A Macat Analysis of Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on “containment”—preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground—and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the first person to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together. Piecing together evidence from a wide range of sources—data, surveys, examinations of leisure activities, and lifestyles as depicted by the media—1988’s Homeward Bound draws a convincing picture of how US culture in the 1950s did the job of containing and constraining its own people, particularly women. This groundbreaking work debunks many of the ideas that have grown up about 1950s culture, and is still an important text nearly three decades after it was first published.
