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Homeward Bound
- American Families in the Cold War Era
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
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Homeward Bound
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Summary
In the 1950s, the term "containment" referred to the foreign policy-driven containment of Communism and atomic proliferation. Yet in Homeward Bound May demonstrates that there was also a domestic version of containment where the "sphere of influence" was the home. Within its walls, potentially dangerous social forces might be tamed, securing the fulfilling life to which postwar women and men aspired. Homeward Bound tells the story of domestic containment—how it emerged, how it affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it unraveled in the wake of the Vietnam era's assault on Cold War culture, when unwed mothers, feminists, and "secular humanists" became the new "enemy." This revised and updated edition includes the latest information on race, the culture wars, and current cultural and political controversies of the post-Cold War era.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Critic reviews
"A major addition to the literature on the history of the family [that] significantly enhances our understanding of American society in the 1950s."—New York Times
"As Elaine Tyler May...has explained, marriage was not necessarily a positive expression of love or family values in the '50s; it was also an expedient means of 'containing' sex among the young."—Frank Rich, New Republic
"Skillfully piecing together a social history of sex roles and mores governing data, parenting, birth control, consumerism, and divorce from the Depression to the late '60s, May supports her thesis with a wide range of unusual evidence, from Hollywood scripts and movie magazines to opinion surveys, economic studies, and federal employment and civil defense policies."—Constance Perin, Los Angeles Times Book Review