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that American superiority rested on its booming consumer culture and rigidly defined gender roles became strangely intertwined with Cold War politics. In 1959, at an American National Exhibition in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschchev engaged in a bizarre“kitchen debate.” As historian Elaine May has noted, “The two leaders did not discuss missiles, bombs, or even modes of government. Rather, they argued over the relative merits of American and Soviet washing machines, televisions, and electric ranges.” 16
    As they toured model American homes, Nixon boasted of the laborsaving devices that gave American women time to cultivate their charms as wives and to care for their children. “What we want is to make easier the life of our housewives,” said Nixon. Khrushchev testily retorted that the Soviet Union had little use for full-time housewives. Its women workers were busy building an industrial society. Tracking this bizarre debate, the American press compared the “bedraggled drudges” of the Soviet Union, who lost their looks at an early age and neglected their children, with the well-groomed American housewives whose leisure allowed them to care for themselves, as well as their families. 17
    The advertising industry quickly geared up to instruct new homemakers in the ways they could help fight Communism. In 1954, a
McCall’s
magazine editorial coined the ideal of “togetherness,” a concept designed to slow the centrifugal forces that were already spinning members of the family in different directions. Speaking before the Wilmington City Federation of Women’s Clubs, a director of Du Pont reminded his female audience that they were no longer just housewives. “You are ‘Managers of Destiny,’” he told them, “perfectly positioned to fight socialism.”
This is where you women can be of tremendous help—by everlastingly teaching and preaching the values of individualism and of personal freedom, and by keeping alive a burning faith in our philosophy of incentive and free choice. . . . Socialists have tried to relieve the individual of all responsibility. . . . Only women, with their “independence,” can fight for individual liberty. 18
    Simply put, the nation needed women to fuel the growing consumer economy. Anita Colby, an author and consultant, lectured businessmen on how to decipher the mysterious ways of the female consumer:
She, too, gets restless . . . but unlike you, she can’t head for a bar alone at night to spend a few hours of relaxation. No, restricted to home and children, she takes it out in a new color of hair—or calls in a decorator to do over the house—andmay even surprise you when you come home one day with a ripped-up lawn bearing all the ear-marks of a swimming-pool in embryo! At the very least, she’ll buy herself a new hat. This is bad, you think? Well, all you cosmetic manufacturers, makers of textiles, furniture, housewares, plumbing appliances, and millinery experts think about your annual sales-figures!! Honestly now, where would you be without the little woman’s rebellion? 19
    It didn’t take much to convince postwar men and women that the United States, and not the Soviet Union, offered the good life. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product leaped 250 percent. In 1955, with only 6 percent of the world’s population, the United States produced half the world’s goods. By 1960, 60 percent of Americans belonged to the middle class, and owned their own homes; 75 percent of farmers owned their own lands. The discretionary income of the middle class doubled: 87 percent owned televisions, 75 percent owned washing machines, and ten million citizens owned shares in American companies. 20
    The growing middle class had to ignore a great deal as they celebrated their material success. Racial segregation and discrimination still ruled the South.