History of Education Society
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era by Elaine Tyler May
Review by: Winifred D. Wandersee
History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 498-500
Published by: History of Education Society
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498 Historyof EducationQuarterly
Elaine Tyler May. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Pp. xi, 284. $20.95.
Elaine Tyler May's study, Homeward Bound, does an excellent job of
establishing the connections between Cold War politics and the American
family in the 1940s and 1950s. Her descriptions of family life-the early
marriages, the baby boom, the high value placed on premarital virtue
and marital fidelity, consumerism, suburbanism, and the well-defined sex
roles-have become a part of our conventional wisdom about the postwar
era. In that sense, this study offers little that is new or controversial. Yet
it does present an explanation-one that is well-conceived and convinc-
ingly executed.
May draws a parallel between the foreign policy of containment that
characterized the postwar stance of the United States and the "contain-
ment" of domestic values within the private sphere of family life. She
relies upon a variety of sources, particularly evidence from popular cul-
ture, including film, mass-circulation periodicals, and newspapers, as well
as the writings of professionals in the social sciences. Her most important
primary source is the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS), which consists of
several surveys of 600 white middle-class men and women who formed
families during these years. The 300 couples who participated in the
study were contacted through announcement of engagements in the late
1930s in New England local newspapers. E. Lowell Kelly, a psychologist
at the University of Michigan, sent them questionnaires every few years
and took his most extensive and detailed surveys in 1955. Kelly was
interested in long-term personality development among married persons,
but as May points out, the KLS data are a valuable source for finding
out why middle-class Americans adhered so strongly to a normative and
specifically defined notion of family life during the postwar years.
May explores a number of issues that have attracted social historians
of twentieth-century America in recent years. For instance, her discussion
of familial security combined with a faith in the expertise of professionals
is reminiscent of the arguments that Christopher Lasch advanced in his
Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977). But whereas
Lasch lamented the passing of traditional family values and parental
authority, May regrets the establishment of values that prohibited the
growth of personal autonomy, particularly for women. The family of the
1950s was something new, but not in the way that it has been traditionally
described. "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
first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all
its members' personal needs through an energized and expressive personal
life" (p. 11).
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Book Reviews 499
May also makes the connection between the familial ideology and
the apolitical tenor of middle-class postwar life. The therapeutic approach
to discontent that emerged during these years was geared toward helping
people feel better about themselves in their own particular situation. "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" (p. 14). Finally, the home was not only a
substitute for political activism and a focus for personal fulfillment; it
represented a commitment that literally went beyond self. "One of the
most striking characteristics of the KLS respondents was their apparent
willingness to give up autonomy and independence for the sake of mar-
riage and a family" (p. 28). This is particularly striking in light of the
expressions of apparent discontent with married life, especially on the
part of the women respondents. The women learned to adjust and adapt.
They saw no viable alternatives to their jobs of building successful family
lives, so they made the choices they believed they had to make. And as
May points out, most thought the gains were worth the sacrifices.
May suggests that the Great Depression and the World War II years
offered the "potential for radically altered gender roles" (p. 57), but that
this potential, thwarted in the 1930s, failed to reach fruition in the 1940s
as well. "In spite of the tremendous changes brought about by the war,
the emergency situation ultimately encouraged women to keep their sights
set on the home, and men to reclaim their status as the primary bread-
winners and heads of households" (p. 59). This is hardly a new argument,
but May expands on the theme. Noting the limited interest in higher
education on the part of young women, and the declining interest in
"careers" on the part of older women, she observes that "the short-lived
affirmation of women's independence gave way to a pervasive endorse-
ment of female subordination and domesticity" (p. 89). Policymakers
and creators of popular culture pointed to traditional gender roles as the
best means for Americans to achieve happiness and security, and thus,
a unique domestic ideology emerged. "As the chill of the cold war settled
across the nation, Americans looked toward the uncertain future with
visions of carefully planned and secure homes, complete with skilled
homemakers and successful breadwinners. The fruits of postwar America
could make the family strong; the family, in turn, could protect the nation
by containing the frightening potentials of postwar life" (p. 90).
May's analysis is persuasive, but class-specific. As she admits in her
introduction, she is describing a middle-class culture and middle-class
families. Although the middle class no doubt set the social standards for
postwar America, the extent to which Americans perceived their security
in cold war terms is debatable. The basic tenets of family life-i.e., marital
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500 Historyof E,ducationQuarterly
fidelity, child-centeredness, consumerism, well-defined gender roles-are
long-term values, and few Americans would have needed cold war ide-
ology to defend them. However, May has developed an interesting ar-
gument to suggest that the popular culture shaped such a domestic ideology
within a conservative political context. She observes that we moved from
the consensus of the fifties to a breakdown of consensus in the 1960s,
and accurately points out that the return to domesticity in the 1980s is
not a return to consensus. Rather, the family has become the center of
a hotly contested political debate-ironically, a debate that also reflects
the intersection of sexual and political ideology in new and complex
ways.
HARTWICKCOLLEGE WINIFREDD. WANDERSEE
Tim Spofford. Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State
College. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988. Pp. 219.
Cloth $24.00, paper $14.00.
A decade ago, students had some point of contact with the epochal events
of the Vietnam War era, which shaped the lives, perspectives, and ide-
ologies of many of their professors. But the killings of students at Jackson
State and Kent State, in May 1970, and the assassination of Martin Luther
King, two years before, are "ancient history" to today's undergraduate.
Good books on the protest movement continue to be published, but little
has appeared recently on the campus tragedies. Tim Spofford, education
writer for the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, has carefully reconstructed
the background events, crisis, and subsequent investigations and lawsuits
surrounding the Jackson State shootings. But the volume ultimately dis-
appoints; the larger significance has not yet been fully probed.
Spofford artfully depicts life for black students in Mississippi in the
decade preceeding 1970. The campus was typical of underfinanced state
schools in the segregation era. Conservative black administrators, wor-
ried lest legislators and the state educational bureaucracy would further
impoverish their institutions, feared student militancy as much as did the
white population. Jackson State students wishing to join sit-ins were
threatened with expulsion in 1961. But after middecade, as "black and
white together" turned to Black Power and as the Vietnam War absorbed
more and more hapless black recruits, the student mood turned angry.
The immediate focus at Jackson State was on white motorists, who sped
through the campus shouting racial epithets, to which students and corner
boys periodically responded by hurling rocks. While attempting to sup-
press such an incident, police shot and killed a young black male on 11
May 1967. A similar confrontation erupted following King's assassina-
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