1. Introduction: Women and Gender in the Postwar United States Joanne Meyerowitz Part I: Women and Wage Labor 2. When Women Arrived: The Transformation of New York's Chinatown Xiaolan Bao 3. An "Obligation to Participate": Married Nurses' Labor Force Participation in the 1950s Susan Rimby Leighow 4. Recapturing Working-Class Feminism: Union Women in the Postwar Era Dorothy Sue Cobble 5. Women's Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years Susan M. Hartmann Part II: Activist Women and Their Organizations 6. Gender and Post-World War II Progressive Politics: A Bridge to Social Activism of the 1960s Susan Lynn 7. Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists During the McCarthy Era, 1945-1955 Harriet Hyman Alonso 8. "Is Family Devotion Now Subversive?": Familialism Against McCarthyism Deborah A. Gerson 9. Gender and Civic Activism in Mexican American Barrios in California: The Community Service Organization, 1947-1962 Margaret Rose 10. "Our Skirts Gave Them Courage!": The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955-1961 Dee Garrison Part III: Constructions of Womanhood 11. Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958 Joanne Meyerowitz 12. "I Wanted the Whole World to See": Race, Gender, and Constructions of Motherhood in the Death of Emmett Till Ruth Feldstein 13. White Neurosis, Black Pathology: Constructing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy in the Wartime and Postwar United States Regina G. Kunzel Part IV: Sexual Outlaws and Cultural Rebels 14. Extreme Danger: Women Abortionists and Their Clients Before Roe v. Wade Rickie Solinger 15. The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America Donna Penn 16. The "Other" Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls Wini Breines About the Contributors

In the popular stereotype of post-World War II America, women abandoned their wartime jobs and contentedly retreated to the home. This work unveils the diversity of postwar women, showing how far women departed from this one-dimensional image.