|
by: Elaine Tyler May
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.850973
EAN: 9780465030545
ISBN: 0465030548
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 284
Publication Date: October 09, 1988
Publisher: Basic Books
Sales Rank: 1371271
Studio: Basic Books
Accessories:
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - 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.
Rating: - 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 ... Read More
Rating: - 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 ... Read More
Rating:  - 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 ... Read More
Rating: - An intriguing premise
From the 1940s through the early 1960s, Americans married in greater numbers, at a younger age, and with a greater resistance to divorce than either their parents' or their children's generation. There occurred a remarkable dash into the domestic embrace of marriage and parenthood as American women abandoned their wartime jobs and joyfully rushed into the arms of returning World War II soldiers.
But what provided the impetus for this yearning? The World War II generation was raised by parents ... Read More
|
