Despite unprecedented economic prosperity, America suffered from instability and uncertainty after World War II. While hailing the middle-class myth of prosperity and abundance for all, post-World War II Americans took refuge from the dangers of the outside world by withdrawing into the security of the family home.
Following World War II, the average age of men and women who married began to drop and the birthrate began to rise. The rising birthrate was perhaps the most significant indication of the monumental change that had taken place in middle-class America’s perception of domestic stability and family values. After nearly a hundred years of steady decline, postwar American married couples not only reversed the birthrate trend but also caused it to skyrocket to a 20th-century high, creating the baby boom. As men and women of the late 1940s and 1950s married in ever-increasing numbers, they also reversed the divorce rate, which had been on a steady rise since World War I and peaked at the close of World War II. The reversal of these long-term demographic trends came as Americans embraced family life more aggressively and with more confidence than ever before.
Although they put a high premium on family life, postwar Americans regarded gender roles in a rigid and
Traditional way. The husband and father resumed the identity of “breadwinner” while the wife and mother resumed the identity of “homemaker,” as reflected in situational comedies like Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. The return of the woman’s role as homemaker was perhaps most significant, as it effectively stripped women of the unprecedented level of independence that they had experienced during World War II.
There was, however, an underside to economic prosperity. While peace, low divorce rates, and a booming economy all defined the American dream to middle-class Americans who had lived through an economic depression and a world war, the euphoria associated with the transition from the adversity of the 1930s and early 1940s to the peace and prosperity of the late 1940s helped to hide a less pleasant side of American society. As women’s lives became predetermined by the new postwar family ideology, an all white middle-class migration to the suburbs further institutionalized racism and inner-city poverty. The suburban phenomenon excluded nonwhites, for as middle-class whites fled the city for the suburbs, the largely black minority population was left behind. While working-class blacks did not enjoy the postwar prosperity that most middle-class whites enjoyed, they did experience similar rises in birth and marriage rates.
At the same time, the post-World War II years were marked by threats to the American way of life that even the walls of the family home could not keep out. COMMUNISM, atomic weapons, and the COLD WAR induced an overwhelming anxiety. The fear of atomic annihilation and radioactive fallout reached epic proportions by the late 1950s. Magazines often contained images that fused the atomic age and domesticity, showing families in their neatly organized fallout shelters. Consumer Reports in March 1959 warned consumers about radioactivity in “The Milk We Drink.” The fear of communism was maintained by effective political propaganda suggesting that, without vigilance, communism would spread from country to country until it threatened the very existence of the United States.
By the late 1950s, the illusion of stability began to reveal the effects of these disturbing undercurrents. Breaching class lines, the Beat Generation, music, and a new political ideology based on activism rather than adaptation began to expose American poverty and question the rigid institutionalized boundaries established and embraced by the post-World War II generation. The baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s created a COUNTERCULTURE and a new focus on WOMEN’S status AND RIGHTS resulting in the weakening of the nuclear family as the central building block in American society.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II, and the politics of the cold war all played major parts in creating and shaping the revival of the family. The hardship and fear associated with all these events led Americans to cling to rigid gender roles for the freedom from adversity that they offered. The baby boomers, however, were disenchanted with the society that their parents had created. They grew up in the affluence of the postwar years and they saw the consequences of the stability that their parents had so desperately sought in uneven distribution of wealth, sexual frustration, and institutionalized gender and racial inequality. As a result, the upheaval of baby boomers produced an unprecedented divorce rate and a corresponding decline in the rate of marriages and births.
Further reading: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
—Jason Reed
World History
