ABSTRACT
A recurrent argument in family research is that the experience of war fundamentally altered the family in America so much that the family model that emerged at the end of World War II departed radically from prior iterations and must be considered anomalous. Mintz and Kellogg (1988), for example, argued that “the pattern of life characteristic of the fifties differed dramatically from any that has been observed earlier in our history or since” (p. 178). The same position has been taken by others, including May (1988), Skolnick (1991), and Coontz (1992), who have attributed negative evaluations of the contemporary family, in part, to the use of the postwar family as a benchmark. In broad terms, these authors contend that the wartime migration of women into the paid workforce produced confusion about male and female sex roles, particularly as those roles related to public (work) and private (home and family) space. In order to reduce that confusion and reestablish the family, the government (supported by the popular media) embarked on a policy of social construction, articulating policies that systematically favored the traditional family and, as such, chased women back into the home and resurrected the role of provider husband-father. In support of this position, authors point to such things as the G.I. Bill, which linked higher education and loan programs to military participation and, so, provided the bulk of those services to males (Hartmann, 1982; May, 1988), popular images of the family that presented women in sexualized but domestic ways (Honey, 1984; Kozol, 1994; Westbrook, 1990) and so encouraged the “notion that motherhood was the ultimate fulfillment of female sexuality” (May, 1988, p. 140), and a cultural ideology that emphasized a woman’s need for husband and
children (Friedan, 1963) and so defined women in the narrow context of the family.
