Elaine Tyler May's 1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the
Cold War Era is a ground-breaking piece of historical and cultural
analysis that uses its findings to build a strong argument for its
author's view of the course of modern US history. The aim of May's
study is to trace the links between Cold War politics and the
domestic lives of everyday American families at the time.
Historians have long noted the unique domestic trends of 1950s
America, with its increased focus on the nuclear family, neatly
divided traditional gender roles and aspirational, suburban
consumer lifestyles. May's contribution was to analyse the
interplay between the domestic scene and the political ideologies
of American government, and then to build a carefully-constructed
argument that draws attention to the ways in which these seemingly
disparate forces are in fact related. May's key achievement was to
use her analytical skills to understand the relationships between
these different factors. She traced ways in which domestic life and
US foreign policy mirrored one another, showing that the structures
and processes they aimed for, while different in scale, were
essentially the same. She then carefully brought together different
types of historical data, organizing her study to produce a
carefully reasoned argument that the American suburban home was in
certain direct ways the product of the 'containment' policies that
ruled American foreign policy at the time.
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