Essay on "Homeward Bound and Coming of Age: Cold"

Essay 5 pages (1695 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Homeward Bound and Coming of Age: Cold War and the Lack of Fulfillment

Both of the authors Elaine Tyler May in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War and Coming of Age in Mississippi by Ann Moody see the institution of the family as something that was a mixture of limiting and liberating influences both for men and women during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, but much less so in the case of Moody's book for blacks. Some of the limitations were good and others might be considered to be bad. As the May book points out, the families that were established by marriages in the 1940s were especially stable. The family experience for Moody was also stable, but was not fulfilling for her and did not answer the basic questions that plagued her due to racial discrimination in her home state of Mississippi. While religion brought her some succor temporarily, it did not provide her with the permanent answers to the questions that haunted her due to the discrimination that she suffered in the apartheid environment of Mississippi where she grew up and matured. The results of the civil rights movement were bittersweet for Ann Moody. She was unable to return to her home town due to threats from the Ku Klux Klan. She is critical of almost everyone from historical figures to people who were contemporary with her in the civil rights movement. One can only surmise her great disillusionment when she did not realize the fulfillment of her dreams for equality that she had worked so hard for.

In the May book, the author details a dichotomy that was dictated by World War II. There was a disruption of the nuclear family during the war and the necessity of the woman working outside the home to make ends meet while the breadwinner was off fighting. For this reason, the postwar period was a conservative reaction against this disruption of the family dynamic. For May, in many ways, "domestic containment"

were the outgrowth of the fears and aspirations that were unleashed after the war. In the 1940s-1960s, the arena for therapeutic solutions to social problems was in the area of the family. Home was the environment where people could feel good about themselves. By emphasizing this, the potential for political activism was undermined and anticommunism was reinforced into the cold war anti-Soviet consensus (May, 1990, p. 14).

May certainly has some interesting support for her claims. This author's background research has born out that it is more that just a lot of circular reasoning. As she correctly points out, this can be seen in the Nixon-Khrushchev "Kitchen Debate" of 1959. This was the ultimate example of the influence of U.S. Cold War material culture. It was a move of propaganda genius for the Eisenhower administration to send the Nixons to Moscow to represent domestic containment. When the American government needed the typical American family, it needed to go no further than the Nixons. Patricia Nixon was the typical domestic homemaker that U.S. propagandists needed to model their work figure on. She appeared by Nixon's side many a time during his political career, especially during the 1950s. Always an important backdrop for Richard Nixon, she certainly looked like every other "normal" American housewife. Pat the typical homemaker accompanied her husband to the U.S.S.R. In July 1959. Between the launch of Sputnik in October of 1957 and Francis Gary Powers U-2 shoot down on May 1, 1960, the Kitchen Debate was the center of the Cold War debate between the U.S. And the U.S.S.R. As Miss May has pointed out, the Kitchen Debate centered on home, family consumption, and women. Pat Nixon contributed to this propaganda tour de force as wife, mother, political adviser, and public figure. In other words, the American ideas about women, domesticity, and consumption that Ms. May talked about in her book were all represented at the Moscow U.S. fair (Ibid, pp. 110-111).

For May, she found the home of the 1950s to both a place of liberation and a prison for Cold War families. The brinkmanship, titillation, diplomacy and sometimes open fighting reflected the Cold War. While the participants were disappointed with the results, the attempts at detente continued because the dissolution of the home like nuclear war was unthinkable (ibid, p. 180). As May put it succinctly: "the home contained not only sex, consumer goods, children, and intimacy, but enormous discontent, especially for women. For many, there was no place else for this discontent to go, so it remained contained in the home...For these white middle-class couples, viable alternatives to domestic containment were out of reach. The cold war consensus and the pervasive atmosphere of anticommunism made personal experimentation, as well as political resistance, risky endeavors with dim prospects for significant positive results...With depression and war behind them, and with political and economic institutions fostering the upward mobility of men, the domesticity of women, and suburban home ownership, they were homeward bound. But, as the years went by, they also found themselves bound to the home (ibid, p. 207)." The Pat and Richard Nixons of American were truly pitiable.

Their black contemporaries on the other hand were in much more horrific straits. For them, even the artificial gods that affluence provided were not ever available to them. While it was eventually taken from the white population, they at least had the memories of when times were better and the hope that things would get that good again.

What is very interesting about Miss Moody's experience is that even her experience as a civil rights worker was eventually disenchanting for her and saw her give it up in disgust. Certainly, she is completely alienated from the American life of her experience. She does not enjoy completeness in it in any capacity, either in the public or domestic sphere. She describes what it was like as a child to be a sharecropper's child. When one reads the experience of sharecropping on the plantation, certainly, one really has to stretch their imagination to see the difference between the sharecropping experience and the slavery that it came out of. This did not mean that the life was much better for the whites in the area. However, they had one advantage that is their skin color. This racial apartheid was used as a tool to oppress both of them.

The monotonous diet was a factor of life. Beans were the fare every night for dinner (Moody, 1992, p. 19). This lack of food made hunting for small game necessary to supplement this pathetic diet and provided a necessary diversion from the monotonous rhythms of plantation life. Their movements through nature provided a cleansing from the pathetic reality of their daily lives and gave them a freedom that was refreshing for Essie Mae as she savored the times with Ed (ibid, pp. 20-21).

One way that was not available to get out of the hell of being black was assimilating and becoming white. This was the key to the "paradise" mentioned in the May book. Her uncles Sam and Walter were very light skinned, meaning that they had white ancestry. What amazed Essie Mae was that her mother said that were not white (ibid, pp. 35). Her entrapment in this world of apartheid was permanent and indivisible. Truly, Jim Crow dictated the rules of her life and they were inviolable with no exceptions. After all, their God, Jesus was white. How must they feel about themselves on a subconscious level if the very deity that they worshipped and that gave them the ultimate salvation from their servitude was white. However, this subconscious reality never pierce the religious epiphany where she found her white Lord in a born again experience (ibid, pp. 73-75). How oppressed one must be if… READ MORE

How to Reference "Homeward Bound and Coming of Age: Cold" Essay in a Bibliography

Related Essays:

Homeward Bound American Families in the Cold War Research Paper

Homeward Bound: The Politics of Womanhood

Elaine Tyler May's Book, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, traces the strikingly parallel journeys of domestic and political life in… read more

Research Paper 2 pages (689 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA Topic: Women / Feminism

---

Homeward Bound Essay

Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York:

Basic Books, 1988, 1999

Fighting in World War II, the American perspective was focused on the larger… read more

Essay 3 pages (1083 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA Topic: Family / Dating / Marriage

---

Coming of Age Theme Term Paper

Coming of Age -- Struggles of Identity, Politics, and Ethics

Coming of age is not merely a personal struggle, defined by changes in one's body and the structure of one's… read more

Term Paper 3 pages (1063 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA Topic: Women / Feminism

---

Summary of Elaine May's Homeward Bound Research Proposal

Elaine May's Homeward Bound

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York:

Basic Books, 1999

How did Americans emotionally shift from wartime mobilization to… read more

Research Proposal 3 pages (1066 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA Topic: Women / Feminism

---

Comparison of Coming of Age in Mississippi Book and Reading in History Essay

Coming of Age in Mississippi Book And Reading in History Book

Martin Luther King Jr. said that the throbbing desire for freedom inside every man could no longer be denied… read more

Essay 3 pages (845 words) Sources: 0 Topic: African-American / Black Studies

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>