Peter J. Kuznick

Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, “U.S. Culture and the Cold War,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 1-13.
Kuznick and Gilbert write, “Broadly speaking there is very little fundamentally new about American culture in the Cold War era. Most of the characteristics by which we define it are the results of long-term social trends and political habits of mind, revived and refurbished from the past” (pg. 2). Despite this, Kuznick and Gilbert identify four elements unique to this era that transformed American politics and culture: “threat of nuclear annihilation, replacement of direct military confrontation with surrogate and covert warfare, opposition to an enemy officially espousing socialism and supporting Third World revolution, and the rise of the military-industrial complex” (pg. 2). Discussing issues of gender, Kuznick and Gilbert write, “The history of sexuality in postwar America is thus the story of increasing liberalization, first within and then outside of marriage” (pg. 5). They conclude, “Despite the weight of advice, opinion, and propaganda, women continued (after a short recess immediately after 1945) to enter the work force in larger and larger numbers. Women’s changing socioeconomic position burst into public view in the early 1960s when feminists denounced the suburban housewife lifestyle that kept women dependent, undereducated, underemployed, and largely underfulfilled” (pg. 9).

William M. Tuttle, Jr., “America’s Children in an Era of War, Hot and Cold: The Holocaust, the Bomb, and Child Rearing in the 1940s,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 14-34.
Tuttle links children’s understanding of the Cold War to earlier patterns during World War II. He writes of previous historians’ work, “Too often historians have overlooked the continuities that distinguished the decade of the 1940s, at least in children’s lives. Between 1941 and 1945 the specter of death and destruction haunted millions of American girls and boys, and the way in which the war ended only exacerbated children’s fears and insured that the specter would persist into peacetime” (pg. 14). He grounds himself in this historiography, though, writing, “We have learned a great deal about the culture of the atomic age from historians, particularly Paul Boyer, Spencer R. Weart, Allan M. Winkler, and Margot A. Henriksen” (pg. 21). Tuttle discusses continuities in the forms of children’s’ media, writing, “Another point of continuity in the 1940s was children’s popular culture, including radio, comic books, and particularly the movies, which changed little after the war” (pg. 17). Even these media were gendered, however. Tuttle writes, “Without regard to gender, film images of war filled the minds of American children in the 1940s. Yet the messages in these movies, as well as those conveyed in the radio shows, comic books, and war games, were gender-specific; the men fought the war, the women waited” (pg. 20).

Joanne Meyerowitz, “Sex, Gender, and the Cold War Language of Reform,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 106-123.
Discussing the historiography of gender and the Cold War, Meyerowitz writes, “I do not attempt to sever the historiography links between Cold War policy and domestic ideology; rather, I hope to complicate and multiply them. While in many cases Cold War thought did indeed reinforce traditional gender roles and the heterosexual marital norm, in other notable cases it also seemed to subvert them” (pg. 106-107). Reformers worked new opportunities for women into Cold War rhetoric. Meyerowitz writes, “In the 1950s, both the Commission on the Education of Women, sponsored by the American Council on Education, and the National Manpower Council, funded by the Ford Foundation, promoted education and employment for women by using Cold War arguments about the nation’s security needs” (pg. 112). Gay and lesbian Americans also tied their identities to a democratic ideal in the ideological battle against communism. According to Meyerowitz, “In this line of argument, the rights of homosexuals belonged within the broader battle for the kinds of individual rights allegedly protected in America and denied under communism” (pg. 114).

Jane Sherron De Hart, “Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality, and National Identity in Cold War America,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 124-155.
De Hart works to complicate Elaine Tyler May’s work. She writes, “May’s use of containment as a metaphor for Cold War gender and sexual politics is not without problems, for reasons we will explore. Yet the repression that she identified was real and has been underscored by scholarship on the gay and lesbian experience during the long fifties” (pg. 125). To this end, “the binary opposites of containment and liberation, even if used sequentially, seem much too simple to capture the complex realities of gender and sexuality over nearly half a century” (pg. 127). She points out that May’s study primarily focuses on middle class white women and modern studies extend analysis to include the working class, blacks, and Hispanics (pg. 130). According to De Hart, those who challenged the norm used maternalist language as to do otherwise would invite criticism from those who equated dissent with communism (pg. 132). Despite this, Hart writes, “Some of these modern practitioners of maternalism were prepared to admit privately that motherhood and family were not the only basis for their political involvement: egalitarian considerations also played a part” (pg. 132). Describing the pushback against activists, De Hart writes, “The framework of significance structuring social conservatives’ beliefs reveal that for many opposing feminism – of which the [equal rights] amendment was a symbol – certitude about the role of sex in shaping personal identity, private obligation, family life, and social responsibility was essentially a religion conviction…Gender, in other words, was sacred” (pg. 138).… (plus d'informations)