ABSTRACT
Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era painted a novel picture of North American domestic life in the 1950s. May's investigation into the finer details of the conventional wisdom regarding 1950s US culture demonstrates the originality of her thought. May connects the move toward containment and national solidarity in the foreign policy of the time with the more informal but nonetheless urgent cultural containment that emerged from the emphasis on domesticity and the suburban experience. Many scholars before May had investigated the overarching political hostility of the Cold War. And some looked at how popular culture encouraged an image of the wholesome, abundant, and prosperous experience of suburban life. May's study sits comfortably within a more general scholarly movement of reassessing the Cold War. May offered an analysis of how Hollywood cinema propagandized and reinforced traditional gender roles, extending the foreign policy of containment to the domestic sphere.
