The Personal and Political Postwar American Family

The proposition of 1960s radical feminism that the personal is (always) political notwithstanding, how the relationship between the private and the public is understood and experienced is shaped by particular historical conditions and changes over time. Undergirded by this premise, Marilyn Irvin Holt’s Cold War Kids, Deborah Weinstein’s The Pathological Family, and Sarah Potter’s Everybody Else are all concerned with mapping the shifting conceptual and material boundaries between the family and society from 1945 to 1960 in the United States. Collectively examining the ideas, initiatives, and experiences of a wide array of historical actors—from federal policy makers to scientific experts to adoptive and foster parents from diverse class and racial backgrounds—these three historians convincingly contend that the supposedly private realms of childhood and the family attained heightened public and political significance in the postwar period, with important ramifications for both family life and American politics that have continued to resonate into our own time.

Cold War Kids thoroughly documents the growing involvement by the federal government in fostering the health, education, and welfare of American children from across the social spectrum during the fifteen years following World War II. Although local and state governments began to assume some responsibility for children’s welfare beginning in the nineteenth century and federal policy makers expressed interest in children’s issues during the Progressive era, the 1920s, and the New Deal years, legislation addressing child labor and the needs of dependent children targeted only the most socially and economically marginalized. It was not until after World War II, Marilyn Holt explains, that the federal government “began to consider America’s youth as one collective group” (8), thereby marking the postwar era as a crucial “turning point” (2) in the history of childhood. Indeed, in contrast to those historians of childhood and of twentieth-century American politics who have characterized the postwar years as a period of inertia in between the governmental welfare activism of the Progressive era/New Deal, on the one hand, and the Great Society, on the other, Holt reveals the post–World War II years to be “a pivotal period in which the federal government’s role in issues related to America’s youth was hotly debated, periodically challenged, sometimes championed, and slowly expanded” (2–3).

Through her examination of presidential speeches, records from congressional debates and investigations, and reports issued by White House conferences and presidential commissions, Holt demonstrates that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, members of their administrations, members of Congress, and public servants in an array of federal agencies became prominent participants in the growing public discourse about children and family life that characterized the postwar years. Federal government officials were motivated to speak up and act on behalf of children by a whole array of developments, sensibilities, and concerns familiar to scholars of the postwar period, including: longings for familial and social stability following the Depression and World War II, confidence in the booming economy, anxieties about the survival of democracy and capitalism spurred by the Cold War, angst about rising rates of working women and juvenile delinquency, the prevalence of racial discrimination and the burgeoning civil rights movement, a national housing crisis, and the sheer numbers of young people in the population putting demands on educational and welfare systems that families, local communities, and state governments could not meet on their own. Although their views were never monolithic or uncontested, federal government officials shared with one another and the wider public the conviction that young people were essential to preserving a “democratic, economically sound, and secure America” (153) and that as such, “society had a responsibility to help them along the way” (148). “As a result,” Holt contends, “the growing-up years of...