In 1959, on the opening of the American Nationwide Exhibition in Moscow, in entrance of a mannequin American kitchen filled with home equipment, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev sparred over some great benefits of the 2 international locations’ financial techniques. Nixon pointed to the dishwasher on show: “In America, we like to make life easier for women.”
Unimpressed, Khrushchev retorted, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism.”
Nixon doubled down on his imaginative and prescient of the social function of girls: “What we want to do, is make life easier for our housewives.”
The apply of linking conventional gender roles to American values has continued, and it was seen within the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Vice President-elect JD Vance described the best American household as one wherein the lady’s main function is as a stay-at-home mom. He additionally mentioned Kamala Harris’ lack of organic kids made her unsuitable to carry a nationwide management function.
As a scholar of American society and tradition, I’ve discovered that this conflation of domesticity, patriotism and Americanness will be traced again to the Fifties. Throughout these early years of the Chilly Conflict, the normal nuclear household was perceived as essential to the nation’s safety. It additionally served as an instance the prevalence of the democratic capitalist mannequin.
Becoming a member of the battle towards communism
America’s leaders promoted the concept that the nation may very well be profitable in its struggle towards communism provided that ladies stayed within the residence, protected it from inside and raised the subsequent technology to be loyal to American beliefs.
Ladies had been central to Chilly Conflict-era worldwide debates in regards to the two competing political and financial techniques. On each side of the Iron Curtain, governments used references to ladies’s happiness as proof their respective fashions offered good lives for his or her inhabitants, despite the fact that actuality was typically totally different.
Official Soviet Union propaganda praised the political dedication and advantage of communist ladies, who might occupy any kind of place within the workforce, from bodily labor to management roles.
Within the U.S., pundits and politicians introduced American ladies as primarily homemakers who discovered objective in life by embracing their organic future. In a 1956 handle to the Nationwide Council of Catholic Ladies, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, maybe the nation’s most well-known anti-communist crusader on the time, declared: “There are no careers so important as those of homemaker and mother.”
Though American ladies had been politically energetic prior to now, their social and political actions had been subsumed beneath the anti-communist priorities of the Chilly Conflict. Teams of white middle- and upper-class housewives turned enthusiastic anti-commmunist crusaders. They hosted teas, wrote letters and petitions, and spoke at ladies’s golf equipment in regards to the risks of communists lurking of their communities.
These ladies’s dedication to domesticity concurrently engaged them politically and certain them to their function as homemakers.
World diplomacy
The picture of the comfortable American housewife was additionally central to American public diplomacy efforts. One of many longest-lived publications of the US Info Company was Amerika, a Russian-language journal showcasing on a regular basis life within the U.S. to Soviet readers.
From 1945 till 1994, Amerika’s tales depicted the US as a rustic that protected the sanctity of household life, and the place ladies lived considerable, comfy lives caring for his or her households, not like their Soviet counterparts.
Consumerism and domesticity had been interlinked in each U.S. public diplomacy efforts and within the media as manifestations of the best American lifestyle.
A 1948 cowl of Girls’ Dwelling Journal unfold an unflattering depiction of girls’s lives within the Soviet Union.
Girls’ Dwelling Journal, February 1948, by way of Wikimedia Commons
Creating American beliefs
American media pushed the identical message for readers at residence. Publications equivalent to Higher Houses and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, Vogue, Ladies’s Day and the Girls’ Dwelling Journal celebrated the thrill of consumption.
These magazines marketed client items, from home equipment to cosmetics, whereas educating their readers in regards to the risks communism posed to cherished American values and establishments, together with church buildings and the household.
Opinion articles, recommendation columns and letters from the wives of U.S. officers stationed in the united states contrasted the privileged lives of American homemakers with these of Soviet ladies who didn’t take pleasure in any lavish client items and needed to work similar to males as a result of their governments despatched them to work in factories, collective farms or the military.
People had been urged to view the house and the household as the final word haven of security within the Fifties. There was widespread nervousness about one other financial despair and quickly altering applied sciences, nuclear struggle with the united states and communist infiltration.
The best American life depicted by the media was a lifetime of white, middle-class, heterosexual domesticity. Returning veterans had discovered new jobs within the booming financial system, which validated their identification as suppliers. However the regimented company work setting discouraged performances of masculinity rooted in combativeness, energy or aggressiveness. The rugged frontiersmen of yesteryear had been now docile staff in grey flannel fits.
The standard household, with ladies and youngsters as subordinates, turned the legendary place the place old school American masculinity might nonetheless thrive.
A posh actuality
In actual fact, the realities of employment in Fifties America had been fairly complicated. Working-class ladies, white and Black, had at all times needed to work exterior the house. Throughout the Nice Despair, many middle-class American ladies needed to take jobs to help their households. Throughout World Conflict II, ladies did males’s work and had been praised for doing so.
But practically all the roles stuffed by ladies returned to males after the struggle. What was left had been the so-called pink-collar jobs, largely considered by society as non permanent occupations for ladies ready to get married.
In 1953 one-fourth of all married ladies had been within the labor drive. Between 1948 and 1958, the variety of working moms elevated by 50%. Of those, 7.5 million had kids beneath 18. These ladies labored in jobs along with being absolutely liable for working their properties, had been paid solely a fraction of males’s salaries, had very restricted youngster care choices, and loved no job safety. A report of the 1960 White Home Convention on Youngsters and Youth revealed that nonwhite feminine staff made lower than half the earnings of white feminine staff.
Total, People within the Fifties felt ambivalent about working ladies and the impression ladies’s work exterior the house might have had on households. But, many who might have dreamed of being housewives couldn’t afford to take action. Some sought employment not as a result of they had been unpatriotic however to bolster the household funds. Others merely had no selection.
The idealized picture of Fifties American ladies who discovered their achievement in life of their roles as moms and wives is a assemble that emerged out of the necessity to distinguish the American capitalist system from the Soviet communist one. Though it was a really perfect that almost all People on the time aspired to, it didn’t replicate the broad spectrum of lives and work preparations of American households on the time.