Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

Uncovering startling connections between the Cold War and its effect on American family life, this classic of Cold War literature challenges assumptions about the happy days of the 1950s. . 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 eras 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.