Citizen-Spy

xxvi Introduction
a thing scarcely existed, then or now), and intense pressures to conform. Political
loyalty and loyalty to social norms were in many cases equated; women
who dared challenge the ideology of domestic motherhood ran the risk of being
labeled unnatural, insurgent, or both. 15 Cold War political struggles were
mapped onto the domestic sphere not just through gender norms, but also
through a blend of consumerism and technological utopianism; when he visited
the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, Vice President Richard
Nixon debated Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev about the merits of the timesaving
conveniences to be found in the modern suburban home. 16
The U.S.-Soviet political tensions that were at the heart of the Cold War
continued to escalate throughout the 1950s. In 1954 the CIA overthrew the elected
governments of Guatemala and Iran to install pro-Western regimes, and by
1956, the Soviets had crushed a Hungarian rebellion and created the Warsaw
Pact to oppose NATO. In 1957 America’s worst fears of Soviet nuclear power
were seemingly realized when the successful Sputnik satellite launch demonstrated
that two oceans weren’t enough to guarantee safety. Castro’s assumption
of power in Cuba shortly thereafter only exacerbated these anxieties, and
led to the disastrous CIA-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The Soviets’
successful downing of an American U2 spy plane and the construction of the
Berlin Wall further eroded diplomatic relations between the superpowers, which
reached a point of maximum crisis over the Soviet installation of nuclear missiles
in Cuba in 1962.
The resolution of the missile crisis marked the first thawing of U.S.-Soviet
relations. The Kremlin–White House telephone hotline was installed, and the
first nuclear test ban was signed in 1963. Alan Nadel has suggested that the
gradual thawing of the social strictures of containment culture was linked to
these political transformations. The conflation of geopolitics with all aspects of
American everyday life represented, to Nadel, an impossibly tight master narrative
whose convoluted logic simply could not hold. Certainly, the early 1960s
saw the reemergence of the political left that had been in hiding for over a
decade. So, too, did the period see the broadening popularity of political movements
once defined as dangerously dissident: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique bespoke the corrosive frustration of the “illness that had no name,”
the U.S. civil rights movement was making concrete steps toward national