ABSTRACT
In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May set out to discover how the cult of domesticity developed such a firm grip on American cultural behavior and identity during the 1950s. May introduces her study in a way that suggests her thesis opposes widely accepted truths. May's discussion of how domestic culture and the security of the family unit feed into wider sociopolitical concerns does not stand completely alone. It echoes a debate put forward by the American historian Christopher Lasch in his 1977 work Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. Examining private and cultural behaviors such as birth and marriage patterns and religious and leisure activities, May shows how the personal realm became linked to foreign policy and the conservative political and ideological cultural infrastructure. Her investigation blended the existing scholarly understanding of the era's politics with the existing idea of the 1950s as a time of suburban bliss and nuclear families.
