In the Basement

Abstract

The home fallout shelter is an outsized presence in American culture around 1962 despite the fact that relatively few were actually built. There are a number of reasons this happened; the reason that dominated the imaginary around individual private shelters was the moral concern it raised. Like the family unit held together by strong atomic forces and unable to be split up without cataclysmic effects, the suburban house was imagined as self-contained and fortified, while able to be grouped effectively in larger clusters, a social agglomeration without the concomitant dangers of collective action or public space. The dissonance between a contained, feminized home shelter and a fortified, masculinized bunker recurs in fiction from the period and in fiction looking back through it. There was little space within the dominant nuclear imaginary for articulating contrarian thoughts; but we do find them in places where it was conventionally harder to take those thoughts seriously: in the frivolous behavior attributed to children and women, and in the frivolous spaces of containment where children and women were allowed to play at being serious grown-ups.