Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American

¶ … Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York:

Basic Books, 1988, 1999

Fighting in World War II, the American perspective was focused on the larger world. During the postwar era, Americans turned inward to focus on themselves. Even when Vice President Nixon debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Moscow-American Exhibition in 1959, the Vice-President used ability of middle-class Americans buy material goods as proof of his nation's superiority, as if this was the main measure of a nation's moral worth. The deprivation of the war years lead to a desire to consume. During this era, the word 'containment' pertained not just to communism, but to life within the family and the home, particularly in regard to women's spheres of influence. Containment meant containing people at home, containing sexuality within marriage, and limiting personal and sexual experimentation into anything deviant, from homosexuality to promiscuity. To be single for a woman was viewed as a horror, and the image of 'Rosie the Riveter' of the previous decade retreated, only to be replaced by the happy homemaker of sitcoms. Women's lack of competence, as manifest in "I Love Lucy" rather than their strength became the most common cultural image of femininity, and the male ability to be the provider and breadwinner was championed. Procreation and patriotism were linked, after the austerity of the Great Depression. Young women could not get married fast enough, women with families left their lucrative jobs and positions in factories and offices that they had assumed during male-deprived wartime, and older women eschewed job advancement and higher education in favor of the home.

Although the Great Depression and World War II had contained many privations, one positive advance was the more prominent role of strong women, in everything from factories to film. These decades "radically altered gender roles" and expectations (May 57). However, afterwards, female nesting became symbolic of a larger movement towards nesting in the entire nation. "Secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country" was the goal of everyday Americans, not freedom, even though ironically the fear that communists would seal Americans' freedoms away prompted this movement inward (May 13).

Analysis:

According to Elaine Tyler May, the modern American family was maintained and valued primarily because of the security it provided in an unsecure world.

One of the problems with Elaine Tyler May's thesis in Homeward Bound is that it is based upon potent images of a rather narrow sector of the American public. May begins her book by chronicling how Life Magazine depicted a newly married couple who spent their honeymoon in a bomb shelter. The nuclear family provided comfort, she said, even while it was responding to tremendous international insecurity, and the nuclear family could hide in a nuclear cocoon of a bomb shelter in their home (May 10). But how many nuclear families were there, really, in the 1950s that fit this description? The image is striking, but most of May's hard data is based n a single study, the Kelly Longitudinal Survey, the results of surveys of 900 middle-class white families. May notes how women's aspirations grew more conservative and conventional, with the shift in postwar culture. The Kelly Survey respondents were apparently willing "to give up autonomy and independence for the sake of marriage and a family" because, she believes, of the fear that the Cold War had created in their lives (May 28). But even May admits that images such as the bomb shelter do not always convey an accurate picture of reality, given that few Americans built such shelters in their homes, although the images of the media might suggest differently, and the way people respond to surveys does not always reflect their lived experience (May 107).

May's analysis thus seems to fall into validating 'Leave it to Beaver' cliches about the 1950s, even when her own data contradicts it. She does remind the reader that the image of the 1950s as normal and iconic is in error: "It was not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of 'traditional' family life...it was the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members' personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life" in American history (May 11). Some of the most interesting parts of her book are those that do not deal with cultural images of the 1950s still popular today, such as the rise of therapy culture and psychoanalysis, which can be said to parallel similar movements in our own environment today. Therapy "offered private and personal solutions to social problems" just like turning to family to solve all of one's problems and to fulfill all needs, as opposed to the community or vocational life (May 11)