Postwar America

Essay Question:

For your family, was the postwar period (1945-1960) a happy time of prosperity, a frightening period of cold war, or was it characterized some other way?

To support your argument, get some family stories about this era. The following questions should elicit family stories that will be useful to you. Composing your own questions might be even more successful, especially if you base those questions on your knowledge of your family chronology and history.

• Did your family place special emphasis on children or on the suburbs during the Fifties?
• What opinions did people in your family have about Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care?
• What did your family expect women to be like in the 1950s? What did they expect women to do?
• When did your family get their first television?
• What did your family like to watch on television? Did they often invite people over to watch tv? Were there special treats to go with television, or rules about watching it?
• What does your family remember about Sputnik?
• How did your family feel about communism in the postwar period?
• What does your family remember about Joseph McCarthy?
• Did anyone in your family learn to "duck and cover" at school?
• Would you say your family was more like or more unlike the Nelsons in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet?



• Did anyone in your family serve in Korea? in occupied Japan or Germany? If so, what was it like?
• How did veterans in your family feel about coming home for the first time after the war?
• Did anyone in your family take advantage of the GI Bill?
  

More general questions for further conversation:

• What is the secret to a happy marriage?
• How did you meet your spouse?
• When you were my age, what were your ideas about and experience with the opposite sex?
• What was the best date you ever had?
• Do you think you could have married someone else instead? How would your life be different?
• Was your marriage like your parents' marriage?
• How did you and your spouse decide how to divide up the chores and responsibilities for taking care of the house, clothes, yard, children, etc?