Elaine Tyler May, "Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb" (1989)

During World War II, many women who had never worked outside the home before joined the labor force when male laborers went off to war. This created the perception that social relations between men and women had changed sharply after World War II. In the late 1940s and 1950s, American society attempted to address these "social disruptions," while at the same time they attempted to address the deepening Cold War.

In "Explosive Issues: Sex, Women and the Bomb," Elaine Tyler May discusses the ways in which the Cold War policy of containment--developed to deal with what U.S. policy makers believed to be Soviet "expansionism"--influenced domestic affairs. May argues that Americans equated the atomic threat to American society with the perceived threat of female sexuality to the American family. Thus, while the State Department tried to contain the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, Americans at home moved to contain women within the domestic sphere.

Questions to Think About:

1) What was "containment"?

2) How did the idea of containment (developed as a foreign policy strategy) reflect domestic affairs during the Cold War?

3) Discuss the impact of the idea of containment on the following arenas of American life:

a) women's sexuality and their roles in the family;

b) treatment of domestic "Communists" and "Fellow Travelers," especially by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Joseph McCarthy;

c) views about why the U.S. had won World War II but "lost the peace" to the Soviet Union--including the "loss" of China, the Alger Hiss case and the "betrayal of Yalta" and the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Atomic spy case.

Further resources and readings:

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988)

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985)

Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (1989)

Thomas Hine, Populuxe: The Look and Life of America in the '50s and '60s, From Tailfins and TV Dinners to Barbie Dolls and Fallout Shelters (1987)

Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1989)

Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (1983)

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for HST 622 (Cold War America), at The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Summer Semester 2000. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Tuesday 13 June 2000.