Revolutionary Road

Though Revolutionary Road is not a historical novel per se, it is a work of realism, specifically post-war American realism. Thus, a rudimentary knowledge of the important historical, political, and cultural aspects of the 1950s is helpful in understanding the pressures placed upon the characters.

The decade of the 1950s is often viewed as a Golden Age in American history. The US emerged triumphant from World War II, its economy had fully recovered from the Great Depression and the war, and business was booming. People became more affluent than ever before and there were great strides in technological innovations. This was also the age when the suburbs as we understand them were truly created. People were moving out of the cities looking for standalone homes or toward the cities from the countryside for work; these two demographics both met in the suburbs. With more buying power than ever before, an increasing number of people could purchase homes for the first time.

However, this rise in wealth and prosperity was also coupled with the frightening reality of atomic warfare and the Cold War. The Korean War was fought between 1951-1953. Politically, a red scare was on the rise in the form of McCarthyism, resulting in a general sense of paranoia about being labeled a communist. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former supreme allied commander during WW2, became president in 1953 and stayed in office until 1961. Additionally, this new American prosperity was largely afforded to white Americans. Black veterans returning from World War II found themselves excluded from GI Bill benefits, such as free college tuition and guaranteed mortgages. The 1950s were characterized by segregation—especially in the South, where Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965—but also the growing Civil Rights Movement, with the Supreme Court declaring segregation in public schools illegal in 1954 and the Montgomery bus boycott beginning in 1955.

American prosperity and anti-communist sentiment contributed to a new set of norms regarding families and gender roles. As men returned from the war, women who worked in factories and other professions during wartime were fired. The rise of suburban living elevated the nuclear family over previously common multigenerational households, creating an environment in which middle-class men worked and their wives were homemakers. These gender roles—man as provider and woman as mother­—became even more entrenched during the red scare as a cultural difference between capitalist and communist hegemonies. While many considered this arrangement the ideal, many women felt confined by a life that largely kept them at home. This mentality is reflected by April in Revolutionary Road and eventually led to the second-wave feminist movement, with writers like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem advocating for women to join the workforce and seek fulfillment outside of homemaking.