ABSTRACT
Elaine Tyler May's study opened up the home and the sphere of domesticity—home and family life—as an important arena of interest. She also demonstrated how scholars might use research in this area to understand the historical cultural climate of 1950s America. May studied at the University of California, Los Angeles during the mid-1960s, earning an undergraduate degree in history, and continuing through to her PhD in United States history in 1975. May had originally wanted to pursue her interest in women's history through the discipline of women's studies. But in the mid-1970s she found it difficult to find a suitable institution that offered the course or an available PhD supervisor. The disciplines of history and, later, American studies appealed to May because they allowed her to explore the areas of women's experience and American social studies. May relies on a number of statistical and cultural sources to understand how political culture affected the representation of gender in the postwar era.
