A Family Affair? Gender, the U.S. Information Agency, and Cold War Ideology, 1945-1960

This book chapter in the edited volume Culture and International History, which explores  how culture, including gender, was instrumentalized for international political  goals and purposes in different historical periods and world regions, shows the  importance of clearly defined gender images in the American Cold War society which was also a postwar society. The ideal of the male breadwinner- female homemaker family stood at the center of the  postwar propaganda of the American government, which aimed to reintegrate the returning soldiers into socety by "normalizing" the gender division of labor in the family. Women were supposed to return home from the work places they took during the war to free men for military service. At the same time this gender ideal was used as a marker of difference to the societies  of the communist block, which supposedly  forced women and mothers to work fulltime outside of the home.