Elaine T May

Great expectations : marriage and divorce in post-Victorian America

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the divorce rate in the United States rose by a staggering 2,000 percent. To understand this dramatic rise, Elaine Tyler May studied over one thousand detailed divorce cases. She found that contrary to common assumptions, divorce was not simply a by-product of womens increasing economic and sexual independence, or a rebellion against marriage. Rather, thwarted hopes for fulfillment in the public sphere drove both men and women to wed at a greater rate and to bring higher expectations to their marriages.

Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness

In the first book to explore the experience of being childless throughout our countrys history, the author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era chronicles the astonishing shifts in public attitudes toward every aspect of childlessness, from voluntary childlessness to compulsory sterilization, infertility, and adoption. Photos.

Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.

Uncovering startling connections between the Cold War and its effect on American family life, this classic of Cold War literature challenges assumptions about the happy days of the 1950s. . In the 1950s, the term containment referred to the foreign policy-driven containment of Communism and atomic proliferation. Yet in Homeward Bound May demonstrates that there was also a domestic version of containment where the sphere of influence was the home. Within its walls, potentially dangerous social forces might be tamed, securing the fulfilling life to which postwar women and men aspired. Homeward Bound tells the story of domestic containment - how it emerged, how it affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it unraveled in the wake of the Vietnam eras assault on Cold War culture, when unwed mothers, feminists, and secular humanists became the new enemy. This revised and updated edition includes the latest information on race, the culture wars, and current cultural and political controversies of the post-Cold War era.