Cold War Kids | Ann Kordas

[00:00:03] You have to give your husband not only something to fight for, but you have to be competent around the house so that he's not worried about what's going on at home when he's flying his fighter plane out over the North Pole getting ready to bomb Moscow. If his mind is back at home wondering what you're doing and whether you can raise the children appropriately, he's not going to be able to do his part.

[00:00:27] So you have to be the perfect housewife, the perfect mother, the perfect woman, and that will encourage men to be just as strong and masculine as possible. Welcome to another episode of My Nuclear Life. I'm Shelly Lesher. After speaking to Kelly Chipps last week and discussing nuclear toys during the Cold War, I found Ann Kordas, a professor at Johnson and Wales University.

[00:00:57] Ann is a social and cultural historian who wrote a book, The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America. I wanted to discuss more nuclear-themed toys with her, but our conversation took a different turn. We spoke about toys, some of which I had never heard of and actually want to buy, but also about childhood in the Cold War in general and about the gender roles which were emphasized during that time.

[00:01:28] What did Children of the Cold War face when it came to nuclear annihilation? That's a good question. According to the government, they would face the possibility of nuclear annihilation, but if you did everything the government told you to do and exactly the way the government told you to do it, you would survive, and in the end, you would triumph. Oh, okay. So full faith in the government.

[00:01:53] Full faith in the government. There's going to be inconvenience for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, but then after that, everything's fine. The roads are cleared, the fires are put out, the mail's being delivered again, people are going back to work. It's all good. So just handle it for two weeks. And how is the government going to help you prepare?

[00:02:13] Well, they did that primarily through media that they put out, a lot of pamphlets. This is how you build your bomb shelter. This is how you stock your bomb shelter. This is how you put out a fire. This is how you render first aid.

[00:02:28] And if you didn't feel like reading, there were phonograph albums that you could listen to. And there were handy little movies that were shown in school or shown for college classes that would teach you the basics of nuclear survival. So I imagine in grade school, for example, the film strips that had the beep and you would turn the film strip. Did those exist too for students?

[00:02:53] They had so many of those. The basic duck and cover, get under your desk and put your arms over your neck and, you know, the rubble will fall on their desk, not you. They omit that the desk will then fall on you, assuming the whole building has not already gone up in flames. Tiny details. Those are this. They are minor, minor details. Minor inconveniences. Minor inconveniences. But then there were films of, you know, what to do if you're at home when the bomb drops.

[00:03:22] What do you do if you're at home and your parents are not at home and the bomb drops? What do you do if you're out on the playground and the bomb drops? Basically every situation imaginable and bomb drops. Every situation. In the school bus, you duck and cover in the aisle while the bus is still driving, apparently. At a picnic, just dive under the picnic cloth, the tablecloth.

[00:03:46] I think that is one of my favorites. Like the picnic cloth is really going to help. Yes. And dad, I think dad covers himself up with a newspaper, which, you know, is good. That's going to stop that intense heat. I mean, there were a couple of things in the chapter that you sent me. What is a little surprising to me is just the fear in which was projected upon students.

[00:04:14] Like it says, the important thing was to remain vigilant. Sundays, holidays, vacation times, we must be ready every day, all the time to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes. Yeah, you're never free from it. If it's not today, it could be tomorrow. Were you a child of that time? Not quite. I came along towards the end of it. I grew up in a little town in New England. It was a heavily factory town when I grew up. And we had a thing called the noon whistle that would blow so people knew when it was noontime.

[00:04:44] And you would hurry back for lunch so you wouldn't get knocked. But at that time, we were going to use this as an air raid warning. So that, you know, if the word came that, you know, the Soviet bombers have crossed the pole and they're heading for us, they'll blow the whistle. And so if it was a time of the day when you weren't expecting the whistle to blow, it wasn't lunchtime. It wasn't quitting time. And you heard that, you had to assume that, oh, no, that's an air raid warning and you have to take cover.

[00:05:14] But eventually, I remember very distinctly, I was like seven or eight years old. And I said to my grandmother, why do they keep blowing the whistle? She's like, oh, no, that's just the air raid siren. I ignored that. So I guess, you know, when you've blown the siren 40 times and the bombs don't fall, you kind of realize maybe they're not going to fall. So perhaps this had the opposite effect on kids. Instead of making them scared, they just became apathetic.

[00:05:43] Or of course, it could be the part of the country, too. New England was fairly cynical. Most people in New England did not build bomb shelters. They didn't stock their basement. They didn't, you know, prepare for nuclear annihilation. It was primarily the West that did it. And I don't know if it was because they were closer to nuclear missile sites, if there were more a greater Air Force presence in the West, if more army bases. Maybe. I don't know. But New England was very cynical.

[00:06:12] The West tended to be the people who built the bomb shelters and stockpiled and did things like that. And the South, while concerned, had to confront the issue of, well, we can't afford to build segregated shelters. So we won't build any shelters. So we'll just ignore it because to do otherwise, either is going to strain the budget or is going to require desegregation.

[00:06:40] And Southern municipalities were pretty unwilling to do either. I mean, it shouldn't surprise me. No, I mean, it's the Cold War is America at its best and its worst. It really, really is. Yes. And the more you dive into it, the more shocked you should be and the less shocked you are, I think. It's true. Nothing shocks me that I read that the government told people to do or advised or said or it's just so ludicrous.

[00:07:10] It couldn't be true. Yet somehow it is. Yes. Yes. So the other thing that was very clear was the gendered roles that were told to children during this time. I mean, the 50s and 60s were a highly gendered time period. But this was obvious in the toys as well. Oh, yes.

[00:07:35] So you, I mean, there weren't really any great toys for girls, but there were some really fantastic toys you mentioned for boys. Oh, there were amazing toys for boys. You had your choice. You had planes that you could practice dropping bombs on targets. You had a nuclear train, which was a train that carried rocket launchers. And they had nuclear missile warheads.

[00:08:06] If you didn't have a missile site in a particular place, the train would get your missiles there. That's fantastic. Isn't that, though? Isn't that, though? Hours of fun. I had never heard of, you mentioned the Remco Toys Project Yankee Doodle Secret Rocket Test Center. Yes. Yep. You have to build your rockets. You have to be aware that, you know, your enemy could be out there at any time.

[00:08:33] If you wanted peaceful uses for nuclear power, you didn't necessarily have to militarize them. There didn't have to be missiles and bombs. You could simply have, you know, a nuclear reactor that you would build. I want to do that. That would be fascinating. Usually they looked like nuclear reactors and there was some little component where like a little red light would be flashing so it looked like it was operating.

[00:09:00] They didn't actually have any kind of uranium core or anything like that. Although some toys did come with just a tiny bit of radioactive material so that a guy's counter would start ticking. And that just fascinates me that in the interest of giving children realistic toys, let's provide them with some radioactive material. Yes, we talked about that on the Christmas episode of the Gilbert Lab that came.

[00:09:29] It actually came with seven sources. Yeah. There was a toy called Little Prospector. If you wanted to be a uranium miner, which I guess was briefly an occupational option. It came with a little Geiger counter. And of course, it came with radioactive substances so that when you went along playing, you were scanning the ground. Every so often it would start to click. You would have found your uranium and you'd struck it rich and you could file a claim.

[00:09:56] So getting back to that, I mean, I'm fascinated by the build your own nuclear reactor because I had never heard that one before. Was that as popular as the nuclear destruction toys? That I don't know. I don't know what numbers they were sold in.

[00:10:13] I would guess from the sheer number of ads and commercials that the military toys probably sold better than the ones that were more science themed. I would suspect that the missiles and the bombs and stuff like that had a greater appeal. Certainly if you look at the numbers of commercials that were made to sell these things. Was part of this to get boys prepared for war? I think so. Yeah.

[00:10:43] A lot of the training of boys in the Cold War was to get them ready. You know, you may have to join the army. You may have to go off and defend your country. So let's get you acquainted with guns and bombs and planes when you're young so that, you know, you can later on, you can go off and join the army the way you should. And was that messaging subtle or was it pretty obvious that that was kind of the point? It was subtle in the sense that they generally didn't come out and say, oh, you're going to join the army.

[00:11:13] That's what you're going to do. But so often boys were encouraged to play at war. They were so often given guns for toys. Really all wars were available. So there's a fascination with the Civil War. And there's toy cannon that you can play with. There's always this sense that you're going to be fighting in a war of some kind. Maybe you're not going to make a career out of the military, but you should be prepared for it.

[00:11:41] And certainly there's a big emphasis on physical fitness and the kinds of things that you'd be doing for physical fitness. You know, the calisthenics and the running and how fast can you climb a rope kind of thing. As opposed to other things that would have been, you know, just as good when it comes to physical fitness, like gymnastics or swimming or something like that. But it's more the military kinds of things that they would be doing.

[00:12:09] So what were girls told to do then? Because these toys were obviously not advertised or marketed towards girls because girls weren't going to go off and fight in war. Yeah, the military toys were not for the girls. I don't even recall any of the lab sets being marketed to the girls, although I'm sure there were girls who had them. But their primary role, and this was just as important, was to become a good wife and mother. Oh, that's nice.

[00:12:39] Yes, there's this fear that America's boys aren't tough enough. That their fathers and their grandfathers fought in World War II and they won and they saved us. But after that, there was this decline in masculinity. Men come home. They're not in the army anymore. They surrender their weapons and their uniforms. They go to work in corporations. They sit at a desk and someone else tells them what to do.

[00:13:08] So they're kind of weak. And mom takes over. She's with the kids all day. And the boys are exposed to their mother's influence. And so they're going to be a little wimpy. They're not going to be masculine enough. So when the new generation has to go toe-to-toe with the Russians or the Chinese or whoever, they might not be up to it. So we have to bolster their masculinity.

[00:13:33] And one way you do that is by encouraging the play at war and giving them guns and things like that. And the other way is to encourage girls to encourage boys to be as masculine as possible by playing the role of the feminine, gentle, fragile person who needs to be protected from everything. Oh, my God. The listeners can't see the look on my face, but it is. I don't even know how to describe it.

[00:14:03] Like, oh, my God. Of course. Yeah, there is. And it's pretty blatant. There's a quotation. And I'm trying to remember the exact quotation where this is actually coming from someone who's speaking on behalf of the government. And it tells – it's directed at adult women. But the idea is you have to be a good wife. You have to be a feminine woman.

[00:14:27] And you have to give your husband not only something to fight for, but you have to be competent around the house so that he's not worried about what's going on at home when he's flying his fighter plane, you know, out over the North Pole getting ready to bomb Moscow. You know, if his mind is back at home wondering what you're doing and whether you can raise the children appropriately, he's not going to be able to do his part.

[00:14:54] So you have to be the perfect housewife, the perfect mother, the perfect woman. And that will encourage men to be just as strong and masculine as possible. So, again, it's your fault. Yes, it's your fault. It's your fault if your boy is not masculine enough. And it's your fault if your husband can't do his job. Exactly. Exactly. I just wanted to make sure I had that right. Yes, it is.

[00:15:18] And I'm sure it's your fault if your girl is not girly enough to support her man and her brother to be a masculine boy. Yes, you had to make sure your daughter was a girly girl. It's okay if she, you know, wants to wear jeans and run around and, you know, climb trees and things like that. But she has to show an interest in boys. She has to show an interest in dating. And if she does not show the appropriate interest in dating by the time she's ready to go to high school, that's a serious problem.

[00:15:47] And you need to find a solution to that. Wow. And if you grow up being told, oh, so, you know, no matter how smart you are and how tough you are and how competent you are, if you're with a boy and you care about him and you want him to like you, you have to pretend that, you know, you're weak and need to be taken care of.

[00:16:09] If a boy asks you to tutor him because you're a straight A student and he's in danger of failing, pretend you're not that smart. Better to settle for a C instead of an A just so he doesn't feel inferior when you're studying together. When you go to the movies, if he doesn't have enough money to pay for both of you, give him money, but do it where no one else can see.

[00:16:35] So he can walk up to the box office and take the money out of his pocket and make it appear that he's paying for both of you because they would emasculate him to suggest that, you know, you had to pay your own share.

[00:16:49] Oh, my gosh. I mean, I know women that grew up, you know, that went to high school and graduated in the early 70s that said they purposely got B's because the honor roll was posted in the public and they didn't want to be on the honor roll. That was a fear. Oh, my goodness. If you're an A student, that's enough to drive away, they thought, to drive away the boys.

[00:17:14] I'm sure there were probably boys who would have been perfectly fine with that. But the great fear is, do you really want to risk that? Do you really want to risk that? Because if you don't get married, you're not going to be happy. You're going to have a miserable life and you should plan on getting married sometime in that year after you graduate from high school. It's best to be engaged in your senior year and then get married in that year after high school. And if you're not engaged, I don't know, that might be that might be a problem.

[00:17:43] Oh, my. And I mean, you also write, though, that on the other side, like boys couldn't play with dolls. But before the Cold War, it was OK for a boy to play with a doll and to have that interest. But at some point that switched. Yeah. In the 19th century, in an odd way, play is less gendered. Boys had dolls. Girls played baseball.

[00:18:08] And there was never the assumption that, oh, if a boy plays with a doll, he'll grow up to be effeminate and won't be a real man. And if a girl plays baseball, she'll grow up to be too masculine and won't be interested in marrying a man. There's never that feeling.

[00:18:22] And then, you know, along comes the Cold War and this terrible emphasis on really, really rigid gender roles and this terror of homosexuality that, you know, you can't have your son play with dolls. And when your daughter gets to be a teenager, you know, if she's going to play sports, she better also wear frilly dresses and, you know, go on dates with boys in her spare time.

[00:18:51] So that really came about? Those very rigid roles came about during the Cold War? I wouldn't say they were born for the first time during the Cold War, but right up to sort of the beginning of the 20th century, there was always the assumption that there was something innate. And this sounds kind of counterintuitive, but gender was somehow innate. And if you were female, if you had two X chromosomes, of course, they didn't know about chromosomes before the 1880s.

[00:19:18] But if you were female, you were going to grow up to be a woman and you would be attracted to men and you would want to get married and you would want to have your own home and you would want to have children. And it was natural. And you could be raised as a boy, but once you hit puberty, the girliness would kick in. And the same with boys. It was innate. And you could play with dolls and, you know, have tea parties with your little sister. But once you hit those teen years, the hormones would kick in and you would become a boy. It was innate.

[00:19:48] And it'd all be fixed. Like some magical way, it'd all be fixed when you grew up. Because it's innate. Boys become men. Girls become women. And men and women behave in certain ways. It's natural. And then in the early 20th century, where there's discoveries of the sexologists and the studies of adolescence and the realization that not all girls want to marry boys. And they don't all want to have children. And they don't all want to get married.

[00:20:18] And so there's this realization that, oh, gender is not really innate. It's not really something essential that, yes, your daughter is female and she has two X chromosomes. But if certain things don't happen right at the right time, it's not going to work out. She's going to get stalled in an earlier stage of development, which is very Freudian.

[00:20:46] She's going to get stuck in that earlier stage of development. She's not going to become heterosexual. She's not going to want to get married. She's not going to want to have children. And the same thing with boys. So you have to make sure that as they hit those developmental points, they're doing all the things they should be doing for someone of the gender you expect them to be. Which means boys play war and girls pretend to be stupid and take care of them. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:21:16] And now, hopefully, we're finally getting back to just let kids be who they are. It would be very nice. It would be very nice. I think that's more common. I don't think that people would have serious problems with girls who wanted to build a nuclear reactor and get their own little prospector kit. Or boys who... I hope not. I hope not. Or boys who have a little doll that they want to take to bed.

[00:21:44] I'm sure there are some parents out there that would still have a problem with that, but I don't think most would. I honestly don't think kids even notice until someone tells them that they should care about it. Yeah. When you put small children together and there are lots of toys around them, the girl is just as likely to end up pushing the fire truck as playing with the doll. And the boy's going to be attracted to the stuffed animals until someone tells them, no, you're supposed to have the fire truck change the toy with your sister.

[00:22:14] You have a fascinating part in here about families who actually went into bomb shelters for experiments. You have to test it. I mean, you have to test it. What if you actually are stuck down there with your family for a couple of weeks? Are you going to be able to do it? Are you going to give it a test run? And there were a couple of families that decided they were going to give it a test run.

[00:22:39] They were going to stock their shelter and they were going to go down there for the requisite amount of time and shut themselves in and not have contact with the outside world and see what the experience was going to be like. So one family, though, I don't think did it right because they just shut themselves in their house. Yeah. And I think all of us are going to say, what's the big deal? We did COVID, right? Exactly. You've got your whole house. There's plenty of space for everybody.

[00:23:07] There was the actual bathroom with the running water and the flush toilet. There was the refrigerator full of food. No one's going to have a problem with just shutting the doors and saying, we're not going to leave the house. Going down into your actual basement and spending time down there or into an actual bomb shelter. That is a bigger deal. I will say that there's one passage here that the experts recommend that I have to say something about before we continue with the bomb shelter, which is the experts say,

[00:23:37] It is recommended that tranquilizers be included in the shelter kit for use by both adults and children. If the bomb falls, a recorded guide to survival advises that 100 pills should be enough to last two adults and two children for two weeks. They're popping up like tic-tacs. I mean, do they expect you to be knocked out for two weeks?

[00:24:03] I mean, 100 tranquilizers for four people? Well, you know, better too many than too few, I guess, was their feeling. Like, I mean, if I was that mom, I'd just take them all. I mean, and they'd be all mine. I mean, what? That's like seven tranquilizers a day for two weeks.

[00:24:28] Yeah, they would just be sort of like, you know, lolling around there, not caring what happened. And, you know. So, okay, let's assume you don't have, you're not like, you haven't drugged your family for the full two weeks. There was a family that did decide to do it, right? It said the Pounders? Yes. The Pounder family who did it at Princeton, I think, right, as lab rats. And so what was the result of their time in the bomb shelter?

[00:24:57] I'm trying to recall there were a couple of families, and I hope I'm getting the Pounders straight. They went down. Oh, my goodness. I'm trying to remember the Pounders. Oh, that's okay. Just tell me what some of them were, and we'll just piece them all together. So some of the families reported that they didn't have too bad of a time. The kids were pretty good. They played with their toys. Mom made the things with her boxed and canned goods. And they wouldn't want to do it for a long time, but they managed to do it for a short amount of time.

[00:25:26] And then there were the people that just absolutely could not stand it. The kids, after the first day, were fighting with one another, and they couldn't stand being confined. And living there with the chemical toilets and not being able to get away from one another for even a brief amount of time. And, you know, the limited diet and the boredom. And it's a miracle some families survived this.

[00:25:53] Again, I think we can say these are families that lived in apartments during COVID. Yes. I think what was interesting about the Pounders is this wasn't just an experiment that they did. They were actually observed during their time. So I think their accounts are pretty accurate as opposed to just like self-reporting. Because does anyone want their family to look bad when they go down for two weeks? They're going to say like, oh, yeah, everything was great. Our family was fantastic.

[00:26:21] I think what was interesting is that they said the smell of the chemical toilet was horrific. Yeah, that was probably the worst thing that most people would have dealt with. I mean, that's just no. And that it took like 90 minutes to heat a can of spaghetti. Like it was just it was hard to cook. Yeah. The chemical toilet was bad. Yeah. And of course, you know, they're not expecting that because according to the government, yeah,

[00:26:47] you take your sterno can and you got your can opener and you got your canned spaghetti and your soup and you could you could cook really easily. And that did not prove to be the case. I mean, some people there was a single man who volunteered to do this also. And I don't think he was accepted because one person, if you're someone who likes to be alone anyway, that's not a big deal. Oh, but he was really preparing. He had the greatest plans. And he was going to bake lemon chiffon pies. It's bomb shelter.

[00:27:16] He was going to have the best time. And then, you know, you have you have the poor pounders starving while they're trying to heat up their food on the can of stir it out with the smell of the toilet in the background. And and of course, I like to point out it is her fault again that the family lost weight because she failed to properly take into account how much food her family was going to eat in two weeks. Yeah, you have to estimate how much food they need. It's again her fault. Again, her fault.

[00:27:45] It might be her fault if the house caught on fire because that was one of the problems. Bad housekeeping. Oh, yeah. We've talked about that extensively. It is my it. I can go off. A friend of mine just says house in the middle and I go off. The house. Blaming women. You've got to clean your house. You've got to get rid of the clutter or you are done for. Your house is going to disappear a minute sooner than your neighbor's house. Again, shame women. Shame, shame.

[00:28:15] Better better housekeeping would enable the family to survive. But what I like is that Mr. Pounder noted that it brought him closer to his kids because he didn't actually ever hang out with his children. Yeah, that part was kind of sweet that, you know, he leaves before they get out of bed. He comes home right before they're ready to go to bed. And, you know, other than Saturday and Sunday afternoon, he probably doesn't spend a lot of time with them.

[00:28:44] And, you know, oh, wow. Like, I have children and they're not bad and they're kind of fun to play with. Yeah. So that like also says a lot about the time, right? Like that, hey, wow. The dad actually kind of likes being around his kids, even though society is telling him that he shouldn't. Yeah. He's not supposed to be the one to raise them, but he actually enjoys it. He enjoys being with them. So the poor Pounders didn't do very well. No. I think.

[00:29:14] Which is why I reiterate my plan for surviving a nuclear war is to not. My plan is to run towards the bomb. I want to be under it. Under it is the best place to be. I think that was the conclusion of a lot of people. No, it's probably just as well if we don't survive. There's this wonderful interview that they did in, I forget what magazine it was,

[00:29:42] where the reporter is interviewing different people about what are you putting in your bomb shelter? What are you putting in your basement? What are you doing to prepare for the coming of the bomb if it falls? And they talked to a couple of guys from New England and they said, oh, we're going to buy a couple of six packs of beer. And if the bomb falls, we're just going to crawl under the bed and drink the beer. That's how we're going to go. We're not stocking up a shelter. Sounds great to me.

[00:30:09] So even outside of children's toys, kids couldn't get away from the messaging of the Cold War because it was all over their sitcoms and cartoons. So what happened during the sitcoms that families would have watched together? Well, a lot of the sitcoms were premised on the idea that there was something out there.

[00:30:34] And usually it was not the threat of someone building a nuclear bomb, but it was usually the threat of maybe your neighbors are spies. Maybe there are aliens who are going to come. And the end of the world is nigh. It's not the Russians who are going to visit it upon us, but space aliens are going to visit this upon us. Even shows where you would not expect this to show up. My favorite example is Gilligan's Island. I was just about to mention Gilligan's Island.

[00:31:03] Where these people go out for a three-hour tour of the harbor and are somehow so blown so far off course that no one can find them. For years, evidently. Years. Years. Years. And you know people were looking for them. They've got a couple of millionaires and a famous actress, so you know they were looking. But they end up on this desert island that no one can find in the middle of nowhere. And yet Russian spies show up there.

[00:31:34] It's really just amazing. Even in the middle of the Pacific where no one else can find you, the Russians are going to find you. There's just no getting away from it. You mentioned there's multiple storylines on Gilligan's Island that has to do with nuclear and Cold War, which is you say that, let's see, the castaways develop superpowers after eating vegetables grown with radioactive seeds. Yes. Yep. Mm-hmm. And then the Russian spy is altered to look like Gilligan.

[00:32:04] I actually remember that one because he's speaking with a Russian accent. It's amazing that they would, to do that, they could alter someone's appearance totally, but could not get rid of a Russian accent. I mean, there are limitations. Those Russian accents are quite strong. They are. They are strong. Then there's a cosmonaut that crashes on the island. Again, you know, it's a miracle it took them so long to find these.

[00:32:33] I mean, I guess the Soviets didn't want to rescue them, but they easily could have. I mean, they clearly know they're there. But they could find a cosmonaut, but the U.S. can't find the castaways? I know, and that's a shocking message for Americans, that the Russians could play a cosmonaut. But the might of the United States could not rescue these poor Americans lost on an island. Well, because there was the professor, too. How could he not get off the island? I know.

[00:33:02] He was normally so clever, but could not find a way to get off the island. I think I'm going to have to find those Gilligan's Island reruns now. I know. It really makes you hanker for the simpler things of the past. I had a whole episode already about nuclear music. Oh, I love that. Those wonderful songs. The anti-communist folk singers of the 60s. Oh, that was fun. Yes.

[00:33:34] A little known. I had never heard that one. Yeah. Yeah. The songs about, you know, shelter life and you're not bringing your girlfriend into the bomb shelter. And that's OK, Dad. We'll die together in the flames, but I'm not going to leave her behind. It's, you know. I love this. You write, the poor left winger gets her Khmutans when the pinko of her dreams deserts her. Yep. Yep.

[00:34:03] And while girls could apparently do their part to keep Americans strong simply by stocking bomb shelters, learning how to perform first aid, recognizing communist lies and avoiding folk singers with poor hygiene. Boys also had to make themselves ready for military service to learn how to fight conventional wars as well as nuclear wars, along with all their other duties. It's gendered. It's all gendered. It is so gendered. Yep. But I'm glad they learned the lesson to avoid folk singers with poor hygiene. Yeah.

[00:34:33] Because the upstanding folk singers, you know, they're going to be clean cut and shaven. And you don't want the bearded folk singer was peddling his communist corn. I was like, what did they have against folk singers? Did the military, I mean, because so much of this is just from the military, right? So did the military just assume that all folk singers were communists?

[00:35:02] Well, the message is, let's give peace a chance. War is bad. Let's love one another. You know, we'll all be brothers and sisters. And to Americans at the time, shockingly, that sounded like communism. The very idea that you could get along with people and you wouldn't want to fight war and you wouldn't want to kill and you would think that was bad. That sounds like a communist message. I'm a little shocked, but okay. And was she also not supposed to go to college?

[00:35:32] No, you could go to college. And actually, a lot of women did. But graduation rates actually went down. So there were fewer women who were graduating from college than, say, had at the turn of the century. So if in the early 20th century, you were a woman and you went to college, it was because you wanted an education and you were going to stay until you got your degree and you were going to delay marriage and you were going to delay having children and that meant you would have fewer children.

[00:35:59] But if you went to college in the 1950s, that's not your primary goal. Your primary goal, it was assumed, would be to find a nice guy to get married. And then when you did that, your career was going to be as a wife and a mother. So why stay? Why not just drop out after your sophomore year and go live in your little apartment and have your first baby while he is finishing up his degree?

[00:36:28] And yet, of course, there were people who completed their degrees and went on to graduate school. But it wasn't assumed that if you went to college in the 1950s and were a woman, that you were as serious about getting an education as, say, in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. So this is where the whole assumption you went to college to get your MRS comes from. Yeah, you went to get your MRS. Because you weren't going to need that. You were just going to get married. You didn't need a degree.

[00:36:58] Your husband was going to care for you. He was going to bring home the bacon. You know, you just had to keep the house clean and stock the bomb shelter and take care of the kids. And he was going to worry about all the really important things. So you didn't really need much of an education. Don't worry your pretty little head about those things. Exactly. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. He'll take care of everything. So this conversation went from what I thought was going to be toys to gendered roles in the 1950s.

[00:37:27] But it's all of a piece. It's all of a piece. You pull one thread and it leads to another and it leads to another. And it's all that fabric of, you know, society. It's true. Because if we don't, here come the Russians and there goes the world. Well, and there was this idea that the Russian women were very masculine, right? Yes. Yes. Because Russia, you know, officially, you know, all workers are equal.

[00:37:55] Whether you're male or female doesn't matter. You know, anyone can do a job. And in the reality of the Soviet Union, which was not as industrialized before the 1950s, women did do a lot of jobs that men would have done. They drove trucks and worked on the railroad and paved streets and did lots of these things. And the assumption is, well, they're all just a bunch of masculine, muscular, rough

[00:38:24] individuals that you're not going to want to come across. They also served in the army, right? Yeah, they did. They served in the army. They flew planes. They did all these things that were just Americans had coded as masculine. And so if they did that... That sounds great. Yeah, it does sound great. It sounds like people had a lot of options. But that's not how Americans during the Cold War saw it.

[00:38:49] The fact that a woman, you know, worked always because she didn't have a man to take care of her and working was a bad thing. It was a punishment. And that just showed you how behind the times the Russians were and how cruel they were that they expected women to work instead of staying home and taking care of children, which is what they really wanted to do, supposedly.

[00:39:12] You know, I remember this messaging that was prevalent for many years after the Cold War, which was the way that the U.S. media spoke about Russian athletes. Oh, yeah. Especially the gymnasts. Yes. I wrote several years ago, I have an article in a book about the gendering and the portrayal of gymnasts from the Eastern Bloc and gymnasts from the United States. And if they're East Germans, they're probably on steroids.

[00:39:41] And the Russians, it varied. They're either in the Russian army, in which case they're probably spies, or they're these terrified little girls who will do anything their cruel coaches tell them to do because, you know, God knows what horrible kinds of punishments they have dreamed up for these children. So, you know, it was one or the other. But American girls competed for the love of it.

[00:40:11] They expressed their creativity and they were never being bullied or forced to diet or do things they didn't want to do, whereas the poor Russian and Romanian girls were starved to make sure they made weight. And it's really pretty, pretty horrendous. And I mean, that was the messaging to kids as well during the Cold War is you couldn't even

[00:40:37] escape it even during the Olympics and with sporting events that should be, should not be political at all. It was still there. Yeah, it's, it's, it should be neutral. They should be talking about people just as athletes. And yet there, there has to come in that undercurrent and the commentators themselves would, when they should be saying, oh, well, that was a wonderful vault. That was a 9.7. If she hadn't separated her legs, it would have been a little higher. They would say things like, oh, well, you know, the Americans are not going to do well

[00:41:06] because, you know, unless you've got that hammer and sickle, the judges are not going to vote for you. So I remember that or that judge always gives Americans bad scores because they're in the pocket of blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's, it's not that the Russian athlete may actually be better. It's that the judges are being bullied by the Russians and they're deliberately marking down the American gymnasts. I remember that. Yes. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yes.

[00:41:35] Oh, it's so subtle though, when it's constantly in the background, unless it's pointed out, you just don't catch it all the time. Yeah. And I think certainly during the Cold War, I think maybe if you were really attuned to it, there were certain things that suggested it maybe subconsciously that this is what they were trying to say, even if, if they're not coming out, even if they're not being very blatant about it. There were a lot of things. I'm trying to remember some of the things that they said about

[00:42:04] Olga Corbett, who is just, she really frightened a lot of Americans because a lot of Americans really liked her. There was a Russian they could relate to because she was only 17. Whereas the other women were older. We don't think of like 25 year olds doing gymnastics, but at the time 17 was considered very young to be on the gymnastics team. And yet people would say

[00:42:28] things like, well, she's actually a captain in the Russian army, which was how they enabled athletes to train without having things like private gymnasiums. And you joined a police unit or you joined a military unit. So you could use their gymnasiums and you could use their coaches. If not, you didn't have access. Exactly. So technically, yes, she's a captain in the Russian army or some, another woman was a colonel

[00:42:58] in the Russian army, but that doesn't mean that they're out there firing guns at Americans. It just means that they go to the gymnasium at the army barracks and work out on the balance beam and lift some weights and get paid so that they can spend their time training as athletes instead of working the normal way beyond eight hours a day that a lot of ordinary Soviet citizens had to work.

[00:43:26] So it was just their way of making sure their athletes could train. Yeah, it was their way of making sure their athletes had the time to train and a place to train. I think American sports commentators probably knew that, but it's just much more dramatic to say, oh, well, the woman who won the gold medal on the balance beam, she's a colonel in such and such a division of the Soviet military. Like I said, I shouldn't be surprised by any of this, but it's, yeah, it just gets me. It's not,

[00:43:56] it's, it's not blatant lying, but it's not providing all the facts to lead someone down the path you want to lead them down. And there was certainly plenty of negative things people could have said about the Soviet Union. I mean, you don't have to go very far to find something negative to say about Stalin. No, definitely. There's plenty of points to criticize the KGB, but to have to go after every single point,

[00:44:25] every single detail, every single part of Soviet society. Every single person. Every single person, every single everything. It's mind blowing that people were so obsessed. It's like during the time they could not have any, like, you could not have a positive thing to say about anything in the Soviet Union. You couldn't. It was just, if you started to say positive things about the Soviet Union, there's the suspicion that, hmm, are you, are you a fellow traveler?

[00:44:55] Are you, are you someone who's sympathetic with communism? So maybe we should look into your background because the next thing, you know, you're going to be lured in. I think there is one thing that should be said that that is maybe not so negative about the Cold War and the fear of nuclear annihilation, although certainly there are plenty of horrific things. I have a question. Are you sure you want to say it for fear of being labeled a communist? I may be labeled a communist, but, you know, perhaps I'll. Okay, go ahead. I'll risk it.

[00:45:24] I mean, that this is, ironically, that this is, it may have been bad for feminism, but it was good for civil rights because so long as the Soviets, again, all workers are equal, and so divisions among people based on race and ethnicity are wrong. Of course, in the Soviet Union, there was discrimination against minority ethnicities and minority religions. There certainly was. But at least officially, there was not.

[00:45:52] And that is the thing that the United States finds so hard to live down, that all Soviets have to say when they're trying to cultivate allies in Asia or Africa or Latin America is, well, look at the United States and look what happens to people of color in the United States. And do you really trust the Americans to be good faith allies to you? And in the United States, certainly civil rights was associated with communism.

[00:46:19] And people who were pro-civil rights risked being labeled as communists. It also, I think, gave a spur to the government. As the civil rights protests were going on and as African Americans were fighting for their rights and going to court, I think it encouraged some people in the government to turn and say, maybe this is an opportunity to counter a lot of the things that the Soviets say about us

[00:46:45] and start paying attention to things like voting rights and desegregating schools and ensuring equality for people. I mean, it certainly was more than that. It took more than that. But if it hadn't been for this desire to prove the Soviet Union wrong, maybe there would have been fewer politicians who would have signed on to that. I don't know. But that was certainly a concern. And at least started the conversation. It did. It did start the conversation.

[00:47:14] And I remember there's an interview with a young boy, a young African American boy, who is part of a movement to desegregate a white school. And this may have been the Little Rock Kids. I don't remember. But they're being interviewed. And the reporter asks him, why do you want to be part of this? Because clearly, you're facing a lot of backlash. This is dangerous for you. It can't be pleasant.

[00:47:38] And he says, I want to do this because I want to prove that the communists are wrong about our country. And so, and I thought that that was just, that's an interesting kind of spin on it. That, you know, communists say we are a racist country. And here's this young African American boy. He's going to try to do something about that. And I think certainly not all politicians did it for that reason.

[00:48:07] Certainly not all white people got on board for that reason. But I think that there were some politicians who said, this is a sticking point here. And the Soviets are right about this. And we have to do something. Thank you for listening. I'm Shelley Lesher, and this has been My Nuclear Life.