Imagining the Family in U.S. Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen

The family is the cradle into which the future is born; it is the nursery in which the new social order is nourished and reared during its early and most plastic period. --Sidney Goldstein, Marriage and Family Living, 1946

If, as social scientist Sidney Goldstein insisted, the family was the cradle for the future, by the mid-1940s that cradle seemed to be rocking wildly. Distinguished psychiatrist William C. Menninger's concern was representative. "How's Your Family?" he asked point-blank in Parents' Magazine in 1948. In his view, "Much of the world's sickness is due to home sickness. . . . To insure the social well-being of this nation and the mental health of its individual citizens, we've got to re-evaluate family life and understand its influences." First things first, Menninger argued: "While we alarm ourselves with talk of bacteriological warfare and atom bombs, we are complacently watching the disintegration of our family life. . . . We cannot ignore the problem of the peace of the world. It should not so distract us, however, that we fail to give intensive thought to the only social system which gives peace of mind." ¹

Menninger was not alone in his concern; anxious observers of the family abounded in the latter half of the 1940s. Why did scholars, pundits, and journalists all worry? Was the ship that was the American family (to borrow anthropologist Margaret Mead's metaphor ² ), having weathered the storms of depression and war, still sailing in treacherous waters? I would argue that this was a specific historical moment, one to which the stresses of war, the uncertainties of the ensuing peace, and the emerging relationship between ideologies of the family and American national identity together lent an unparalleled ambiguity and anxiety about family life. It is that moment, and its construction by and through mass culture, that I explore.

During the war years, the nation's energies had focused on defeating an external foe; with the cessation of hostilities abroad, attention turned to matters of internal housekeeping. While the second half of the 1940s was hardly the first time the American family had been pronounced in crisis, what many discovered during those years proved profoundly unsettling. The divorce rate was at a record high, juvenile delinquency seemed on the upswing, and fears of parental irresponsibility and neglect were amply voiced in discussions of "latchkey children," for example, considered "abandoned" by their working parents, and in worries about returning veterans' reluctance to embrace their familial responsibilities. To many observers, social chaos seemed close at hand.

Moreover, World War II had left a dramatic mark on American families. The conflict affected the homefront in ways that did not evaporate with the war's end. The increased independence of youth during the war, the mobility resulting from wartime employment and military service, and the shift in power relations within families brought about by women's increased labor force participation and men's wartime absences all raised questions about the meaning of family in the postwar world. ³

Negotiating the family's safe passage through these difficult straits quickly became a high-stakes proposition. Did the "crisis of the family" signal social disorder of even larger scale? ⁴ It was more than a truism to consider the family as crucial to building a democratic society. Family well-being became at once an essential building block for nurturing national health and "American" values. This burgeoning "discourse of the democratic family," as historian Sonya Michel has termed it, linked family and national well-being in a connection that went on to flourish during the Cold War, while leaving the gender hierarchy untouched--democracy in the family, as in the nation at large, did not necessarily imply social equality. ⁵

The family was "the anvil...