Marriage, family structure, and gender roles had been undergoing significant changes since the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning in the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans increasingly saw marriage as “companionate,” that is, based on romantic love and a lifetime of shared friendship. Companionate did not mean equal. In the mid-twentieth century, family life remained governed by notions of paternalism, in which men provided economic support and controlled the family’s financial resources, while women cared for children and occupied a secondary position in public life.

The resurgent postwar American middle class was preoccupied with the virtues of paternalism. Everyone from professional psychologists to television advertisers and every organization from schools to the popular press celebrated nuclear families. Children were prized, and women’s caregiving roles were valorized. This view of family life, and especially its emphasis on female “domesticity,” was bolstered by Cold War politics. Americans who deviated from prevailing gender and familial norms were not only viewed with scorn but were also sometimes thought to be subversive and politically dangerous. The word containment could apply to the home as easily as to foreign policy. The family had become politicized by the Cold War.

The model of domesticity so highly esteemed in postwar middle-class morality hid deeper, longer-term changes in the way marriage, gender roles, women’s work, and even sex were understood. To comprehend the postwar decades, we have to keep in mind both the value placed on domesticity and the tumultuous changes surging beneath its prescriptions.