Homeward Bound

The stunt was little more than a publicity device; yet, in retrospect it takes on symbolic significance. For in the early years of the cold war, amid a world of uncertainties brought about by World War II and its aftermath, the home seemed to offer a secure, private nest removed from the dangers of the outside world. The message was ambivalent, however, for the family also seemed particularly vulnerable. It needed heavy protection against the intrusions of forces outside itself. The self-contained home held out the promise of security in an insecure world. It also offered a vision of abundance and fulfillment. As the cold war began, young postwar Americans were homeward bound.

Demographic indicators show that in this period, Americans were more eager than ever to establish families. The bomb-shelter honeymooners were part of a cohort of Americans who lowered the age at marriage for both men and women and quickly brought the birthrate to a twentieth-century high after more than a hundred years of steady decline, producing the “baby boom” (see Tables 1 and 2). Virtually everyone of childbearing age participated in the production of the baby boom. Americans of all racial, ethnic, and religious groups, of all socioeconomic classes and educational levels, married younger and had more children than at any other time in the twentieth century. Black and white, rich and poor, they all brought the marriage rate up and the divorce rate down. Although the nation remained divided along lines of race and class, and only members of the prosperous white middle and working classes had access to the suburban domesticity that represented the “good life,” family fever swept the nation and affected all Americans. These young adults established a trend of early marriage and relatively large families that lasted for more than two decades (see Table 3). From the 1940s through the early 1960s, Americans married at a higher rate and at a younger age than did their European counterparts.²

Less noted but equally significant, the men and women who formed families between 1940 and 1960 also reduced the divorce rate after a postwar peak. Marriages forged in the late 1940s were particularly stable. Even those couples who eventually divorced remained together long enough to prevent the divorce rate from rising until the mid-1960s (see Table 5). Although the United States maintained its dubious distinction of having the highest divorce rate in the world, the temporary decline in divorce did not occur to the same extent in Europe. Contrary to fears of commentators at the time, the roles of breadwinner and homemaker were not abandoned; they were embraced.

Why did postwar Americans turn to marriage and parenthood with such enthusiasm and commitment? Scholars and observers frequently point to the family boom as the inevitable result of a return to peace and prosperity.³ They argue that depression-weary Americans were eager to put the disruptions and hardships of war behind them and enjoy the abundance at home. There is, of course, some truth in this claim, but prosperity followed other wars in our history, notably World War I, with no similar increase in marriage and childbearing. Peace and affluence alone are inadequate to explain the many complexities of the post-World War II domestic explosion. The demographic trends went far beyond what was expected from a return to peace. Indeed, nothing on the surface of postwar America explains the rush of young Americans into marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles.

It might have been otherwise. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought about widespread challenges to traditional gender roles that could have led to a restructured home. The war intensified these challenges and pointed the way toward radical alterations in the institutions of work and family life. Wartime brought thousands of women into the paid labor force when men left to enter the armed forces. After the war, expanding job and educational opportunities, as well as the increasing availability of birth control devices, might well have led young people to delay marriage or not to marry at all, and to have fewer children if they did marry. Indeed, many scholars and observers at the time feared that these changes seriously threatened the continuation of the American family. Yet the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that postwar American society experienced a surge in family life and a reaffirmation of domesticity that rested on distinct roles for women and men.⁴

The demographic explosion in the American family represented a temporary disruption of long-term trends. It lasted only until the baby-boom children came of age. The parents, having grown up during the depression and the war, had begun their families during years of prosperity. Their children, however, grew up amid affluence during the cold war; they reached adulthood during the 1960s and 1970s, creating the counterculture and a new women’s liberation movement. In vast numbers, they rejected the political assumptions of the cold war, along with the domestic and sexual codes of their parents. This generation brought the twentieth-century birthrate to an all-time low and the divorce rate to an unprecedented high.⁵

Observers often point to the 1950s as the last gasp of time-honored family life before the sixties generation made a major break from the past. But the comparison is shortsighted. In many ways, the youths of the sixties resembled their grandparents, who came of age in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like many of their baby-boom grandchildren, the grandparents had challenged the sexual norms of their day, pushed the divorce rate up and the birthrate down, and created a unique youth culture, complete with music, dancing, movies, and other new forms of urban amusements. They also behaved in similar ways politically, developing a powerful feminist movement, strong grassroots activism on behalf of social justice, and a proliferation of radical movements to challenge the status quo. It is the generation in between—with its strong domestic ideology, pervasive consensus politics, and peculiar demographic behavior—that stands out as different.⁶

Observers normally explain the political activism and the demographic behavior of the baby-boom generation as the effects of affluence and the result of expanding opportunities for women in education and employment. Yet the same conditions existed twenty years earlier at the peak of the domestic revival. The circumstances were similar, but the responses were different. What accounted for the endorsement of “traditional” family roles by young adults in the postwar years and the widespread challenge to those roles by their children?

These questions stimulated the exploration that led to this book. Answering them requires entering the minds of the women and men who married and raised children during these years. The historical circumstances that framed their lives shaped the families they formed.

What makes the postwar demographic explosion even more curious and remarkable is its pervasiveness across all groups in the society. Americans of all backgrounds rushed into marriage and childbearing, even though many of these newly formed families—most notably large numbers of Americans of color—were excluded from suburbia, the site of the “American way of life.” Racial and class divisions were concealed beneath an aura of unity in the aftermath of the war. Post-World War II America presented itself as a unified nation, politically harmonious and blessed with widespread affluence. Emerging triumphant from a war fought against racist and fascist regimes, spared the ravages of war-torn Europe and Asia, and prosperous from the booming wartime economy, the United States embraced its position as the “leader of the free world.”

But major challenges lay ahead if the nation was to maintain its leadership in the world. The atomic blasts that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked both the end of World War II and the beginning of the cold war. The United States now faced its former ally, the Soviet Union, as its major foe. The cold war was largely an ideological struggle between the two superpowers, both hoping to increase their power and influence across the globe. The divisions in American society along racial, class, and gender lines threatened to weaken the society at home and damage its prestige in the world. In the propaganda battles that permeated the cold war era, American leaders promoted the American way of life as the triumph of capitalism, allegedly available to all who believed in its values. This way of life was characterized by affluence, located in suburbia, and epitomized by white middle-class nuclear families. Increasing numbers of Americans gained access to this domestic ideal—but not everyone who aspired to it could achieve it.

Poverty excluded many from suburban affluence; racism excluded others. Nevertheless, experts and officials insisted that the combined forces of democracy and prosperity would bring the fruits of the “good life” to all. Racial strife, they asserted, was diminishing. Workers, they argued, were prosperous. But anxieties surrounding these issues did not disappear. Policymakers perceived racial and class divisions as particularly dangerous, because dissatisfied workers and racial minorities might be drawn to left-wing political agitation, leading to socialism or even communism. According to the cold war ethos of the time, conflict within the United States would harm our image abroad, strengthen the Soviet Union, and weaken the nation, making it vulnerable to communism. The worst-case scenario was communist takeover and the defeat of the United States in the cold war. Although strategists and foreign policy experts feared that the Soviet Union might gain the military might and territorial expansion to achieve world domination, many leaders, pundits, and observers worried that the real dangers to America were internal ones: racial strife, emancipated women, class conflict, and familial disruption. To alleviate these fears, Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety in an insecure world, while experts, leaders, and politicians promoted codes of conduct and enacted public policies that would bolster the American home. Like their leaders, most Americans agreed that family stability appeared to be the best bulwark against the dangers of the cold war.

These widely held beliefs and the public policies they generated led to some dramatic transformations in American society, beyond the rush into marriage, childbearing, and domesticity. Most important, they blurred class lines while sharpening racial divisions. The massive infusion of federal funds into the expansion of affordable single-family homes in suburban developments made it possible for white working-class families to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Second-generation European immigrants moved out of their ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, leaving their kinship networks, along with their outsider status, behind. Postwar prosperity and the promise of assimilation made it possible for ethnic Americans with white skin to blend into the homogeneous suburbs. Jews and Catholics joined Anglo-Saxon Protestants in these all-white communities, even if they could not join their country clubs or social gatherings. Greeks, Poles, and Italians joined Norwegians and Swedes as members of the white middle class, reaping the benefits of affluence and the American way of life.

People of color were excluded from the vast majority of these suburban communities and were denied the benefits of American prosperity even if they could afford them. With very few notable exceptions, residential segregation defined the postwar suburbs. Persistent racial discrimination proved to be the nation’s worst embarrassment throughout the cold war. It also proved to be a situation that African-Americans were unwilling to tolerate. It is no accident that the civil rights movement developed in the wake of World War II, as black soldiers returned from fighting a war against racism to face segregation, discrimination, and brutality at home. Black leaders and federal officials also understood that the national government needed to promote civil rights at home in order to save face abroad, as the Soviet Union and other communist countries pointed to American race relations as an indication of the hypocrisy and failure of the American promise of freedom for all.⁷

But the strategic alliance between the national government and civil rights leaders required that the movement remain limited to legal and political rights, which were consistent with principles of equal opportunity. Issues such as school desegregation and access to public transportation did not violate private property rights. Although most Americans approved of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to desegregate public schools, as late as 1964, 89 percent of those polled in the North and 96 percent in the South believed that “an owner of property should not have to sell to a Negro if he doesn’t want to.” Anything that hinted of a redistribution of wealth evoked fears of socialism and a threat to American capitalism. These cold war principles precluded governmental efforts to strengthen the hand of those with less against those with more. Civil rights leaders understood these imperatives, and they limited their efforts to achieving political rights rather than economic justice. After all, the rallying cry of the United States in the cold war was “freedom,” not “equality,” and “freedom” became the rallying cry of the civil rights movement as well.⁸

The focus on political rights allowed the government to support certain aspects of the civil rights movement, such as the dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the South, while doing nothing to alleviate residential segregation or the widespread poverty that kept Americans of color at the bottom of the society. As a result, American leaders spoke loudly and often about the efforts the nation was making to eradicate institutionalized racism, claiming that the situation for black Americans was improving. At the same time, they allowed racial segregation to prevail in the suburbs, where the Federal Housing Authority and lending banks maintained redlining policies that prevented black Americans from obtaining home mortgages.⁹

These policies did little to challenge the racial attitudes of white Americans. In the late 1950s, in spite of widespread support for school desegregation, white Americans were less enthusiastic about bringing the races into closer contact in more private realms. Although 60 percent of whites outside the South said they would stay if a black family moved next door, only 45 percent said they would remain in the neighborhood if large numbers of people of color moved in. Disapproval of racial integration was strongest in the most intimate realm of life: the family. The vast majority of Americans—92 percent in the North and 99 percent in the South—approved of laws banning marriage between whites and nonwhites. As late as the mid-sixties, more than half of northern whites and over three-fourths of southern whites still opposed interracial marriage.¹⁰

The long-term effects of these policies and attitudes were devastating. Black Americans were excluded from most suburbs, even if they could afford suburban homes. That exclusion denied them the opportunity for capital accumulation and upward mobility that homeownership provided. So while white working-class Americans prospered and joined their middle-class peers as suburban homeowners, African-Americans lost ground economically. They were forced to reside in substandard urban housing, left out of postwar prosperity, and denied the government subsidies available to whites.

Out of these developments came a society with a rhetoric of classlessness, but sharply divided along racial lines. From a prewar nation made up of many identifiable ethnic groups, postwar American society divided rigidly along the color line. The children of immigrants identified as outsiders before World War II became “white” after the war, gaining access to the privileges and opportunities that whiteness bestowed, such as life in the suburbs.¹¹ Political leaders highlighted the nation’s prosperous all-white suburbs, hid its poverty in rural and urban areas, and masked its racial oppression by promoting the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, the “American way of life” embodied in the suburban nuclear family, as a cultural ideal if not a universal reality, motivated countless postwar Americans to strive for it, to live by its codes, and—for black Americans—to demand it.