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Genealogy Book Store > Genealogy books beginning with H
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Homeward Bound: American Families In The Cold War Era |
Author: Elaine Tyler May
Published: 1990-02-14 |
List price: $22.00
Our price: $20.90
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Don't waste your time
The text relies too heavily on the Kelly Longitudinal Study. This was a lop-sided study taken from the late 30s to the mid 50s. The primary study subjects were middle class white protestants. This is hardly the the broadest cross sections of America then or now. That being said I do not understand how may can fairly draw such conclusions.
 Hollywood Does not equal popular belief
Throughout the book, the author continually uses Hollywood movies as proof that the beliefs she advocates were popularly believed. Often she does not provide solid proof when she states that an idea was popularly believed by Americans. Movies may be popular because they are a great story, but that does not necessarily mean they reflected American's belief. Hollywood is good for entertainment, not necessarily a good metric for Americans' beliefs.
 let's talk about Momism!!
The whole concept of "momism" was embedded throughout western culture in films stemming after World War II from work of popular novelists like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. "Momism," is a female condition caused by an overdose of freedom which slowly spread among women while their men were preoccupied with war and other manly pursuits. Women were able to experience some sort of social and economic mobility after World War II. The development of wartime and postwar period economy had given women more freedom than they had ever had before. As the society became evermore feminists after World War II, measured by open acceptance to the jobs pre-owned by men, the protection of civil rights, and their preponderance over family and outside, the society evidenced more and more Momism, its emergence of Mother-Nature, the great care giver. But the problem arose when "Momism" made its shift to "bossism":- authority by a single individual, within few decades. Mothers who contributed to problems in self-development by pressuring their children, emphasizing on external measures of success, being overly critical about smaller things, forging their expectations over their children's identity and being emotionally unavailable when the children needed them the most. This became particularly difficult for children under these critical circumstances, as result difficulties such as boredom, vagueness, unhappiness, reliance on others started in the very foundation of their psychological development. They suffered failure of their adolescents to reach full maturity and disarray of independence, initiative, and identity. The danger of such overly powerful mothers is also portrayed in films like Rebel without a Cause (1955), Psycho (1960).
American society was rapidly becoming a matriarchy in which domineering and overly protective mothers disrupted the Oedipal structure of the middle class nuclear family by smothering their sons with `unnatural' affection"...
Many Shortcomings
Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era encapsulates the life of the average American family from the decade prior to World War II through the decade of the 1980s, primarily focusing on the Cold War period of the 1940s through the 1960s. Although the threat of the Cold War and use of atomic weapons always loomed in the background, May's work essentially emphasized the social and economic happenings of the time. Homeward Bound is an easy read with each chapter following a format that introduces the reader to the chapter's subject, backs it with statistical data, and provides a summary. And lest the reader think the book is balanced and fair to men and women, later chapters show the author's true intent which is to show how American women were trapped into becoming housewives and not being able to explore their own interests or careers in favor of their husbands'. Nine chapters guide the reader through the Great Depression, World War II, the Eisenhower years, the turbulent decade of the 1960s and ends with the election of Ronald Reagan. Since the book was originally published in 1988, there is a follow-up section for the new 1999 edition. Further, there are several appendices with statistical data describing the demographics of the people about whom it is written. Also, the questionnaire from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which is the basis for the data provided in the text, is also included.
Vice President Richard Nixon's "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is the opening salvo in a book that paints a bleak picture for American women in the 1940s and 1950s. Much of the information provided to support the author's thesis is from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which consisted of surveys of six hundred white middle-class families and spanned the period from the late-1930s to about 1955. Families actually began in the 1930s and 1940s for security and economic reasons and "...laid the foundation for a commitment to a stable home life...." Even though women worked outside the home and were in many ways functional within the job market, they were discouraged from working during the time of the Great Depression, since working women took jobs away from men. This changed after America's entry into World War II where full employment existed and the need for workers to drive the military production machine required that women enter the workforce. However, once the war ended and veterans returned from overseas, many women left the job market on their own or were forced out so that men could be employed. The expectation was for women to become housewives and mothers and cater to their families rather than have a career of their own. In fact, many government officials, like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, stated that being a housewife was one of the most important careers a woman could have to provide stability in the country as an attempt to thwart the growth of communism.
Many women were not satisfied with that life. Although the marriage rate increased significantly and the birth rate jumped after WWII (producing the "Baby Boom" generation), women from the survey experienced a sense of despair in their lives due to their societal subservience to their husbands. Though many believed raising a family and keeping a happy home was quite satisfactory to them, many women were depressed and unsatisfied with their lives in general. May describes in great detail the miserable lives of many of these women whose husbands treated them badly, were not affectionate or sexually gratifying, and who were inattentive fathers. The life of the average housewife was gloomy because she worked where she lived whereas men worked away from the house and saw their home as a sanctuary for them to relax and, seemingly, be waited on hand-and-foot by their jobless wife. Certainly divorce was available for these women; but, unless their husband was abusive or adulterous, most did not exercise that option since a high social stigma was attached to it during that era. Further, from an economic standpoint, most women with children could not survive on their own. Indeed, the economic fortunes of divorced women declined while that of divorced men increased.
Consumerism and the ideal American family bring the reader back to the Nixon - Khrushchev debate. New appliances, new homes, new cars, and other "big ticket" items were the staple of American life and what separated the U.S. from the U.S.S.R. and made American appear more affluent then their Communist counterparts. Not only did Americans want more things, they also wanted more children. Couples who had no children were seen as unsuccessful. "Large families were an indication of a man's potency and ability to provide and a woman's success as a professional homemaker." Women should be able to manage a larger household, after all, because many of the appliances (e.g., washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric irons) were invented to make their lives easier and thus enable them to have more time to raise children and keep a clean house.
This era of the nuclear family began to unravel in the early 1960s with the publication of the best-selling book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. In it, she questioned the status quo and "...spoke for thousands like herself whose dreams and desires withered under the weight of domesticity." Moreover, as the children of the baby boom era came of age themselves, they rebelled against the lifestyles of their parents and turned the 1960s in a decade that saw "free love" and the move away from the nuclear family. This brought about cohabitation without marriage, premarital sex, and an increase in the divorce rate. The author concluded that the conservative movement that helped Ronald Reagan to become elected president and harkened to return to the days of the nuclear family and the stable 1950s was misguided because that era actually diminished the role of women and prevented them from realizing their potential.
As stated earlier, the author shows herself as a feminist whose goal was to prove that women were kept down in subservience to men after World War II. From a statistical standpoint, since the surveyed families were mostly located in the New England area of the country it is debatable that the data the survey provided is applicable to the rest of the country. Basically, twelve hundred adults were surveyed from a 1950 population of over one hundred and fifty million. Does that really represent the American population as a whole, especially when the survey is geographic specific? Further, May is critical of the conservative movement and the supporters of Reagan which further paints her as a liberal feminist. Although there is nothing wrong with having that viewpoint, it diminishes the work in general. What starts out to be a statistical analysis of married couples during a specific time period results in a generalization of the country as a whole and sheds a negative light on men of that time. Although Homeward Bound gives the reader a glimpse of a time in recent American history, it should not be considered the decisive work for which to judge that generation.
 How the Hetero-normative, Racialized, Exclusive Suburban Family Ideal Became a Unifying Aspiration of American Culture
This work contends that there was an anomalous rise in "marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles" in the post-World War II United States that was pan-racial, pan-economic, pan-ethnic, and pan-regional. It attributes this to social constructions of home and family that responded to governmental policy aims and cold war anxieties. The work seeks unearth what, precisely, drives the anxieties behind these social formations and why they dramatically distort the post-World War II child bearing generation from the radicalism that preceded and proceeded them.
May ascribes the geopolitical parlance of "containment" to the domestic cultural policies of the cold war United States. She asserts that the rhetoric and practice of the nuclear family served to contain subversive sexual and political behavior that might evoke contestation of gendered postwar consumerism, masculinist renderings of science qua exceptionalist prosperity, and endanger the social practices of unity, security, and stability that were understood to confer qualitative global advantage in the cold war. The author also engages the nuclear family as an aspiration that mobilized the majority of United States residents who were racially, economically, or otherwise excluded from its suburban actualization. The capacity of family to frame the intelligibility of "prosperity" for economic actors who were conferred unequal advantage is key, May suggests, to its postwar centrality in visions of an abundant and classless society.
In this context, May's suburbs emerge as liminal spaces that both enact and resolve the contradictions between pre-and postwar culture, replacing the aspiration for equal condition with the condition of uniform aspiration, reifying romance as the mutual consent of liberal individuals yet encasing it in an exclusionary propertization of private life, and substituting ethnic kinship and working class consciousness that situated life in power with a homogenous whiteness that rendered power unintelligible. This is artfully demonstrated as the text traces the dispositions and cohesions of families from the New Deal era thru the early 1960s.
The author's hybrid methodology combines statistical demographic data with qualitative analysis of cultural texts. May notes assiduously the key contradiction within this data; that while the imagery of suburban familial prosperity presented a level of prosperity that was realistically inaccessible for the majority of United States residents who encountered it, it nonetheless correlates with a strong voluntary entrance into the social formations of that aspiration that is evident across demographics. May goes as far as to entertain that the disconnect between the consumer aspirations of marginalized peoples and their social reality may have contributed to their motivation to pursue social change, also noting the strong political incentives to resolve visible racial inequality during the cold war. Indeed, the phenomenon through which the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement became centered around an actualization of the postwar patriarchal family and economic opportunity--it was examples of consumer exclusion from diners, hotels, and municipal services as well as his daughter's weeping at a whites-only amusement park that Martin Luther King rooted his initial moral appeals in-would constitute an entirely separate study. This, if anything, is the question one is left with at the conclusion of Homeward Bound. To what extent has the lasting postwar articulation of the nuclear suburban home as the fruit of prosperity become the constantly greener grass to marginalized peoples, and how has this interfaced with social movements, rebellion, and self-destruction?
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