an. 4.4.“. J Liz diam. . . , A 1 , . . V ‘ an . . , .. @bn... n. $2 mi I. I 3 won?! if . 1:3: 2. . >21. . ..N\u: .30 '1! u! 14 . t. 1:, .Lil . 5.1.6. . 27 ‘91.!- l..! I}. 3. , .rt , -. \ 4“...“va nL fiathmfi: t I: . ‘ .15.? 1 {‘1'1 . (0.1!! .S .- Lat 131...; It .I t I). It: 14“.. . .I vi. . V gfiwfififi maawfifig . ‘ r _ . . . I - ,. :_ C . . . . $333., .fii ...¢,n... urns f- _ coo» lIBRARY Michigan State University This is to certify that the dissertation entitled INVISIBLE WOMEN IN TRANSITIONAL TIMES: THE UNTGLD STORIES OF WORKING WOMEN IN THE 19508 presented by Debra Pozega Osburn has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph.D. American Studies degree in jg inr/gjwfl; / Major professor 9 Date 30 October 2001 MS U is an Affirmatiw Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771 PLACE IN RETURN Box to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. ATE UE DATE DUE DATE DUE 04.2305 943 o 05 MAYHZOUS 5582265 (2907 A @3314ng ill I t’ " HAY i, Z 23m: 6/01 cJClRCDItoDuapfis-DJS INVISIBLE WOMEN IN TRANSITIONAL TIMES: THE UNTOLD STORIES 0F WORKING WOMEN IN THE 19505 By Debra Pozega Osburn A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fiIlfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of American Studies 2001 ABSTRACT INVISIBLE WOMEN IN TRANSITIONAL TIMES: THE UNTOLD STORIES OF WORKING WOMEN IN THE 19505 By Debra Pozega Osburn Women’s lives in the 19505 were much more diverse than is apparent in the mass media of the time, since those media likely were both reflecting the culturally proscribed value structure of the time and constructing a reality that the American power structure wished the rest of the world to see. A qualitative study of the way that women’s lives were depicted in the nation’s largest mass-circulation, general audience magazine of the day—Life, with a circulation of more than 6.5 million and an audience that spanned gender and ages——places the question within a cultural context, and provides important insight on the decade of the 19505 in America; a decade, it is argued, that was as volatile and conflict-ridden as those that preceded and followed it. By applying fiameworks of feminist, cultural, and media theory to an examination of the way that Life portrayed women who worked for pay during a decade in which the social structure was built in part on the ideal of women being at home, it can be shown that the magazine, one of the most well read and influential of its day, also was providing a kind of rallying point for a culture searching for a sense of order and security. It also is likely that, in this transitional decade of America’s culture and social order, women were at the center of an invisible revolution that would come to the attention of the nation during the 19605. Indeed, the one-third of American women who worked for pay during the decade actually formed a new culture—a culture of working women—that still has gone unrecognized in a society where women and the roles they play often are held up as symbols of economic success or social stability. While the productive 19505 housewife has been joined, thanks to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, by the dissatisfied suburban homemaker in the nation’s cultural history, their paycheck-earning Sisters still are considered exceptions to the rule. Thus, they are marginalized and dismissed during a decade in which they actually led vibrant, productive, and diverse lives. A close look indicates that this culture of working women served as a metaforce that made wide cultural change inevitable. Copyright by DEBRA POZEGA OSBURN 2001 To my parents, whose dedication to education inspired my own; to my husband, whose unquestioning faith and unequivocal support provide those timewom essentials for success, roots and wings; and to my daughters, who like their grandmother are walking right into the rest of their lives: the ones they will build themselves. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS More than anything, this is a study of stories told and untold, and for that I most gratefully acknowledge the ten women who so readily accepted me into their offices, homes and lives to tell me about their lives during the 19503. Although their lives were very different, each told her story with deep pride and satisfaction. I admire each of them greatly, and am indebted to them for their trust and time. I also acknowledge the guidance of my adviser and dissertation director, Dr. Gretchen Barbatsis, whose encouragement and enduring belief in the value of my work were invaluable; my guidance committee, who in addition to Dr. Barbatsis included Dr. David Cooper, Dr. Maureen Flanagan, and Dr. Joyce Ladenson; and the colleagues with whom] discussed my ideas and findings as they coalesced into this project, each of whom had an interesting story of her own to tell. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I THE COLD WAR CONTEXT ...................................................................................... 21 Always Overhead: Communism and War Science, Technology, and the Bomb The Family: Within Itself, Within the Social Context CHAPTER II WOMEN’S LIVES ....................................................................................................... 45 Symbolic Contributors: Family, Society, Economy Symbol versus Statistics What the Media Said Extremes as the Norm? CHAPTER III WHOSE ‘LIFE’ WAS IT? ............................................................................................. 75 Women’s Work, in News and Features Women’s Work, in Paid Advertising CHAPTER IV ASSESSING THE GAP .............................................................................................. 117 A Feminist Framework The Media Studies Approach A Cultural Studies Assessment Merging the Traffic CHAPTER V VOICES HEARD: THE INVISIBLE REVOLUTION ................................................. 155 Jane’s Story Bea’s Story Margaret’s Story Eva’s Story Lucile’s Story Hortense’s Story Kay’s Story Mary’s Story Anita’s Story Donna’s Story vii EPILOGUE: MY MOTHER’S STORY ...................................................................... 231 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 244 viii INTRODUCTION THE REST OF THEIR LIVES In 1951 she was twenty years old, two years out of high school, and suddenly out of a job. The doctor for whom she worked—a highly respected family man whose practice was housed in a busy town seven miles down US. Route 2—had taken a liking to her and proposed that their relationship move beyond the professional level. He’d buy her a car, he promised, and a fur coat. His wife wouldn’t mind, he assured her. She’d have everything She wanted and more than most girls from her small mining town in the rocky hills of Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula. Horrified, she balked; determined, he pushed. Finally, she took the only recourse she knew: she quit, walked out, and stepped into an unfair world full of promise and confusion, opportunity and roadblocks, a world that turned out to be nothing like she had imagined and yet everything she could dream. Without knowing it, she was walking right into the rest of her life: the one she would build herself. My mother—the young woman who walked out of that office as the United States entered the second half of the twentieth century—is seventy-one years old this year and talks matter-of-fiactly now about the things she has done. She is a teacher, a mentor, a mother, a spouse; a homeowner, a fun-lover, a traveler, a worker. The Cold War years of the 19503, alternately defined as a time of unprecedented prosperity and promise for families and a time of domestic containment for the women within them, for her were a decade of challenges and work, of taking chances, of sudden adventure, of finding her way. They were not the 19503 I knew anything about. What I knew was what I saw on film and in the news and on television: someone else’s decade. Why didn’t I know any differently? Why have I been so surprised, in recent years, at the things my mother has told me about that decade in her life? Sometimes she’ll say, “When I think about it now, I can’t believe I did that.” Why is she just as surprised as I? To a large degree, it’s because the decade was constructed for us. It was COHStTucted for her, as she lived it, by news-makers through the media, by profit-makers through advertisements, by the entertainment industry through film and song. It was constructed for me, since then, in part by the nation’s need to hang on and harken back to a time tint seemed less complicated and more certain—and, to an extent, by those same media-makers and their various mediated realities. It’s a symbiotic relationship, today’s theorists would say; the media-makers are not passive transmitters of the message, nor are the media users passive recipients of it. As communications theorist James Carey says: we construct our realities, and then we take up residence within them.1 The nagging questions, though, related to the construction of Cold War lives during that transitional time in American history are symbiotically connected as well: What was the construction, and why was it so? What did the media show of women’s lives; what did the populace see? Why did the media construct that particular reality, and why did the nation take up residence within it? A qualitative study of the way in which women’s lives were depicted in the nation’s largest mass-circulation, general-audience magazine of the day—Life, with a circulation of more than 6.5 million and an audience that spanned gender and ages-— places the question within a cultural context and provides important insight on the decade of the 19503 in America. That decade, it can be argued, was as volatile and conflict- ridden as those that preceded and followed it, if only anyone had noticed. The number, variety, and form of the depictions of women are important; they indicate a recognition of the fact that women did play a variety of roles in society, although their work roles typically were depicted as less important and often were named in a way that was, at best, disparaging of the actual value of their work. In noting the trend in coverage over the course of the decade and in comparing the editorial content to the advertising content, it is particularly telling to compare not only the numbers, but also the types of coverage given to women as wage earners, and to note how that may be indicative that the magazine, despite its presumed role as an objective reporter of the news, was actually portraying and confirming a particular and changing view of the world. All three aspects of the study are important in enhancing the understanding of women’s lives: The decade of the 19503, because it was such an unusual time in the nation’s history (Andrew Cherlin, in fact, calls the decade the most unusual one, in terms of family life, of the centuryz) and yet has since been held up as the norm; women’s lives, because it was their private-sphere roles as mothers, homemakers, and spouses that has flamed the nation’s memories of the decade; and the media, which in a fi'ee society both reflect and construct reality. The addition of the testimony of a select group of women who played a variety of roles during that decade should provide a better understanding of women’s lives at the height of the Cold War in the 19503 and can raise questions for further examination. Those family-centered roles that now flame fond memories were at the time the stufl‘ of economic, 30th and political policy, and were the rallying point of society. “. .. [T]he family is the chief conservator of our cultural and spiritual heritage—and so has a large share of responsibility,” said Anne G. Pannell, president of Sweet Briar College, in a speech at the Second Annual Public Afl‘airs Forum in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1951. “It traditionally sets the tone of our common life and influences standards of conduct more than all other factors. It is the traditional role of women to keep the home and conserve the best elements of our heritage—to be in John Mason Brown’s comparison ‘The Typhoid Mary3’——the Carriers and Transmitters of culture, civilization and religion, and not the exponents of today’s three C3—Cocktails, Canasta and Cynicism.” Women, she notes, are “the hope of the future—the logical, practical sex, aesthetically responsible, wary, discreet, who need to extend their practicality to the consideration of world problems and the place of strong families in building a secure nation and world.”3 Even while advocating for advanced education of women, Pannell placed women squarely in the center of the family and focused on the important role of child-rearing, which she called an intellectual occupation in itself; “It calls, and calls loudly—and often in vain—for carefirlly trained mental, as well as great moral powers,” she said, and who could argue with that? This was a child-centered society. Stephanie Coontz, among others, noted that marriage was a bond universally praised, the family was considered the bulwark institution of the nation, and that the baby boom was a characteristic so integral to the culture that it spanned all classes and ethnic groups. Far fiom being an American ideal of the past, she notes, the idyllic family of the 19503 was a new invention—a kind of experiment, it can be shown, that bears further study in an eflon to determine just how “right” it was for the men, women and children who lived within it.4 Yet as a part of that economic boom and stable economy, women increasingly found themselves juggling a variety of roles, just as did men: spouse, parent, sibling, son or daughter, and employee. The latter, in particular, has been a source of controversy and conflict for US. women and the culture in which they live ever since the Cold War ideal was constructed. For that reason, a focus in particular on the way Lifi: portrayed women in their roles at work—work for pay. that is, as opposed to the unpaid work that they do taking care of homes and families—allows an examination from a feminist theoretical standpoint, raising questions of gender construction in society. It allows an examination of the mores and values of the time, and raises intriguing questions about why some roles were visible, and others invisible, at this time in the nation’s history. That, then, allows a better understanding of the familial and cultural demands of the decade, firrther enhancing the understanding of women’s lives during the 19503. As noted earlier, Life, one of the most well read and influential publications of its day, most likely was both reflecting a reality of American life at the time and constructing it, while providing a kind of rallying point for a culture searching for a sense of order and security. 13 also is likely that, in this decade of transition for American culture and social order, women were at the center of an invisible revolution that would finally catch the attention of the rmdia and the nation in the 19603. Women’s proscribed lives, so often and so publicly held up as affirmation of the nation’s greatness, were clmnging rapidly despite the nation’s dogged determination not to notice. As Wini Breines noted in arguing that the conservative messages of the 19503 were part of an effort by government and industry to ensure that women stayed home, “It seems likely that the ideological message touting domesticity was as shrill as it was because for the first time masses of women had real options.”5 Indeed, America’s Cold War era provides a fascinating canvas for cultural, feminist, and media-related studies. Gaile McGregor remarked that cultural representations of the decade are windows to the enormous social transformations that swept the nation from the 19403 through the 19603.6 Culturally, the 19503 were a time in which the nation, collectively and individually, sought stability after years of war, economic depression, and scientific and technological advances that were both remarkable and unsettling. The form, order, and tone of that search for order were set by the post World War II and Cold War concerns of Communist expansion. It preceded the highly visible, highly volatile decade of the 19603; until recently, it was considered something of a dormant decade until historians began examining it through the eyes and experiences of women, of blacks, and of the others whose lives were all but invisible during that time period. From a feminist and cultural perspective, this was a decade in which “domestic containment” meant not only the circling of the nation’s collective wagons against Communism, but the containment of women in the private sphere as both fashionable and desirable. Homes in the post-War, Cold War years, meant safety and stability; women, for the most part, made the home within a patriarchal and capitalist structure in which that was deemed the norm. There was an American image that needed to be maintained: among Americans themselves, whose lives had been unsettled for decades by economic crisis within their nation and military crises worldwide, and, more importantly, to critics across the ocean who believed capitalism to be the work of the devil. America’s white middle-class housewives became a political symbol for all that was right with American capitalism, particularly as contrasted with the hard-laboring Soviet women. Vice president Richard Nixon even played the appliance-filled home of the American housewife as his trump card in a meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a discussion that will forever be known as the Kitchen Debate, declaring that any advantage the Soviets claimed on the nuclear front was clearly less important than the United States advantage on the dishwasher front. “What we want,” he said, “is to make better the lives of our housewives.” The vision of two of the world’s most powerful men arguing about which country’s women had the best kitchen appliances speaks volumes to the nation’s devotion to domesticity in the 19503.7 So immersed in public policy and culture was the role of women in the family that their inmge became a key component in the communication strategy of the National Securities Resources Board. The board’s widely distributed illustration of “The National Civil Defense Pattern” shows a widening ring of concentric circles of protection. At the outer limit is the federal government; in the center, “The Individual,” a man wearing a business suit, adjacent to “the family,” made up of two women—one grandmotherly in dress, the other motherly—and two children, both of whom are clinging to the younger woman. That the man is step away from the women and children, bearing the “individual” label, indicates clearly his carefully defined presence in a different sphere, and is an important indication of the social, political, and economic mindset that accompanied the Cold War. If indeed there was an invisible revolution in progress during the 19503, it may be best represented by a cultural paradox: the measurable influx of women into the workplace, contrasted with the persistent insistence that, as Nixon declared to the world, women were happily homebound. Historian William Chafe even asserted that the entrance of women into the workplace was a defining characteristic of the 19503. He and others have discounted the notion that World War II was the only reason for the growth in the number of women in the workforce in the 19403. Claudia Goldin, in American Economic Review, cited a study that confirms that wartime work did not by itself cause the boom in women’s employment, which ballooned from five percent in 1890 to sixty percent by 1990. The war more likely caused a brief acceleration in what was already an established long-term trend: the entrance of women into the wage-labor force.8 Indeed, among the most notable changes in the US. labor force between 1940 and 1975 was the increase in the number of married women working for pay. By 1960, almost one-third of married women were employed outside the home, a significant increase from just fourteen percent in 1940. A total of 34.8 percent of all women were employed by 1960.9 In part, that increase was due to new jobs created by a booming economy, which increased the demand for workers in typically female jobs—clerical and service sector positions—at the same time that fewer young, single, or childless women were available to fill them.10 This practical economic need was in direct contrast to the visible ideal of women staying at home. That women were funneled into relatively low- paying, low-profile jobs rmy have soothed the Cold War angst over the conflicting roles, since their wage work could then be Shrugged off as less important than their roles in the home. But women’s work in nontraditional fields, such as police work, was growing as well. Despite this movement, the image of the homebound nuclear family remained strong in entertainment, advertising, and news media. It seems likely now that the idealized 19503 suburban family was an integral part of the Cold War political structure. Kristina Zarlengo, in her 1999 examination of public information campaigns during the atomic age, noted that metaphorically, family, city, and nation were parallel structures. “National structure was simply a magnification of family structure, and a community’s structure a miniature of the nation’s. Their shared characteristics were said to be safety, earned with technical strength and defensive capability; sovereignty, based on individuality and inventiveness amidst fierce competition; fortification in the name of fi-eedom; and domestic security. The various structural levels of American life during the atomic age were portrayed as similar pieces that successively contained and filled one another, like a set ofnesting dolls.”” Elaine Tyler May is among the historians who have coxmected political and Emily values in the Cold War era, raising questions about wtacther the idealized Emily life of the time was an image used to further the patriarchal capitalist hegemony—and thus, of course, to ward off Communism. It’s not that the image was forced on Americans; they needed it, May argued, to feel secure in the shadow of the atomic bomb that cast America out of World War II and into the Cold War. How else could Americans feel liberated fi'omthe past and secure inthe future atthe same tithe? The 19503 were a time of transition, too, for media in the United States. While Ill'fi‘mrsreels still were broadcast in theaters as one means of telling the story of American lives, television news grew out of its infancy during this decade and began to be a factor in tlle daily lives of the nation’s citizens. Magazines, as they had throughout the century, continued to be a particularly influential means of communication. Nancy Walker noted that magazines, today just a small subset ofthe print, broadcast, and Internet-based media we receive, were a much more important source of information in a time when they had only radio and the telephone with which to compete. During the 1950s, she said, tr'z‘gazines helped both Shape and reflect American values and aspirations.‘2 As it does at any point in American history, the media played a central role in flaming 19503 life. Ellis Hawley, in analyzing America’s efforts to establish an ordered society early in the 20th century, said that mass media had grown and become more wide 1y disseminated, and were firmly established as gatherers and dispensers of factual i11123r1nition.l3 In general, noted communications theorist Denis McQuail, news media are of critical importance in all modern societies. They are, of course, a source of informtion for the society, but they also are potentially a means of influence, control and innovation; an arena in which local, national, and international affairs are played out; a some of widely held images of social reality. In a fiee society, particularly, news media provide a benchmark for what is normal. In short, as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil point out, while the press may not tell people what to think, it certainly offers people an agenda of what to think about.14 Both editorial content and advertising play a role in shaping that agenda. Media analyst R.F. Bogardus observed that mass circulation magazines have been a major force in the shaping of modern consumer culture, particularly in their advertising content; “Magazine ads were (and still are) scenes, each separately presented in time and space. If they were to be successful, readers had to pull them together in their own minds as unified narratives. The modern magazine format, especially in the advertising pages, l"ecll-lired readers to complete the pictures presented, and they completed the pictures based partly on suggestions given them and partly on the complicated needs and desires that: they brought to their readings.”'5 Marilyn Hegarty, who studied the role that print media played in encouraging women to support the US. war effort during World War H, remarked tint magazines were important both as entertainment and for information for busar Vvartime women; they functioned as “sites of multivocal discourses that comp lement, contradict, converge, and interact in many ways and that produce patterns which resonate with the reader’s conscious and unconscious conceptions of male and 10 fenaale ‘nature.”’"S And Gertrude Joch Robinson, in studying how women’s work is depicted in magazine fiction, notes that the media help define the appropriateness of certain jobs for women—that media actively create aspects of reality as part of the construction process in which people interpret it. Media “select, structure, and evaluate what is considered important and good in the public discussion agenda. All media help in the public definition and legitirnization of life and work in a variety of ways.”17 The study of the media raises not only the question of the what, but also of the who - Who is chronicling the history? Writing the news story? Framing the photograph? Applying paint to the canvas? Who is doing the looking, and who is being looked at? Numerous feminist theorists have argued that the act of remembering—of chronicling, in fillet—is at the core of the formulation of critical theoretical frameworks. One cannot look at history without first debating who is doing the “seeing,” and for whom, for that surely will affect what is seen, sorted and recorded. This is not simply a postmodern notion of hiStor-y as being constructed, or of media as being constructors; it is an argument that both the construction and the constructor are important Feminist, mdia, and cultural theories can effectively mesh in the examination lick- Media theorists, James Carey has noted, classify communication in two general Ways- The transmission view, common in industrial cultures, defines communication in terl'ns of the movement of information fi'om one person or place to another. It’s the tral'ls'tnission of signals or messages over distance for the purpose of control, and those mesSages must be distributed—via book, magazine, newspaper, radio, or another [newly—t0 serve their purpose. The ritual view, on the other hand, considers ammunication a sort of ceremony that draws people together around a certain viewpoint. ll Commanication is less a means of transmitting information than it is the construction and maintenance of an ordered culture than can “serve as a control and container for human action?“ Communication of news, then, becomes “a form of culture invented by a particular class at a particular point of history.” News is, under the ritual theory, “not infornrlation but drama. It does not describe the world but portrays an arena of dramatic forces and action; it exists solely in historical time; and it invites our participation on the basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social roles within it.”19 If news editorial content is a drama of forces and action, advertising plays an additional role in affecting and reflecting the culture of the times. Communication SCholars Kenneth Allan and Scott Coltrane have shown how advertising, particularly t‘ifiltevision commercials, provides insight into the meaning of gender in popular culture. Like programming content, it provides insight into the shifting nature of gender relationships. “Commercials present condensed typifications of gender relations, with men typically shown as active and dominant, and women shown as passive and dependent,” they noted. Such imagery “molds cultural ideals of appropriate behaviors for men and women. Being exposed to consistent and repeated stereotypical gender images shapes cognitive structures, or gender schemes, and subsequently influences people’s per‘ceptions of themselves and of others.”20 Numerous studies have assessed the impact of adVeil‘tising in women’s magazines on women’s perceptions of themselves and of their op133<>rtunities and priorities. A comparison of the advertising in the magazine to the edit~01'ial content can further confirm how the norm of women’s lives—or the ideal—was constructed for women during that decade. 12 Pl hi5- i. ii saith liar} Hi hr i152 distill the his. . but: i in“: lighting Vomit 011'! pub In in 1 than] Feminist theory allows the analysis to take place within a context of power—who has it, who wants to keep it, and who wants to gain it. It also allows gender to be viewed as a cultural construction, as opposed to being seen simply as the natural order of things. Mary Hawkesworth observed, “When culture takes up the task of molding human nature, then, its aim is to enhance its own construction of what is naturally given, to mark sex difl‘erentiations through language, characters, and roles.”2' In other words, cultures are in the business of surviving; to survive, they form power structures. Those structures are usually based on gender relationships, most specifically on who does the childbearing. Feminist scholar Susan Cahn and others have argued that social and political structures, beginning after World War I and extending through the Cold War era, conspired to keep Women in their proper place—which meant, in her study, out of the athletic realm and other public arenas and safely ensconced in the home.22 In assessing the evolution of feminist theory, Jackie Stacey traced the connection from the early 19803 focus on women’s oppression and social inequality to the post- mOdel'n, post-structuralist examination of the meaning of the category of “woman.” Her case study on theories of the body focused on how women’s bodies are used, portrayed, Structmed, or depicted, and in that sense, the connection of the ways women’s bodies are conStl'ucted by society is particularly applicable to assessing how women’s lives are cOHStl'ucted by the media. She wrote of the “return to matters bodily” in current feminist theory as perhaps the continued presence of discourses of Nature about social inequalities, noting, “No nutter how often feminists have argued that the categories of gfinder, ‘race,’ class and sexuality are socially and culturally constructed, and not biologically determined, the appeal to Nature continues to flame many public debates. In 13 popular culture and media representations, for example, ideas about Nature are constantly invoked.”23 Feminist theory also has challenged the bases for conventional theories and forced examination of the roots that guided them. One visible impact is the gradual acceptance, at least in some schools of thought, that one’s personal experience can be an asset, not a liability, to a research framework. In doing so, it allows the examination of the consequences of definition by gender and offers a system of ideas that then can be applied to study of the causes of women’s oppression, and possible solutions to it.24 It also allows the inclusion of first-person testimony to be a viable addition such a study. In applying a feminist framework to an analysis, under the ritual view, of the depiction of wage-earning women across the 19503 in Life magazine, the magazine can be seen as among the forms of communication—along with art, speeches, and others— that create a symbolic order designed to confirm, not only to inform; not to change minds, Carey would say, but to represent the underlying order of society at the time. Readers were not simply gaining information; they were getting a certain view of the contending forces in the world. In the act of reading, the readers then became players. In reading about the ongoing Red Menace, for example, they could support Communism or, Inore likely, rally around the benefits of capitalism; a story about the work of the great seielllists of the age could elicit pride and confidence, or fear and dismay. The magazine OECTOd, as Carey would say, a presentation of what the world was—an overall form, “dc-r, and tone about life and culture. If that is true, we might expect the media to uphold the perfect image of Emily life\and for Americans to accept that. Even the media, which in a free society would be 14 expected to tell an accurate and balanced story of the happenings of the day, might serve not as a transmitter of a picture of truth, but, as Carey would say, a ritual point around which people would gather. This is consistent with historian Richard Hoflstadter’s long- he 1d, often-analyzed opinion that societies that are in good working order, such as the post—war U.S. capitalist society, have a kind of “mute organic consistency?” In other words, they are not particularly welcoming of ideas that don’t support the status quo, and tllose that go against the mainstream often become lost within it. May is among the recent scholars who have cast the 19503 in a different light &0 m the Happy Days of television fame, noting that the decade may not have been all, to all people, that it was portrayed to be—that it was the happiest of times only for those in positions of high political or economic standing, who of course built their power and fortune on the images. The nuclear family, far from being a safe haven, often was instead a kind of societal bunker against the ills of the rest of the world; it was “isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected against impending doom by the wonders of Inodern technology.”26 Susan Lynn referred to women’s domesticity during the decade not as reality, or even as an ideal, but as a discourse, and a conservative one at that. Studies of women’s domestic lives during that era lmve been flawed, she said, by their asSIImmion of, rather than demonstration of, the domestic ideal, and by the notion that when women focused on home life, they did so to the exclusion of all other interests and actiVities. In fact, she said, the messages and images of women’s mass movement toward honlebountl domesticity represented only the “conservative edge of public discourse” at the time.27 15 m: for a: Leger win an Carolyn Kitch, in discussing feminist scholarship, outlined four categories of researCh on the representation of women in media: the stereotypes approach, the search for alternative images, the examination of imagery as ideology, and the reading of images as polysemic texts. The third, and perhaps the one that most closely reflects the fi-amework most appropriate for this study, focuses on the idea of women as symbolic of larger ideas and idea systems; it assumes that women are part of a larger American story, a. cultural mythology that has more to do with national values and identity than it does with the literal description of women. It also assumes that the roles of women are intentiomlly constructed by societal leaders to perpetuate the political, economic, and social order of the United States; and/or that they constitute a patterned form of patriarchy, a symbolic system that reinforces sexist ideology. Although Kitch notes a Shifi now to the fourth type of research, she continues to see value in works that show that representational patterns are linked to larger societal forces, and that class and economic forces are important. She notes that ideological critiques are especially popular in Studying war years.28 It is important, however, even within such a framework, to take into account the recipient’s willingness to accept the symbols, and the reasons behind this. That is the in3ll>ortance of Carey’s and of May’s frameworks, which must be tightly tied in analyng the rcpresentations of women and what those indicate of the culture of the time. As Kitch noted, historians now must assess the meaning of imagery itself, taking into account that “B texts contain multiple meanings depending on who is reading them and on historically sDecific discourses that increase the likelihood of multiple readings. In other words, 16 audiences can decide the meaning of imagery “either by recognizing and responding to atypical imagery or through an even more active and personal reading of media.”29 Culturally, it’s clear that the American home wasn’t the only institution that was omwardly peaceful, but inwardly unsettled. Historian Alan Brinkley, among others, observed that politically, the United States as a whole struggled with a rising conservatism and disagreement on whether the New Deal had worked or had simply pointed up to the liberals what the state could and could not accomplish 3° A post-war fear of totalitarianism and accompanying wariness of centralized governmental power left the nation confused on some issues, resolute on others. Most prominently, the nation was resolute in its condemnation of Communism. It also still feared that the splitting of the atom had foisted onto the world a future that would be bleak indeed. Paul Boyer recalled his own memories of ominous news reports of the nuclear threat, and documented the TCSistance of the public to messages of the potential benefits of nuclear energy. Once the bomb was dropped, he noted, a shaken American public “grasped at straws, searched for hopeful signs, and tried to arrange scary new facts into familiar patterns.” 3' The dangers of the bomb and of Communism became inextricably tied. So, too, did the dangers of Communism permeate the everyday lives of women. “You always had tlmt in the back of your mind; Russia. Korea,” said one of the women in3tel'VtIiewed for this study. “You had fiiends over there. We’d sit and watch the TV and women Said another whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Croatia, “when you heard the term Communist, well, my parents knew what Communism was all about. My parents told me, ‘They can’t be trusted.”’33 Blanche Wiesen Cook, in remarks at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Media Analysis at Harvard in 1988, said the 17 fear of Communism has had an indelible affect on American culture. “[A]nti communism has narrowed the American mind and has been responsible for the incredibly shrinking American heart,” she said. “It has polluted our discourse; destroyed our national credibility; vitiated our democracy.” Some of the greatest women of the twentieth century, she said, were denounced as communists and assailed as being dangerous and 1111-- American.34 This, then, provided the fi'amework for the reality that, as Carey says, Americans constructed and took up residence within: Fear of communism and fallout, literal and figural, from the atomic bomb; a belief that the image of a nation gathered within the honle would fight off threats outside of it; a time of turmoil and promise and, it will be Shown, invisible revolution. Yet what of the woman interviewed for this study, who, dllring the 1950s, was embarking on a career at Detroit Edison that would eventually see her rise to vice president of that organization? “If you look at the times . . . supposedly eVel'yone wanted to have this nice idyllic family life, just like the television show; Donna Reed, you know,” she said. “I was talking to a friend of mine, my vintage, the other day, and we both said we never had that desire. I never saw that as a wonderfill thing.”35 Or consider the daughter of immigrants noted above, who during the 19SOS—ostensibly a “file when she’d have been happily homebound—was rising through the ranks ofthe Navy on her way, by time of her retirement in the 1960s, to a position as commander, s°°°nd only to an admiral in rank. “1 was determined,” she said, “I was going to do an3"t11ing I wanted to do. If in my own mind I wanted to do it, I knew I could go do it. The woman was out of the picture. I knew that. But it didn’t bother me. I always felt, ‘This is 18 Arnerica. My parents came here so that they could escape that repression.’ I thought, ‘ I ’ m in America. I can do what I want.”’36 Indeed. Like so many other women, she seized the day and walked right into the rest of her life: The one she built herself. ' James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, l 992), 30. Specifically, Carey says, “We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up raidmce in the world we have produced.” He adds: “Alas, there is magic in our self deceptions. We not or) 1y produce reality but we must likewise maintain what we have produced, for there are always new get) erations coming along for whom our productions are incipiently problematic and for whom reality must be regenerated and made authoritative.” 2 Andrew Cherlin, ed., The Changing American Family and Public Policy (The Urban Institute Francs: Washington, DC, 1988), 4. 3 Anne G. Pannell, “A Nation’s Strength Begins in the Home: Parents Are the Real Molders of Character,” in Vital Speeches of the Day 18, no. 5 (1951): 145. ‘ Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New Yak: Basic Books, 1992), 24-26. Coorltz argues that the benefits of such pro-family cultural standards were borne out in the economic advances of individual families and the nation at large; the family became both a beneficiary of and a symbol of economic prosperity. People supported school tax levies, the addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the notion that the family was their source of t‘appiness and success. 5 Wini Breines, “Domineering Mothers in the 19503: Image and Reality,” Women ’s Studies International Forum 8 (I985): 601. 6 Gaile McGregor, “Domestic Blitz: A Revisionist History of the Fifties,” American Studies 34, no- 1 (1993): 5. 7 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: BasicBooks, 1988). In her book, May notes that although institutionalized racism and poverty kept most black Ama'ican families on the fringes of the middle class, their demographic trends roughly paralleled gose of white Americans during the 19505. In general, she notes, American families of all ethnic _ Ckgounds experienced high fertility rates and rising divorce rates. Most of the data she accesses, Incl uding the Kelly Longitudinal Study, were based on surveys of white families. ’ Claudia Golden, “The Role of World War II ill the Rise of Women’s Employment,” American Economic Review 81, no. 4 (1991): 741-756. _ 9 Figures m women’s employment are from the U.S. Bureau of Census l983b, p. 383, and are “ted in several sources. ’0 Suzanne Bianchi and Daphne Spain, American Women in Transition (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1986), 166. - ” Kristina Zarlengo, “Civilian Threat, the Suburban Citadel, and Atomic Age American Women,” S’gm: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 4 (1999): 931. '2 Nancy Walker, ed., Women ’3 Magazines, 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press (308mm Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998). ' P '3 Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American theople and Their Institutions, 1917-1933 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 118. Hawley recognizes not only e f‘apid growth of mass media, but also of specialized and trade media designed to serve an industrialized (“ety- Th " Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil, Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media (New York: e Century Fomdation Press, 1999), 3. file '5 RF. Bogardus, “The Reon'entation of Paradise: Modem Mass Media and Narratives of Desire in Making of American Consumer Culture,”American Literary Histon) 10, no. 3 (I998): 519. I9 r— '6 Marilyn Hegarty, “Patriotute or Prostitute? Sexual Discourses, Print Media, and American Women during World War II,” Journal of Women 's History 10, no. 20 (1998): 114. '7 Gertrude Joch Robinson, “The Media and Social Change: Thirty Years of Magazine Coverage of Women and Work (1950-1977),”Atlantis 8, no. 2 (1983): 94. '8 Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, 19. Carey compares the ritual nature of media to the ritual nature of, say, a church ceremony. He notes that, as with a religious ceremony, news may not change much, yet the viewing of it is still intrinsically satisfying, and that like religious eel-anemia? people engage in it as much fi'om habit as from a need to know. Ibid, 21. 2° Kenneth Allan and Scott Coltrane, “Gender Display in Television Commacials: A Comparative Study of Television Commercials in the 19503 and 1980s,” Sex Roles 35, nos. 3-4 (1996): 187-188. 2' Mary Hawkesworth, “Confounding Gender,” Signs 2, nos. 34 (1997): 659. 22 Susan Cahn, “From the ‘Muscle Moll’ to the ‘Butch’ Ballplayer: Mannishness, Lesbianism, and Hon: ophobia ill U.S. Women’s Sports,” Feminist Studies 19 (1993): 343-368. 23 Jackie Stacey, “Feminist Theory: Capital F., Capital T,” in Diane Richardson and Victoria Robinson, eds., Introducing Women ’s Studies: Feminist Theory and Practice (New York: New York U11 iversity Press, 1997), 59. ’ Sheila Ruth, Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women ’s Studies (Mountain View, Calif: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1998), xi. Ruth introduces the notion of the examination of the consequences of definition by gender. Alison Jagger and Paula Rothenberg discuss the building of feminist frameworks to M oppression in Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984). 25 Richard Hofstadter, introduction to The American Political Tradition (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), viii. 2‘ May, Homeward Bound, 1. 27 Susan Lyrm, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, I 945 to the 19608 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 11. 2’ Carolyn Kitch, “Changing Theoretical Perspectives on Women’s Media Images: The Em ergence of Patterns in a New Area of Historical Scholarship,” Journalism and Mass Communication Qua-cert)» 74, no. 3 (1997): 482. 29 . Ib1d., 485. 3° Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontent, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1 998), 87. 3' Paul Boyer, By the Bomb ’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 25. Boyer asserts that the cultural crisis that engulfed ericans after the bomb dropped was nearly immeasurable, and that the resulting anxiety drew the nation together to meet the challenges of the nuclear age. 3’ Dorms Maki, personal interview with author, 3 July 2001. 33 Mary Kovacevich, personal interview with author, 3 July 2001. 3" Blanche Weisen Cook, “The Impact of Anti-Communism in American Life,” Science & Society 53. no- 4 (1989-90): 407—475. Cook believed the fear of communism permeated American life to the point of (fen-imam, and that as it united some, it divided the nation; “To think systematically about the impact of ant1<>Ol'nmunism on American life is to think about every aspect of American life,” she said “Every mo'nerlt of our era has been touched, and diminished, by this crusade. While democrats, reformers, pl"(P.gl‘assives, visionaries, and revolutionaries fight over every issue, anticommunist crusaders are united by their purpose: to maintain power and control, absolutely and against all opposition.” 3’ Jane Kay Nugent, personal interview with author, 15 August 2001. 3‘ Kovacevich, personal utter-view, 3 July 2001. 20 .15 a have in l‘illi add 0i laid: it cem‘r hissed Iv lid of Th mtllded l with: hi M? ii CHAPTER I THE COLD WAR CONTEXT As the second halfof the twentieth century opened, President Harry S. Truman— as have presidents before him and since—used the pulpit provided by his State of the Union address to take a look back and a look ahead at the nation’s progress and potential. On January 5, 1950, he stood before a Joint Session of Congress, identified the first halfof t11e century as “the most turbulent and eventful period in recorded history,” and then addressed the filture: The swift pace of events promises to make the next fifty years decisive in the history of man on this planet. The scientific and industrial revolution which began two centuries ago has, in the last fifty years, caught up the peoples of the globe in a common destiny. Two world-shattering wars have proved that no corner of the earth can be isolated from the afi‘airs of mankind. The human race has reached a turning point. Man has opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers. If he uses them wisely, he can reach new heights of civilization. If he uses them foolishly, they may destroy him.l Three days earlier, Life—as have magazines before it and since—used the pulpit provided by its first issue of the new year to take a look back and a look ahead at the nation’s high points and hopes. On January 2, 1950, in introducing the second halfof the century, the magazine’s editors breezily summed up the American Cold War mindset: This week, instead of being concerned with the world around us, Life surveys an entire halfcentury. In deciding to devote an issue to the spectacle of the U.S. when it was emerging as the most powerful of all nations, some rather arbitrary decisions had to be made. . . .As the staggering amount of research that goes into a project of this kind got under way, it became obvious that there wasn’t room for everything. Thus the world as a whole has been ignored except where it directly affected the U.S."2 21 America, it seemed, was at the center of the universe. If its citizens must, as Trurnan said, immerse themselves in the affairs of mankind worldwide for the benefit of all, they must do so, as Life said, with awareness that preservation of the American way was the reason. The nation must focus on the world so that it could remain great within itself. It must, as the National Commander of the American Legion said later that year, ensme that America remained “always American.” “This is America,” he reminded an alldience at an Indiana Constitution Day celebration, “and we live the American way of life - - - Basically, it is a life of freedom Freedom established and fought for by Americans for tract-e than a century and a half. Freedom of religion freedom of speech . . . fieedom of our home, person and property. ”3 Nowhere in the world was there another culture like it, 313‘! Americans would do well to remember that their lives, and lifestyles, needed to be Protected. It was, it seems, a decade of both fun, in a family-oriented, economically booming, technologically exciting time, and of fear, with the specter of the bomb and of the dangers of Communism always at hand. It has been called a conservative decade, and yet it can be Shown that enormous advances were made in the 19505 for the rights of workers, of WOInen, and of minorities. It has been looked on as a time when the economy bummed along efficiently, and yet concerns about employment and irresponsible spending hovered juSt beneath the headlines of daily news reports. Held up often and wistfully as the ideal, prototype American decade, it actually is quite distinctive; in terms of family structure and defile graphic trends, there never has been one like it before or since, despite a cultural insistence that it defines the American way of life. Indeed, as Andrew Cherlin has said, the 22 1 95 Os family, which functioned neither as a production unit nor as a subsistence-level mcomc-pooling unit, seems an odd consequence of a capitalist culture in uncertain times.4 In that uncertain world, postwar America craved a world order in which it was on top, in charge, and if it chose to be, isolated. Alison Light noted that most historical accounts of the decade view it as a time of consensus, “of the reconstruction and consolidation of the social order, as it realigned itself beneath the values of a- powerful and growing middle class.”5 Yet Alan Brinkley has shown that the post-World War II years, fo 110ng a grim view of what totalitarianism could lead to in other parts of the world, shifled liberal thought fiom a focus on reform to a focus on individual rights and liberties, eSpecially as related to racial justice. Perhaps, as the war pointed up, society’s challenges were not tied exclusively to class or to the economy. Perlmps they were linked, too, to race, ethnicity, religion, or gender—all topics scarcely addressed in the Happy Days image Pm forth by the popular media. During the war, Brinkley notes, America had firmed up its View of itself as a righteous society protected from the rest of the world by its own Stl‘ength and virtue.6 Afterward, it seemed clear to the nation that its victory had proved it Ifight. America Ind succeeded because it was different. It was moral and prosperous. Its wOInen, unlike the Soviet women, didn’t need to work for wages; they were at home raiSing the next generation of Americans. Its men were strong, capable providers who had Saved the world while at war and would protect their families now in a time of uneasy IDS-taco.7 As noted earlier, it also can be argued that the idealized 19503 suburban family was an filtegral part of the Cold War political structure—an image used to ward ofi’ COlnmunism, a kind of societal bunker against the world. It was an image that fit only a 23 trailer instill lie of!" :‘l‘i‘IElEE {wait it". it: mills-i COHIJCI :‘ "'A l “LIKE? I 5011:: C0 fi-action of the population. Despite ongoing tensions between liberal economic policies and postwar conservative rumblings, the image of the United States remained, most visibly, that of the white middle class. Both the Great Depression and World War II had challenged traditional American notions of family life, particularly as it afiected women's roles, by welcoming women into service and wage-earning roles in unprecedented numbers. After the war, both the job market and educational opportunities expanded. Yet expectations for women’s options narrowed, and instead of turning outward to embrace their new opportunities, women found themselves turned inward toward proscribed middle-class roles of consumption and family management. Those roles came into direct conflict with those ofiered outside the home, but it was as if a wave of what May terms as Inaterialism, consumerism, and bureaucratic conformity l'had engulfed the nation—a wave, iro nically, that was directly in line with the sort of decadent New Deal liberalism that the return to family was supposed to combat. As Jonathan Rieder observed, in this time before liberals and Democrats crashed to earth in the turbulent 1960s, there was nothing that could must the middle class from a mood that was acquisitive and self-absorbed.“ Elaine Tyler May’s notion of domestic containment meant not only the circling of the nation’s collective wagons against Communism, but also the containment of women in the private sphere as both fashionable and desirable. In this sense, wormn and family were inextricably tied; a healthy, secure and distinctively American family meshed the two ideIltities so that one was not complete without the other. Such a fiamework of the world and the U.S. position in it would require that the U.S. lifestyle, particularly the lifestyle of its Women, be presented in stark contrast to the widely agreed upon United States view of Soviet Communism. 24 That was the visible America. Its housewives, in fact, were its most visible manifestation of superiority, as evidenced by the Nixon-Khrushchev exchange. The nation was not of one mind during this decade—that becomes clear particularly when women's vo ices are brought into the public debate. However, Truman's State of the Union speech 311d Life magazine’s context indicate that there were common issues faced by families (inning this height of the Cold War, and each can be briefly examined separately: concerns about Communism and the nagging, continual threat of war; the rapid development of science and technology, and with it the threat of the atomic bomb; the booming economy, and the worries about consumerism that accompanied it; and family and social changes tlzat defied the visible, nuclear family image. Those common concerns hovered over the economic, social, and cultural characteristics of the time. A [Ways Overhead: Communism and War In the autumn of 1950, the University of California Board of Regents issued a directive to its faculty: sign an oath saying that you are not a Communist. While many coInplied, some refused, arguing that such a dictatorial demand violated their rights to aCademic fi'eedom. Said the regents: sign or resign. One stepped down; twenty-seven others who refilsed were ultimately dismissed. Recapping the struggle, Life said, “At the University of California last week, a very sad fact was being proved. The fact was that in opposing ColIlrnunism, Americans sometimes create another evil."9 Make no mistake; the threat of Communism seemed very real to American families in the 19505. Concerns about its creeping spread were the reason the nation stepped into 25 Korea 9 l beam Elm mm; which innit It hit? We (031mm lick: _ . “5‘5qu 1] mic"‘Ci’flll Korea; when communist North Korean soldiers crossed the 38‘” parallel into South Korea, it became clear the nation could not let its guard down for even a day. The climate of fear that hung over the nation elicited a series of dramatic responses in the workplace, in political and social policy, and even in personal decisions that played out as publicity stunts. It contributed to the demise of the United Electrical Workers' Union, which shortly after World War H led a successful strike against General Electric and sparked a niobilization of women’s trade union activism, but unraveled afier it was attacked as being Communist, eventually to be replaced by a more conservative organization.lo It sparked the FCC investigation of performers and broadcast producers for alleged communist afliljations. And it prompted Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Mininson, at the request of a company that built back-yard bomb shelters, to spend their two-week honeymoon in an 8-foot by 1 4— foot underground fallout shelter (the gratefill builder, who gained enormous attention for the publicity stunt, then paid for a honeymoon to Mexico for the two).” l‘[T]he fighting in Korea is but one part of the tremendous struggle of our time—the struggle beth fi'eedom and Communist slavery,” President Truman told a conference on children and youth in Washington, DC, in December 1950.12 Said Life’s editors: “The mid-century American is called upon, first ofall, to resist the Communist threat to his WOrld, Which is to say, to rally his world to battle for the life and fi'eedom of all men. And this is to say, to make his world a place and his century a time of fi'eedom everywhere."'3 It was unsettling, this constant reminding that one’s way of life could be snuffed Out in moment. It was unnerving to feel that the nation was constantly looking over its SI“Mulder. Not everyone agreed the nation should be in Korea; the troops seemed inadequately trained and equipped, and in the backs oftheir minds Americans feared this 26 was leading to a third World War. The president and his general, Douglas MacArthur, disagreed so vehemently on some issues that Truman finally recalled him as commander, sparking further concern and a national debate over whether the general or his president was right. Americans distrusted the Communists, but some wondered also about the motives of their own government following the rampant rise in McCarthyisrn—and subsequent actions like the one the regents took again the University of California professors. David Anderson is among the scholars who argue that Truman oversold the thlreat of communism to the point that citizens were less unified than they were angry or frightened; the public disagreement between MacArthur and Truman “suggested a deep fissure in American opinion.”l4 While certainly affecting hundreds of thousands of Americans whose fi'iends and relatives were involved, the war in Korea was in fact looked upon by others as a sort of n-agging interruption of prosperity—a kind of forced look at the rest of the world that they v‘KNJlld rather not take, given the choice. Had the government not persisted in reminding the nation that this was not about Korea, but about Communism, not about someone else’s life, but about their own, one wonders whether the public would have acknowledged the Si‘illation at all. Far from rallying as a nation in support of the cause, Joseph Goulden said tlmr to Americans who wished to spend their time going to baseball games and their InOlrrey buying new cars, “the Korean War was an unwelcome interruption of postwar prOSperity. The five years from 1945—50, fiom V—J Day to the start of the Korean War, indeed were among the most pleasant in American history, a few economic and political b‘lll'rps notwithstanding....To read that hundreds of American soldiers died at such geographical locales as Heartbreak Ridge and No-Name Ridge does not excite public 27 it 395 McCain mallet the new among ll mm L thou}: {Week In? comm War A 56 Combat I‘O‘humg a MOD of m” ”an. with: support for a war.“5 While the war on one hand pointed up the need to be on the constant alert for the spread of Cormnunism, it also pointed up the conflicts within the nation, personified in the very visible one between Truman and MacArthur. By its end, it seemed, t11ere was even more confirsion about what was right and wrong for the nation in this previously black-and-white battle between good and evil.‘6 By the middle of the decade, Cold War tensions had relaxed somewhat following tile 1 953 death of Soviet Premier Josef Stalin and the 1954 censure of Sermtor Joe McCarthy for his inflammatory anti-Communist witch hunt. The U.S. economy was on an extended upswing, and new topics were finding their way into daily conversations and into time news media. There was school desegregation in Arkansas, the new rock—and—roll fad aniong the nation’s youth, and the development of the Salk vaccine against polio. Life Opened the year 1955 with a special edition devoted to the world’s food supply, acknowledging the nation’s abundance, the good work of the scientists who had helped formulate it, and the critical role the United States would play in feeding the world.'7 The Red Scare, though, was still prominent, even in such uplifling stories. Food, 311d control of it, the magazine noted, was the United States’ greatest weapon in the Cold War. A series of articles and editorials in the spring and summer of 1955 indicate the 00urbination of skepticism and hopefulness that characterized the public. In April, following a Chinese incursion onto the island of Matsu, Life’s editors said: “The President is 1fleeting Congressional leaders this week for a grave purpose. It is to discuss the question of whether—and in what circumstances—the U.S. may soon again be at war.” Rather than worry about throwing its weight into a situation in which it didn’t belong, they Said, the nation would be better served by cutting ofl‘ the threat; ‘It would even be better 28 to lose this. mom its 01' iron ill: [ht lied-m to lose those islands while fighting for them tlmn to lose the world while fighting the elephantine inhibitions of our own musclebound might.”18 In May, senior European reporter Emmet John Hughes followed the Russians’ acceptance of a treaty with Austria, 311d their stated willingness to meet with other chiefs of state, with a cautionary note; elmnges in Soviet tactics, he said, must be viewed skeptically. “The year 1955 may rule the lives of the unborn more stemly than any year in the memory of living man. This is neither theory nor exhortation; it is fact. Upon men and emotions and events now at work can turn the destiny of Europe, the very existence of the United States and the hope of fireedom anywhere."l9 In July, the magazine reminded its readers that while it was the responsibility of each American to contribute to the good of the nation, they must remember that “God’s is Still the only truth that can really make and keep men fi’ee.”20 It also published a story by f0 finer Marshall Plan administrator and auto executive Paul G. Hoflinarl, author of the 1 95 1 book Peace Can Be Won, in which he expressed his profound belief that peace was within the nation’s, and world’s, grasp. Now, he said, it was on our doorstep, thanks to lStailers “wiseenoughto seethat to winthepeacewe hadto wage it withasmuch bOldrress, daring, and imagination as we would apply to waging war.” He wrote, Everyone is aware,” “that the struggle between the free world and the Communist countries is entering a new phase, one which is already witnessing a relaxation of tensions and which may produce some more at next week’s Meeting at the Summit in Geneva. We should not expect too much fiom all this, as the President and others have warned, since the basic realities of the struggle endure. But it is highly important that the American people understand why this relaxation is taking place. The reason for it is the biggest news of our time: the fact that afier a decade of costly struggled we are finally winning the peace.2| 29 Stit’nl‘t. “1’3. Cm halting it dildo. Kill of 331 EmlhO“ their the me it $3th a Yet by the decade’s end, there was more to worry about. Fidel Castro was carrying the flag of Cormnunism in Cuba; Vice President Richard Nixon was telling Soviet Premier Mikhail Khrushchev that while both nations want peace, “both of us possess great strength and neither of us can or will tolerate being pushed around.” 22 Science, Technology, and the Bomb The dropping of the atomic bomb, ostensibly to end the war that was to end all wars, certainly gave visible evidence to the scientific advances that hurled the nation headlong into the second halfof the twentieth century. This would be a decade not only of the development of the Salk vaccine, but of birth control pills, color television, and the kind of satellite technology that allowed the nation’s President in 1958, Dwight Eisenhower, to broadcast a Christmas greeting to the world. It also was the decade in which the United States space program would become a darling of the public fancy; its Space monkeys, with names like Old Reliable, Able, and Baker, were figuratively e111131'aced by Americans ranging fi'om school children to grandmothers, and the original Seven astronauts were as recognizable in many circles as movie stars. The nation took pride in its scientific and technological accomplishments in part because it deemd them evidence of U.S. superiority over the Russians. Following Eiserlhower’s Christmas greeting, Life reported, in a thirteen-page feature on satellite teel'mology: “Though technical considerations prevented the voice being heard direct throughout the world, it was relayed by the United States and was even grumpily acknowledged by Russian newspapers."23 There is evidence, too, that the nation’s fasCination with technological advances was at least in part due to its belief that it would 30 mam mm 31m c Wen [Cimmur T 80qu trim, m TTCM Milka} dL‘ TEE Hallo“ help preserve the white, middle-class American dominance that was the nation’s hallmark. Reporter Robert Coughlan, in his report about the need for birth control in a world in which the population is multiplying at an unprecedented level, does not address the now ofien-cited U.S. baby boom at all. Of greatest concern was that the boom was at its highest in undeveloped countries, and that those nations might turn to Communists for help- “Forty years from now,” he wrote, “the world will be seventy percent Afi'o-Asian. Adding in some of the Latin countries, one finds that about three fourths of the world’s population will be living in today’s least developed areas. What kind of life can these new billions have? The living standard of the present generations is miserably low. . . .What is alInost certain to happen instead, unless the birth rate falls, is a lowering of standards until hulnan misery finally puts a brake on breeding—probably not, however, until democracy has been chucked overboard in favor of some form of dictatorship. The likely choice is Comm ”24 Yet if science might be the savior of democracy, the bomb it created might destroy it\and everyone else, if some sense was not brought to the rapid and multidirectional changes in technology. It was an odd and enervating juxtaposition, this linking of science, whiCh might save the world, to the atomic bomb, which might destroy it. Science should not, could not, advance in a vacuum; must not be practiced without the good of the nation in Ihind, lest its discoveries cause more harm than good. Max Ways, former senior editor of Time magazine, wrote about the confusion following Khrushchev’s much-heralded visit to the United Sates in 1959, noting that technology is a “common disintegrator" of po 1itical disorder in that it “gives people a Godlike confidence in what they can do through their national governments.” “We can act with firmness and look forward to achievement 3] only when we recognize our purpose—-when we see that what we are trying to do is build situat ions of order and freedom under morality and law.” Without order, science would not advance the nation. The result would be chaos, and disintegration of the nation’s l ,jEZS Good Times or Rampant Materialism? Linked to scientific and technological advancement was consumerism, still another aspect of American life that on the surface seemed a good thing, but that brought with it nagging concerns about whether the nation's people had their priorities straight. If the American ideal was the white middle class, and a key characteristic of that ideal was to have a home, a car (or even two), stylish clothes, and the proper gadgets, acquisition of those things clearly was a sign of achievement. The nation’s leaders believed that the more its citizens were able to buy, the happier they would be—and the more visible that happiness was, the more other mtions would see the superiority of capitalism over corIltnunism. In fact, that was a key component of the Kitchen Debates between Nixon and Khrushchev. May refers to it as “the new American work-to-consume ethic,“ and n(“fies that the opportunity to purchase a home became a key motivator for those in the wotking class who wanted to move up in the world.26 But whose middle class was it? Coontz and others note that the middle class, living in that $3,000- to $10,000-a-year income bracket and presented as the norm in forums ranging from international summits to television comedies, was not where all Americans to°k up residence. In 1958, for example, sixty percent of Americans over age sixty-five had incomes below $1,000. A quarter ofAmericans were poor in the middle ofthe 32 “pocket: harsh mm the saw an léfi's E 15m is. a slight. ht zone. 0 811%. realm ( Rik . 1 Th decade, a third of them by the decade’s end.27 The widely touted prosperity of the decade likely was based at least in part on a widening gap between workers in stable, secure jobs 311d those whose employment was less certain.28 The workforce included what Life called “pockets of poverty” that caused “poverty in the midst of plenty,” noting that finconsistencies in employment had lefl some five million U.S. workers out work and built into the American system a clear set of haves and have-hots.29 Those firmly ensconced within the middle class found it astonishingly difiicult to save any money. In a 1959 feature article that spanned twelve pages of the magazine, Life’s Ernest Havemann put a face on the problem when he featured a typical American—— that is, a working man—who with his wife spent as much as he made. At age twenty- eight, he was a technical writer earning $12,000 a year, placing him well into the comfort zone, Of course, he had three children, one car—he'd like to buy a second for his wife— and a house that they had outgrown. Once monthly expenses were covered, with a bit of fun included, there was precisely $29.23 lefi over—hardly enough to begin saving for that bigger home. “While many readers of this article who have to struggle along on far less than 3 1 2,000 may be tempted at this point to send the young St. Louisianan a long-playing re=Cord of Hearts and Flowers, his is in many ways a typical 1959 American family,” I‘Iawemann wrote. “Most of us are making considerably more money than we would have guessed five or ten years ago and far more than our grandfathers ever dreamed of making. 0111- pay checks say we are rich. The monthly bank statement and the stack of unpaid bills on the pantry shelf say we are stone broke. We have to ask ourselves a sad, bewildered c“lemon: “Where does the money go?”30 33 IO! {31 F‘. ' to iii In ht; —‘ ‘ n-m n “'43 Delhi “(med . Where, indeed? In answering the question, it became obvious that the must-haves for the middle class were yesterday’ 3 luxuries, and they cost money. True, the graduated imome tax didn’t help families like Havemann's “typical 1959 American family,“ but there was more to it than that. “At the same time there are hundreds of expensive and seductive new luxuries to which he [the executive] feels, as a successful man, at least moderately emitled.” Sure, the American penchant for buying on time as opposed to paying cash is part of the problem, but let’s face it, that was rapidly becoming the American way; “To get to the job nowadays, many men need a car. . . .many men who want to start a family have to buy a house. To help their wives with the housework they can no longer supply a maid and a cook, who can be paid by the week, but must instead supply an electric washer, a drier, a toaster, broiler, mixer, vacuum cleaner, refi'igerator and dishwasher, all adding up to a lot of money. ”3' Most interesting are Havemann’s conclusions, for after raising the