The 1950s-60s and Enforcing "normal"

 When it comes to events that have changed stereotypes and culture, particularly for women, I often think of wars which have given women jobs, or the federal enfranchisement of women, or the post-war removal of women from jobs. However, I’ve never really considered the effects of the Cold War on women’s roles, stereotypes, and culture. After Mr. Bobrowskas’ talk, I felt like I came away with a better idea of the effect that it had.

The Cold War was more a battle of ideologies than of physical powers—even with the threat of bombs at the ready, there weren’t any physical moves made between the US and the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the US was trying to stop communism from overtaking the world. Americans became so worked up about being anti-communism that they would try to keep an eye out for any suspicious behaviour or abnormalities—for they must be a communist, conspiring with the enemy! In this time period, so many people were being accused of communism, losing jobs and opportunities, that the majority of people leaned heavily into the “norms” of the time. As I did some research, an article I found said that among other things, “things like the nuclear family, school, community, obedience to parents and loyalty to the nation were openly promoted.” These ideas, including the norm of a woman marrying and caring for children, became more and more ingrained in movies, advertisements, and propaganda throughout this period, to promote the idea of normalcy. For example, in the late 1950s magazine I saw from class, women were often portrayed with children or with a man who was presumably her husband. They were almost never shown doing anything beyond caretaking, being a wife, or showing off their own beauty, much unlike the men who were shown boxing, driving new cars, going to museums, engineering dioramas, and countless other activities. I thought it was interesting that while the men were shown at varying ages, the women were only ever shown as young girls or young adults, never with gray hair or prominent facial wrinkles. It’s also important to note the complete exclusion of black people, at least in the edition I was looking through. For people of color reading the magazines, they were given so little representation in the media, and the media decided to ignore they existed entirely, giving them no representation, even worse than the mediocre representation of women.

All of this to say, the way that publishing companies and the film industry and the artists went about portraying the populus influenced the people of its day and age—the idea of women as housewives was enforced and practically unquestioned - doing much else could be seen as an abnormality. This was, of course, an interesting effect that the communism scare and the cold war had on women’s culture and stereotype enforcement.