Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era Apush
The stunt was piddling more than a publicity device; yet, in retrospect it takes on symbolic significance. For in the early on years of the Common cold War, amid the uncertainties brought near by Earth War 2 and its aftermath, the home seemed to offer a secure private nest removed from the dangers of the outside world. The message was ambivalent, withal, for the family also seemed particularly vulnerable. Information technology needed heavy protection confronting the intrusions of forces outside itself. The self-contained home held out the hope of security in an insecure globe. It also offered a vision of abundance and fulfillment. As the Cold State of war began, immature postwar Americans were rushing into this vision of marriage and family life.
Demographic indicators show that in the menstruation immediately following World War Two, Americans were more eager than ever to institute families. The flop-shelter honeymooners were part of a cohort of Americans of all racial, indigenous, and religious groups, of all socio-economic classes and education levels, who lowered the age at marriage for both men and women, and quickly brought the birthrate to a twentieth-century high afterward more than than a hundred years of steady decline, producing the "infant boom." Although the nation remained divided along lines of race and course, family unit fever swept the nation and afflicted all Americans. The trend of early matrimony and relatively big families these young adults established lasted for more than ii decades. From the 1940s through the early 1960s, Americans married at a higher rate and at a younger age than did their European counterparts.
Less noted but as meaning, the men and women who formed families between 1940 and 1960 likewise reduced the divorce rate after a postwar height. Marriages forged in the late 1940s were specially stable. Fifty-fifty those couples who somewhen divorced remained together long enough to preclude the divorce rate from rising until the mid-1960s. Although the United States maintained its dubious stardom of having the highest divorce rate in the earth, the temporary decline in divorce did not occur to the aforementioned extent in Europe.
Why did postwar Americans plough to marriage and parenthood with such enthusiasm and delivery? Scholars ofttimes signal to the family smash as the inevitable result of a render to peace and prosperity. They argue that postwar Americans were eager to put the disruptions and hardships of economic depression and war behind them and enjoy the abundance at dwelling. There is, of course, some truth in this claim, but prosperity followed other wars in our history, notably Globe State of war I, with no similar increment in marriage and childbearing. Peace and affluence alone are inadequate to explain the many complexities of the postwar domestic explosion. The demographic trends went far beyond what was expected from a render to peace. Indeed, null on the surface of postwar America explains the rush of young Americans into spousal relationship, parenthood, and traditional gender roles.
It might take been otherwise. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought about widespread challenges to traditional gender roles that could have led to a restructured home. The war intensified these challenges and pointed the way toward radical alterations in the institutions of piece of work and family life. Wartime brought thousands of women into the paid labor strength when men left to enter the Armed Forces. After the war, expanding job and educational opportunities, also every bit the increasing availability of birth-control devices, might well have led young people to delay marriage or not ally at all, and to have fewer children if they did marry. Indeed, many observers at the fourth dimension feared that these changes seriously threatened the stability of the American family. Withal, the bear witness overwhelmingly indicates that postwar American society experienced a surge in family unit life and a reaffirmation of domesticity that rested on distinct roles for women and men.
This demographic explosion in the American family unit represented a temporary disruption of long-term trends. It lasted only until the infant-boom children came of age. The parents, having grown up during the Low and the war, had begun their families during years of prosperity. Their children, however, grew up amongst affluence during the Cold War; they reached adulthood during the 1960s and 1970s, creating the counterculture and a new women's liberation movement. In vast numbers, they rejected the political assumptions of the Cold War, along with the domestic and sexual codes of their parents. This generation brought the twentieth-century birthrate to an all-fourth dimension depression and the divorce rate to an unprecedented high.
Observers often point to the 1950s every bit the final gasp of time-honored family life before the sixties generation made a major break from the past. But the comparison is shortsighted. In many ways, the youths of the sixties resembled their grandparents, who came of age in the outset decades of the twentieth century. Like many of their baby-boom grandchildren, the grandparents had challenged the sexual norms of their 24-hour interval, pushed the divorce rate up and the birthrate downwardly, and created a unique youth civilization, complete with music, dancing, movies, and other new forms of amusements. They also behaved in similar ways politically, developing powerful feminist and civil rights movements, strong grassroots activism on behalf of social justice, and a proliferation of radical movements to challenge the condition quo. It is the generation in between—with its strong domestic credo, pervasive consensus politics, and peculiar demographic behavior—that stands out as different.
What makes the postwar demographic explosion even more curious and remarkable is its pervasiveness across all groups in the lodge. Americans of all backgrounds rushed into marriage and childbearing, even though many of these newly formed families—nearly notably big numbers of Americans of color—were excluded from suburbia, the site of the "American mode of life." Racial and class divisions were concealed below an aura of unity in the aftermath of the war. Post–Earth State of war II America presented itself as a unified nation, politically harmonious and blest with widespread abundance. Emerging triumphant from a war fought against racist and fascist regimes, spared the ravages of war-torn Europe and Asia, and prosperous from the booming wartime economic system, the United states embraced its position as the "leader of the free world."
But major challenges lay ahead if the nation was to maintain its leadership in the world. The diminutive blasts that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked both the end of the Second World State of war and the beginning of the Cold War. The United states now faced its former ally, the Soviet Union, as its major foe. The Cold War was largely an ideological struggle betwixt the two superpowers, both hoping to increment their power and influence beyond the globe. The divisions in American society along racial, class, and gender lines threatened to weaken the lodge at home and damage its prestige in the world. In the propaganda battles that permeated the era, American leaders promoted the American manner of life as the triumph of capitalism, allegedly bachelor to all who believed in its values. This way of life was characterized by affluence, located in suburbia, and epitomized by white heart-form nuclear families. Increasing numbers of Americans gained access to this domestic ideal—but not everyone who aspired to it could achieve it.
Poverty excluded many from suburban affluence; racism excluded others. Still, experts and officials insisted that the combined forces of republic and prosperity would bring the fruits of the "skillful life" to all. Racial strife, they asserted, was diminishing. Workers, they argued, were prosperous. Merely anxieties surrounding these issues did not disappear. Policymakers perceived racial and class divisions every bit specially dangerous, because dissatisfied workers and racial minorities might be fatigued to left-wing political agitation, leading to socialism or even communism. According to the Cold War ethos of the time, conflict inside the United States would harm our image abroad, strengthen the Soviet Union, and weaken the nation, making information technology vulnerable to communism. The worst-example scenario was Communist takeover and the defeat of the United States in the Cold War. Although strategists and foreign policy experts feared that the Soviet Union might gain the military strength and territorial expansion to achieve world domination, many leaders, pundits, and other observers worried that the real dangers to America were internal ones: racial strife, emancipated women, class conflict, and familial disruption.
To alleviate these fears, Americans turned to the family as a breastwork of safety in an insecure world, while experts, leaders, and politicians promoted codes of conduct and enacted public policies that would bolster the American dwelling. Like their leaders, most Americans agreed that family unit stability appeared to be the best bulwark confronting the dangers of the Cold War era. Considering of the political, ideological, and institutional developments that converged at the time, immature adults were especially eager for the comforts and security that the nuclear family promised. Like the young couple who honeymooned in the fallout shelter, postwar Americans set their sights on the affluent and protected home equally the location of their own personal pursuit of happiness.
Elaine Tyler May is a professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota and the writer of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (2008) and Pushing the Limits: American Women, 1940–1961 (1994).
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Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/fifties/essays/cold-war-warm-hearth
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