The 1950’s in the United States of America were characterized by a strong fear of communism, growing consumerism due to a healthy and fast growing postwar industry and the belief that the nuclear family is the heart of the American society. If we examine these three ideologies closer and oppose them to Stephanie Coontz opinion expressed in her essay “Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet: American Families in the 1950s,”, we see that many myths existed about the 1950’s.

After World War Two the American economy was on the rise due to the outcome of the war.
Some astonishing figures prove that fact, over 50% of the American families moved into middle-class status. The number of salaried workers increased by 61 % and the number of …show more content…

These gender roles are illustrated in “Growing up with Dick and Jane.”. But the nuclear family is also an after war institution because after man returned from fighting they found a place “beautiful, peaceful, secure, a place to restore faith”. Or as the women’s guide to better living proclaimed:” The family is the center of your living if it isn’t you’ve gone far astray.” People who were not living in a family were regarded as “unnatural especially women if they did not seek fulfillment in motherhood”, bachelors on the other hand were regarded as “immature,” infantile,” “narcissistic,” “deviant,” or even “pathological.” To raise a family was a social constraint of the 1950’s.

This is important for us to understand because even though times have changed and ways in which people live together and raise children have become more versatile, the family still is the most common union between man and women in order to raise children even though families can also exist of two people with the same sex. But still by most people the most common thing is the nuclear family everything else is still regarded by many as something special.

A third ideology of the 1950’s is the strong fear of communism, by the 1930s, communism had become an attractive economic ideology among some in the United States by 1939 the CPUSA had about 50,000 members. After the Second World War as first evidence to the cold war anxieties the U.S. Congress legislated the Alien