ABSTRACT
Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era has featured in countless studies that probe American culture in the 1950s. Homeward Bound opened up the home and the sphere of domesticity as an important arena of scholarly interest. May created an interdisciplinary investigation that may be used to examine any identity, American or otherwise. May shows how the home acted as a sphere in which the heterosexual nuclear family could be contained. This culture took root because of the urgent necessity to maintain an American identity. Joanne Meyerowitz challenges May's thesis by examining the many roles women played in 1950s culture and the diversity inherent in female identity in the era. Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how the focus on suburban dwellings as representative of American cultural and domestic experience clouds our understanding of people's wider cultural experience in the 1950s.
