Domestic Containment In The 1950s

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Gender roles were reasserted in 1950s America postwar. Even if there was an increase in divorce rates popular culture and mythology upheld hetronormative marriage as a key to spiritual, financial and spiritual success. In the 1950s, the term “containment” referred to the foreign policy-driven containment of communism and atomic proliferation. In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988) Elaine Taylor May demonstrates a new version of containment prevalent in the domestic sphere. She gives a detailed description of the emergence of domestic containment-how it emerged and affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it unravelled in the wake of Vietnam’s era’s assault on cold war culture, when unwed mothers,