertaining description of the interconnections between the Cold War anticommunism of post-World War II America and the domestic ideology that Betty Friedan unmasked..."
-Signs

"A provocative thesis that will stir debate."
-Library Journal

"This book helps the Baby Boom generation understand its genesis."
-Booklist


"May offers a sensitive, nuanced reading of domestic ideology, judging but never blaming. Her men are not oppressors, her women not betrayers....History has a long-and often dark-shadow in this book."
-Beth Bailey, author of Sex in the Heartland

"Particularly refreshing is May's superb use of images taken from Civil Defense publications....May's scholarship is superb."
-Joseph M. Hawes, Journal of American History

"May is fundamentally correct...that something was cooking under the surface of those placid 1950s families with their station wagons and their bomb shelters."
-Eric Black, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Homeward Bound comes as a timely antidote to any nostalgia for the 'affluent' '50s or a revival of its domestic ideology."
-Rochelle Gatlin, San Francisco Review of Books

"This fascinating book shows us that the Cold War took place in kitchens, bedrooms and family rooms, as well as in the Pentagon. This is not just for historians-it's a good read for everyone."
-Linda Gordon, New York University


"Required reading for anyone who wants to understand how the upheavals in family life of recent years could have happened so quickly after the baby-boom era of togetherness and stability."
-Arlene Skolnick, University of California, Berkeley

"A provocative, challenging, persuasive interpretation of the internal dynamics that shaped America family life in the postwar years."
-William Chafe, author of Never Stop Running

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