When men returned after war gender roles changed as discussed above. There was a general sense at the time that excess domesticity was making returning soldiers soft and eroded their masculinity. Look magazine published a series in 1958 on new pressures facing American men. One of the contributor’s was of the view that nation was in danger of becoming “too soft, too complacent and too home-oriented to meet the challenge of dynamic nations like China and the Soviet Union” (qtd in Halliwell 41). The figure of the war veteran, uncomfortable in the ‘gray flannel life’ or the city life was a stock character in fiction and film in the 1950s.
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