A Revealing But Narrow Picture Of American Families In The Cold War Era
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Publicado: 22 de noviembre de 2012
A Revealing but Narrow Picture of American Families in the Cold War Era
In her book, Homeward Bound, Elaine Tyler May attempts to explain the general trend towards domesticity of both men andwomen in the Cold War Era. Despite the “traditional” label these decades often get, she argues the contrary, proclaiming there was nothing traditional about the forties and the fifties. Conversely, sheargues, these decades were an anomaly in American history. “It was not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of ‘traditional’ family life with roots deep in the past. Rather, it was the firstwholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life”(11). Unlike the flappers of the twenties and the hippiesof the sixties, young adults of the fifties were a generation of complacency: complacency to monotonous corporate jobs that emasculated men by stripping them of authority in the public sphere;complacency to the traditional gender roles of male breadwinner and female homemaker; complacency towards socially acceptable sexual behavior, the list goes on.
May argues that in the face of the ColdWar and having lived through World War II and the Great Depression, young adults of the forties and fifties sought security in the home: in a stable, structured, happy and sexually satisfied, whitepicket-fence home. The age of marriage decreased and the birthrate increased in an attempt to better attain this goal – and sooner. As with the rhetoric of containment of communism, containment became amajor fact of life in the home front as well: containment of sexuality in marriage, containment of the tamed woman in the home as homemaker and wife, containment of the nuclear family in the suburbs.To support her arguments May uses primarily the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS): a series of surveys given to 300 white middle-class couples over the course of about a decade or so, who started...
In her book, Homeward Bound, Elaine Tyler May attempts to explain the general trend towards domesticity of both men andwomen in the Cold War Era. Despite the “traditional” label these decades often get, she argues the contrary, proclaiming there was nothing traditional about the forties and the fifties. Conversely, sheargues, these decades were an anomaly in American history. “It was not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of ‘traditional’ family life with roots deep in the past. Rather, it was the firstwholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life”(11). Unlike the flappers of the twenties and the hippiesof the sixties, young adults of the fifties were a generation of complacency: complacency to monotonous corporate jobs that emasculated men by stripping them of authority in the public sphere;complacency to the traditional gender roles of male breadwinner and female homemaker; complacency towards socially acceptable sexual behavior, the list goes on.
May argues that in the face of the ColdWar and having lived through World War II and the Great Depression, young adults of the forties and fifties sought security in the home: in a stable, structured, happy and sexually satisfied, whitepicket-fence home. The age of marriage decreased and the birthrate increased in an attempt to better attain this goal – and sooner. As with the rhetoric of containment of communism, containment became amajor fact of life in the home front as well: containment of sexuality in marriage, containment of the tamed woman in the home as homemaker and wife, containment of the nuclear family in the suburbs.To support her arguments May uses primarily the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS): a series of surveys given to 300 white middle-class couples over the course of about a decade or so, who started...
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