The Fifties

by David Halberstam

women needed to hear and that it should all be upbeat, and that any larger doubts were unworthy. The magazines explained their new lives to them: how to live, how to dress, what to eat, why they should feel good about themselves and their husbands and their children. Their sacrifices, the women’s magazines emphasized, were not really sacrifices, they were about fulfillment. All doubts were to be conquered. The ideal fifties women were to strive for was articulated by McCall’s in 1954: togetherness. A family was as one, its ambitions were twined. The husband was designated leader and hero, out there every day braving the treacherous corporate world to win a better life for his family; the wife was his mainstay on the domestic side, duly appreciative of the immense sacrifices being made for her and her children. There was no divergence within. A family was a single perfect universe—instead of a complicated, fragile mechanism of conflicting political and emotional pulls. Families portrayed in women’s magazines exhibited no conflicts or contradictions or unfulfilled ambitions. Thanks, probably, to the drive for togetherness, the new homes all seemed to have what was called a family room. Here the family came together, ate, watched television, and possibly even talked. “When Jim comes home,” said a wife in a 1954 advertisement for prefabricated homes, “our family room seems to draw us closer