Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

Rating:
Summary: a must-read for women of all ages!
Review: 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!!!

Rating:
Summary: a must-read for women of all ages!
Review: 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!!!

Rating:
Summary: A landmark text in the field of American Studies
Review: 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 This is not to say that the work has no weaknesses, but it remains in many ways an enduring, if somewhat superceded landmark in American cultural studies.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.

Rating:
Summary: The Cold War's Home Front
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Uneven in examining reproductive rights
Review: I purchased this book for my graduate-level independent studies course hoping to find definitive answers to a hunch post-war controversy over reproductve rights actually had a larger tie-in to the era's blatant anti-communism.

After all, the advent of antiseptic surgery and antibiotics meant the driving reason behind 19th century anti-abortion campaigns was effectively negated by the post-war period, so opponents of women's rights had to construct a new justifcation for extending the laws beyond their original intent. Abortion was now dangerous because it increased women's autonomy and freedom.

While May does address reproductive policy, this work suprisingly does not delve heavily into how anti-communism and reproductive bias paralleled eachother.Considering many post-war restrictions (pregnancy-related job firing and school expulsion co-existed with illegality of abortion and contraception) were directly related to women's reproductive potential, a considerable amount of research was missing from her book. The research presented skimmed what I had already discovered from Solinger et al's other works and did not provide the insight I was desperatley seeking.

Because May is able to tie anti-communist objectives into television and other cultural arenas, I remain puzzled by the selective exclusion. However well written structurally, it also seemed as if she were skipping around the same argument, but electing not to explore it for whatever reason.

This book is not a good candidate for work with reproductive policy, but would be an excellent choice for a general study of American women's post-war political agency.

Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly uneven in some places
Review: Still working on my independent study project, I bought this book hoping to gain some critical insight on the apparent ties between the era's anti-communisim and renewed interest in enforcing other-wise ignored anti-abortion laws.

Originally passed in the 19th century when all surgery carried a certain degree of risk, abortion had become a fairly safe medical procedure with the advent of antiseptic surgery and antibiotics. Yet, the immediate post-war era saw massive restriction on the number of 'legal' abortions which directly contradicted medical technology's advancement. Paradoxically, when the procedure had attained a fair degree of safety, society was going to go out of it's way to remove women from their own reproductive rights.

This removal had significantly less to do with fetal rights than concern about the woman's real and future 'femininiy'. An informal and unlikely coalition of government experts, and Madison avenue set out to convince the American woman (via comericials, movies, and atrocious sitcoms) THE way to fight the communists was through their unquestioning adoption and adherence to a pre-determined gender role, because only then could she (and the nation) be 'sure' her children would grow up unmarred by communist doctorine.

While there is some information implicating newly rigid gender roles (and the related quest to contain women's sexuality--just like the containment for the communists!)in the sharp increase in abortion prosecutions and legal/cultral restrictions, it did not go in depth as much as I would have prefered. For whatever reason imaginable, May's research into this specific facet abruptly fades in and out of an otherwise solid and engrossing text.

Rating:
Summary: homeward bound
Review: 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.