Between Mother and History: Jean Stafford, Marguerite Oswald, and U.S. Cold War Women's Citizenship

In women there is the strength to open up new frontiers, but there is, as well, the proud power to safeguard what is most worthy in the national heritage.

(Stafford, “Intimations of Hope” 77)

Mom is an American creation.

(Wylie 198)

It is commonly accepted that the cold war era was undergirded by an American narrative that opposed two projected visions of national power in agonistic struggle: American capitalism cum liberalism versus Soviet communism cum totalitarianism. However tenuous, this narrative of hostile rivalry was grounded in a bipolar framework that placed American citizenship in opposition to its Soviet other and facilitated for some U.S. citizens a grounding of self within a national community through a process of imaginative and actual exclusion. ¹ Because the period was one in which the pressures to triumph over the enemy lay heavily upon a nation engaged in an ideological tug-of-war, critics have been able to show the ways national narratives helped explicate the central meanings, roles, and duties of civic membership and participation. These theorizations of the role of narrative have opened up a way of understanding the relationships between subjectivity and citizenship during the cold war period. Donald Pease, to take an influential example, explains the national narrative as naturalizing the relationship between a people and a territory, thus effecting

imaginary relations between national peoples and states that secured them to their apparatuses [. . .]. Overall these narratives positioned a totalized community as the narratee of a story that structured the subject positions, actions and events of that community within a masterplot that performed the quasi-metaphysical function of guaranteeing its perpetuity. (4–5)

Pease sees the relationship between subjectivity and citizenship, then, as routed through a master narrative that sutures social bonds among citizens. Participation in these bonds endows subjects with a sense of national filiation and power vis-à-vis the nation state and generates a sense of continual belonging and perpetual community based in an imagined relation of opposition to a national “other.” This way of understanding the role of narrative has been key to a rethinking of the cold war, its U.S. citizenry, and the reach of its logic through various cultural and social strata.

Supporting Pease's correlation between an emplotted citizenship and the idea of community created therein, Alan Nadel, Robert Corber, and Elaine Tyler May offer accounts of domestic life that serve as subjects in this schema. In his discussion of the importance of narrativizing strategies in the cold war period, Nadel focuses on the trope of “containment” as the “privileged American narrative during the cold war” (3). Nadel notes, as have other critics, that U.S. policies established to direct American international relations following World War II also powerfully affected U.S. domestic life. Following George Kennan's 1947 description of the Soviet Union as an insidious political force capable of “filling every nook and cranny,” containment became a catchphrase to describe the need to control communism abroad and suppress it at home (575). This logic was adapted into state policy in 1950 when Harry Truman invoked containment as the official means of warding off threats to national security. Within the rhetoric of Kennan's article, as Nadel argues, the metaphor of containment was sexualized. The Soviet menace was at once potent and fluid, capable of reaching the most remote of cracks. Elaborating on the dualisms of this metaphor, Nadel offers an assessment of numerous social and cultural practices—from the development of bombs to biological reproduction—that secured American domestic life within the logic of containment culture. For Nadel, the “performance of disparate acts” in the name of anticommunism becomes a key element of this culture, particularly as it circulated through the epicenter of domestic life, the American home (3). The fear was...