"We're a Happy Family: Me, Mom, and Daddy"

“All happy families resemble one another,” Tolstoy began Anna Karenina; “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In her intensive close reading of the photo-essays that Life published each week during the post-World War II era, Wendy Kozol argues that this most popular national magazine of the time established the happy family, and especially one narrowly constrained vision of the happy family, as the goal and purpose of American life. By helping create the dominant image of the American family—white, middle-class, nuclear, and conforming to traditional gender roles— Life was a major contributor to the ideological mission of containing cultural anxieties during the cold war period. Any family that did not correspond to this image was transformed by the magazine into an Other—each different in its own way—used to represent the social and political problems that threatened the happy ideal. Relying on the powerful rhetoric of domesticity and the equally persuasive capabilities of the news photograph, the weekly photo-essays, entitled “The Week’s Events,” translated “social and political issues into narratives about representative families.” Life’s America demonstrates that, as a result, “pictures of families promoted ideals about home and private life, public issues, social identities, and ultimately, the nation itself” (viii–ix).

The period after World War II was a time of both social upheaval and economic growth for the United States. Recent scholarship has traced the roots of both the civil rights and the women’s movements to the experiences of African Americans and women during and immediately after the war. In order to re-employ returning white male soldiers, women were forced out of their newly gained manufacturing jobs and either into clerical positions or out of the workplace entirely, and African American soldiers who had fought for democracy abroad returned home to face unrelenting segregation. At the same time, housing and educational subsidies were proffered to veterans able to take advantage of the migration to suburbia and the opportunity of earning a college degree. ¹ Powerful cultural forces had to be brought to bear in order to legitimate these decisions. Life’s America shows the complex manner wherein photo-narratives promoting consumption and domesticity helped temporarily defuse this legitimation crisis.

As a result, dominant economic and social hierarchies were not significantly challenged during this time. Instead, manufacturers with an already established sense of their audiences found rapidly expanding markets for their products. This period saw the triumph of consumer culture as the predominant means for the establishment, maintenance, and display of American identity. Companies that sold home appliances and automobiles, as well as those that sold greeting cards, clothing, cosmetics and other personal items, found the demand for their goods inflated not only by increasingly available consumer credit but, perhaps most importantly, by an almost inexpressible anxiety concerning the necessary components of both national and individual identity.

In order for Life to attract advertisers and readers, it had to create a cultural product that could both question the conditions of American identity and provide persuasive and reassuring answers. Life’s narrative blend of consumerism and domesticity functioned well within this social milieu. The magazine’s readership grew tremendously from 1946 to 1956, when it had 5.8 million subscribers; during the same time, its advertising revenues doubled. This market success testified to the magazine’s ability to appeal to and assuage the cultural anxieties that were accompanying the period’s social turmoil.

The two most important techniques Life used in this process were the rhetoric of the photo-essay and the strategy of focusing on major public, national and international issues through the lens of the family. The photo-essay allowed Life to combine the persuasive power of photorealism with a narrative that sometimes complemented and sometimes contradicted the story told in the photos. The use of the family allowed the magazine to suggest an immediate emotional resonance to larger issues that might have been beyond the personal experience of...