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173 Q Between 1941 and 1945, the United States participated as a combatant in World War II. Mothers were expected to sacrifice on the home front, and Americans sentimentally honored the sacrifice of mothers’ sons to the larger cause. Meanwhile, the nation encouraged less traditional roles for women and mothers, asking them to adapt their domestic roles with greater labor force participation to keep industrial production moving while men were at war. At the close of the war, however, many Americans grew fearful and reactionary, as they tried to come to terms with the developments of a turbulent decade and a half—the years spanning the Depression and wartime. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a McCarthyist hunt for communists and suspected subversives expressed a culture of fear and conformity. The postwar backlash was a reaction to not only the perceived excesses of leftist activists from the 1930s but also the social and cultural changes of modern life, especially in the form of nonmarital sexuality and married women’s labor-force participation.1 Nevertheless, during and especially after the war, Americans hurtled into neotraditional family life, exploding onto the suburban landscape and creating the twentieth century’s great demographic bump: the baby boom. They did so in perhaps the century’s most rigidly enforced definitions of masculinity and femininity . Despite the increasing similarity of the education of middle-class women and men, cultural commentators insisted on portraying masculinity and femininity as utter opposites. Maintaining gender distinction was a primary assignment for both parents, but mothers most especially felt the pressure to shape appropriate gender norms and to conform to those norms themselves. Experts in books and popular magazines and on television carried a relentless message to women: “accept your role” as wife and mother. Consider the story of Jennifer Colton, who told her fellow wives and mothers “Why I Quit Working” in a Good Housekeeping article in 1951: “At first I found it hard to believe that being a woman is something in itself,” she wrote.“I had always c h a p t e r 8 The Middle-Class Wife-and-Mother Box 174 Mothers of Invention felt that a woman had to do something more than manage a household to prove her worth. Later, when I understood the role better, it took on unexpected glamour. Though I still wince a little at the phrase, ‘wife and mother,’ I feel quite sure that these words soon will sound as satisfying to me as ‘actress’ or ‘buyer’ or ‘secretary’ or‘president.’”2 Ambivalence rings throughout this exposé on the life of a reformed (or almost reformed) woman who had engaged in interests that society deemed too absorbing for a true wife-and-mother. This message of acceptance was reinforced throughout the culture, with the help of the nation’s new pastime: television. Even in its early years, television was an American dreamscape, enticing viewers with the family life and products they really wanted—or were supposed to want. Programming reflected Americans’ hopes and fears and, in a continuous loop, fed them new ones. Tightly scripted narratives and visual confines, in a box, seem to be an appropriate metaphor for this era in motherhood, the period roughly from 1940 to the early 1960s. The visible families who developed into archetypes by this new technology were almost uniformly white and middle class, and usually suburban. They were also deeply ensconced in rigid gender roles assigned to Mother and Father, the latter parent being the one who “knew best.” TV mothers were always married, financially supported by a man, prolific in their reproduction (this was, after all, the baby boom era), and content with a life that revolved around serving the needs of children and husband. These women exercised very little initiative even within that realm. Jane Wyatt, who played the mother in Father Knows Best, later recalled, “My only complaint was you never saw her reading a book, or going to the office, or playing tennis. Mom always had to be around with nothing to do . . . just to say,‘wash your hands.’”She was available, but not too involved, and she exercised little real authority . Mothers who did not fit this domestic ideal, or women who were not mothers, were either invisible, suspect, or problematic characters in television and in films.3 In real life, of course, things were more complicated. The cultural prescriptions for motherhood were riddled with contradictions, and yet most women threw themselves into trying to be good...

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