Kelsey Parkinson
Professor Christopher Staaf
History 2112
20 October 2014
Homeward Bound Rough Outline Notes
NOTES
In the introduction of the novel, May talks about life for family in this time. She starts out by showing a picture from Life magazine which features newlyweds with dozens of canned goods and supplies and goes on to say that they would be spending the next two weeks in an underground bunker. The adventure was described as two weeks of “unbroken togetherness”. Home life during this time seemed to offer protection from the dangers outside. Marriage age decreased, birthrate increased. The baby boom was born. No matter race, religion, education, or financially, people were getting married younger and having more children than at any other time in the…show more content… The dramatic increase in the American family only lasted until children of the baby boom generation had grown to be adults. Their families had begun during the prosperity that followed the depression and they themselves had grown up amid affluence during the cold war. The children of the baby boom generation had created the counterculture once they reached adulthood. These children dramatically decreased birthrate and dramatically increased divorce rate. In the first chapter, May first talks about the “kitchen debate”. Nixon believed that American superiority rested on the perfect image of the suburban home. A model home included a “male breadwinner, and a full time female homemaker, adorned with a wide array of consumer goods” and he believed it represented American freedom. Arguments over household appliances would provide the image of the good life during the atomic age instead of the vulnerability of the United States in even of a nuclear war. Nixon insisted that America was on top during the cold war because of the secure family life image they