The kitchen debate was one of the major skirmishes in the cold war, which was at its

core an ideological struggle fought on a cultural battleground. For Nixon, American

superiority rested on the ideal of the suburban home.

Richard Nixon insisted that American superiority in the cold war rested not on
weapons, but on the secure, abundant family life of modern suburban homes.

Soviet women, as workers and political activists, desexualized themselves. It

described Moscow as “a city of women in the West. Most Moscow women seem
unconcerned about their looks.

American women, unlike their “purposeful” and unfeminine Russian counterparts,

did not have to be “hard working,” thanks to the wonders of American Household
appliances. They cultivated their looks and their physical charms, to become
sexually attractive housewives and consumers under the American capitalist
system.

WWII “took negro mothers out of white kitchens, put them in factories and
shipyards. When it was all over, they went back to kitchens, but this time their own.

Church membership rose from 64.5 million in 1940 to 114.5 million in 1960 from 50
percent to 63 percent of the population (100 years earlier only 20 percent of all
Americans belonged to churches). Religious affiliation became associated with the
“American way of life.”

Postwar America was the era of the expert. Armed with scientific techniques and
presumably inhabiting a world that was beyond popular passions, the experts had
brought us into the atomic age. Physicists developed the bomb, strategists created
the cold war, and scientific managers built the military-industrial complex.

During the postwar years, sexual values as well as sexual behavior were in flux. A
heightened expectation for erotic fulfillment in marriage, and an explosion of sexual
images in the media. at the same time, the taboos against pre marital intercourse,
homosexuality , and other forms of non-procreative sex remained central tenets of
sexual morality.

Guilt also affected marriages of several women who had engaged in premarital
sexual activity. Many were unable to achieve satisfying sexual relationships as a
result.

For some sex was more pleasurable before the wedding than after. The newness of
the relationship or the freedom from the daily responsibilities of married life
contributed to this relatively high level of excitement before marriage is impossible
to determine.

The baby boom was not the result of the return to peace, or of births to older
parents postponed because of the war. Rather, the baby boom began during the war
and continued afterward because younger couples were having babies earlier. Part
of the boom can be explained by the drop of the marriage age, which was
encouraged by sexual pressures. But a lower marriage age would not necessarily
result in a higher birthrate.

Along with the baby boom came an intense and widespread endorsement of pro
nationalism the belief in the positive value of having several children. A study found
that most Americans believed that parenthood was the route to happiness. Twenty
years later, these prenatal norms began to break up. But in 1940’s and 1950’s nearly
everyone believed that family togetherness focused on children.

A study concluded that the increase of women employment is related to the secular
decline in the birth rate. Same year newsweek reported that education was equally
detrimental to procreation. “for the American girl books and babies don’t mix.” Long
ago scientist concluded that the American family’s reproduction rate is in inverse
ratio to the educational attainment of the parents.

According to the 1940 United States census, they have discovered that it is the
higher educated wife, rather than the husband, who brings down the birth rate.