The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America by Ann Maire Kordas

Author:Ann Maire Kordas [Kordas, Ann Maire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, North America
ISBN: 9781317321378
Google: sZRECgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T01:26:02+00:00

4 THE DATING GAME: GENDER ROLES

Given the importance attached to the inculcation of appropriate gender roles and the emphasis placed on the creation of an orderly and stable home and family in the years following World War II, it should come as no surprise that many American parents were virtually obsessed in the 1940s and 1950s with ensuring that their children entered into appropriate relationships with the opposite sex. This was especially true of the parents of girls. While boys could find other paths to manhood through working or entering into military service, post-war culture emphasized that the only acceptable option for girls was to marry and start a family – and to do so as soon as possible.

Not only were parents anxious for their daughters to find husbands, but the nation as a whole looked to marriage as the solution to many of Cold War America’s perceived problems. In the period following World War II, the United States suffered a ‘masculinity crisis’. American manhood, it was feared, was in jeopardy. During the war, while men were overseas, their wives and teenage children had become independent and self-supporting. Between 1940 and 1945, the number of women working outside the home rose by more than 50 per cent. Most of the new female workers were married. By the end of the war, nearly 25 per cent of married American women had jobs outside the home.1 Economic independence was coupled with a new sense of autonomy inside the home as well. While fathers were away, mothers made the major decisions regarding where the family should live, what it should spend money on and how children should be disciplined. Children, too, experienced a newfound sense of both freedom and responsibility when their fathers went away to war. With their fathers gone and mothers away at work, children took on new, adult tasks. Many cooked, cleaned and cared for younger siblings. Teenagers babysat for defence workers and took over jobs that others had left either to join the armed forces or to move into more highly-paid defence work. As mothers toiled long hours at their jobs, children of all ages spent time unsupervised, left to their own devices to do whatever they chose and, for those who had jobs, to spend their money how they wished.

When men returned from combat, they reclaimed the jobs that teens had taken and most factories fired the women who had worked for them during the war so that returning husbands and fathers could claim these jobs as well. While the majority of women returned to the home (most willingly), this did not diminish their sense of achievement and desire for autonomy. Men thus often returned home to very different families than the ones they had left. No longer were they the only source of authority within the home. Now wives and adolescent children stood ready to challenge many of their decisions. This, for many men, constituted a blow to their egos.

Furthermore, when men left the military and sought civilian jobs, they traded one style of life for a very different one.

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