A number of factors contributed to the gendered expectations that characterized the middle-class white American family in the 1950s. US marriage rates skyrocketed after World War II, and heterosexual couples were getting married younger, commonly fresh out of high school or during college. Cold War propaganda put “the American family at the center of the struggle” by contrasting its wholesomeness with the supposedly bleak separation endured by Soviet children forced into care while their mothers worked (“Mrs. America: Women’s Roles in the 1950s.” PBS).

The media idealized domesticity and depicted the ideal white middle-class woman as a happy homemaker, content to raise multiple children while her husband served as the sole breadwinner. Depictions of beautiful wives with perfectly clean houses and model children were pervasive: “[A]n image was promoted of American women, with their feminine hairdos and delicate dresses, tending to the hearth and home as they enjoyed the fruits of capitalism, democracy, and freedom” (“Mrs. America: Women’s Roles in the 1950s”). Moreover, those who failed to conform to standards or wanted more fulfillment or purpose faced judgment. It was not until Betty Friedan’s 1963 second-wave feminism classic The Feminine Mystique that the idea that women should be entirely satisfied by domestic lives was widely questioned. Lulu finds the expectations stifling: She resists adhering to the cleaning schedule laid out by Good Housekeeping magazine, struggles to manage life with her son, and regrets giving up her dream of a career after college. The monotony of a life where her duty is to support her husband and children overwhelms her even before she experiences postpartum trauma and symptoms of lupus.

In the 1950s, few support systems were available to women who felt alienated from strict gender roles. The medical establishment developed tools primarily meant to pacify patients into acceptance; financial institutions made it difficult for women to be unmarried, as they were unable to open bank accounts or take out loans without male cosigners; and the oppressive fear of ostracism prevented women from speaking out. Lulu is afraid to share her real feelings for fear that she is the only woman who feels as she does; what concerns she does express are dismissed as “hysteria.”