Elaine May's Homeward bound: summary and analysis

Elaine May's Homeward Bound

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York:

Basic Books, 1999

How did Americans emotionally shift from wartime mobilization to the uneasy peace of the Cold War? According to Elaine May's Homeward Bound American: Families in the Cold War Era, Americans reacted to the threat of the Cold War by 'cocooning' into suburban domesticity. "Secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country" became the priority of most Americans, at least the white, middle-class American suburbanites that are the focus of May's book (May 13). May suggest that the nearly hysterical emphasis on normalcy during the era of "Leave it to Beaver" was a reaction to the fears of the atomic age as well as an expression of relief at the end of the Great Depression and World War II. And although all Americans were affected, the role of women in particular was put under scrutiny by the media. During the Great Depression, economic circumstances and an escalating divorce rate had forced many women to work. Women had served in factories in the war mobilization effort, and pursued careers that challenged gender stereotypes. However, during the 1950s, women began to lose the gains they had made in the workplace. Just as damaging to the incursion of women into the workplace, the media climate shifted and changed from "Rosie the Riveter" to a celebration of motherhood and apple pie.

Most of May's evidence comes from the Kelly Longitudinal Survey -- a series of surveys of middle-class white families conducted by E. Lowell Kelly, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. Kelly's work actually began during the 1930s and May compares the findings from the 1930s to the qualitative and quantitative reports of the mid-1950s to support her thesis. May's analysis of the results of this data is that women were driven by fear and a desire for security and by and large accepted America's newly stringent gender norms, until Betty Friedan's classic the Feminine Mystique began to question the suburban ideal of the stay-at-home mother. In the 1950s American women were willing to sacrifice autonomy for comfort, bolstered by images of the media's celebration of domesticity, and the suggestion that women had to 'choose' between love and a career, as famously depicted in films like "His Girl Friday."

May believes that women's bodies were the canvas on which the new ideology of Cold War America was 'painted.' Sexuality, domesticity, and anticommunism were curiously intertwined in the cultural imagination. When Vice President Nixon debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Moscow-American Exhibition in 1959, their disagreement about the relative value of communism over capitalism was called the 'Kitchen Debate.' The controversial two-piece swimsuit the bikini came from a bomb test site: "The designer of the revealing suit chose the name 'bikini' four days after the bomb was dropped to suggest the swimwear's explosive potential" and sexy women were known as 'bombshells' (May 110). Life Magazine even featured on its cover some newlyweds spending their honeymoon in a bomb shelter (May 10).

As the title of May's text indicates, the comforts of home after the war were 'binding' -- binding women to confining gender norms, and binding all Americans in a fashion that promoted conformity. However, although the 1950s may have prohibited sexual 'deviance' outside of conventional sexual norms, in the form of out-of-wedlock births and homosexuality, it was highly approving of sexuality within the bounds it defined as acceptable -- the age of newlyweds plummeted according to the natural average, and the birthrate skyrocketed. Marrying young and having children enabled "Americans to thumb their noses at doomsday predictions" and also signified the end to an era when Americans were afraid to get married, for fear of providing for a new family (May 23). 'Containment' is the other key word of May's text, containment of communism and sexuality -- experts advised that it was better for teens to marry young than to relieve their urges in other ways. Sexual looseness outside of marriage and political deviance were also lined in the popular imagination.

Interestingly, May does not see the 1950s as traditional but as futuristic in its obsession with the threat of war and what she sees as the new emphasis on personal life. As reflected in the Kelly surveys from this period, the popular use of psychoanalysis began to rise. "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). This intense personalization of American life also temporarily stultified political activism. "It offered private and personal solutions to social problems.... domestic containment and its therapeutic corollary undermined the potential for political activism and reinforced the chilling effects of anticommunism and the cold war consensus" (May 14). Even the increased effectiveness of contraception brought it under 'expert' and professional control, thus containing it as well: like "labor saving" devices around the home, birth control mechanized the process of keeping home childbirth, enabling families to plan and space out their children (May 135). This was the age of the tyranny of the 'expert' who gave comforting advice how to build a bomb shelter, how to give birth and to raise children, and even how to efficiently cook the family meal according to the 'correct' procedure.