Science Fiction Blue Prints for Cold War Gender Roles: Mystique Models and Team Players

Abstract

Although some still look back at 1950s America through rosecolored glasses that transform it into an tranquil time forever lost, historians and critics including Elaine Tyler May, David Halberstam, William O’Neill, and James Gilbert remind us that it was a time of rapid social and political change that fostered a great deal of excitement and an equal amount of trepidation. Many Americans, especially the white middle-class, were excited about the postwar prosperity that provided much needed housing and initiated a new consumerism that centered on the home and family. Despite this new found prosperity, people across the nation were still anxious about a variety of issues such as the (perceived) threat of communist infiltration, the spiraling arms race, juvenile delinquency in the expanding suburbs, and even water fluoridation. Among other things, these complex issues and competing social, political, and economic ideologies prompted a renegotiation of postwar gender roles.