Q: Can you talk about the home protection drills?
LM: Yes. A very vivid example of how the family becomes militarized in the
1950s is the home protection exercises, which was a workbook of drills and
exercises that families were supposed to perform routinely, perhaps weekly,
perhaps monthly. And each family member had a particular job. Fathers to
build the shelter, mothers to stock the shelter, children to make sure that
there was no debris around the shelter, to practice various drills that
children could handle, like making sure that the brooms and the mops were in
the right place in the shelter, very basic things. But each family member had
a particular task.
And the home protection exercises emphasized drilling as a way, again, of
making sure that families could perform their duties in the face of attack
instinctively, without panic. That was very important, programming people to
be calm, to be rational, to accept the fact of nuclear war, to accept the fact
of the hydrogen bomb, and to accept the fact of home front preparedness. And
each time a family performed these tasks successfully, they were supposed to
check it off in the workbook.
And one of the ideas floated by women's organizations in the late 1950s was to
reward each family that had successfully performed the home protection
exercises with a home protection sticker. And the idea was that local female
civil defense volunteers would go from house to house on every block, meet with
the homemaker, make sure she had done the appropriate, taken the appropriate
steps to make the home ready for attack. And she, the family, would be
rewarded with a sticker that they would put in their window to show their
patriotism, to show that they had done their duty in the nuclear age, and to
advertise to other families the importance of being ready for the big one.
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