Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era [Paperback]

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 This is not to say that the work has no weaknesses, but it remains in many ways an enduring, if somewhat superceded landmark in American cultural studies.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.