Ma and Pa Kettle Go to the AHA

Abstract

In her fine article, Jane Levey joins a chorus of historians who have sought to complicate not only the picture of women's experience in the two decades after World War II but also the ideological surround of that experience by challenging the conventional view of the period as one simply marked, in both life and thought, by a triumphant and unrivaled celebration of reactionary domesticity. She also lends her voice to those who have sought to characterize American culture generally in the years immediately following the war as particularly unsettled, a "culture of uncertainty," as William Graebner has termed it in his excellent survey of the cultural history of the 1940s. As Graebner notes in his own effort to unite these two themes, "Postwar domesticity was a powerful social and cultural force from which few Americans were completely free. Yet despite its strength, it was also depicted in the 1940s as a fragile frame, as vulnerable and besieged as the cold-war engaged nation itself." 1