Fetzer notes that for much of this time, the amount of hostility directed at a given immigrant group depended on “how much the newcomers’ culture diverged from the dominant WASP norm.”107 This was especially the case when there was a big influx of a very different group. The “exotic” Chinese and Japanese had it rough, while fair-complexioned Brits and Scandinavians were mostly accepted. Though economic factors played a role in any given year’s levels of xenophobia, immigrants weren’t, for the most part, hated for taking our jobs. They were resented for usurping our culture. Americans were worried that newcomers would commit the worst sin of all: never being quite like “us.”

In love and romance, too, nothing has, historically, been hotter than conformity. The idea that people should embrace you “just the way you are” is nearly as new as the sext. After a brief dip into bohemianism in the 1920s, and before the tuning in and dropping out of the late 1960s, Americans of the late 1940s and ’50s craved convention. The rise of bureaucracies within corporations made standardized practices and dress codes more important. “You see a filling out of middle management,” explained Micki McGee, a sociologist who has studied the history of self-help literature. “You see women employed as assistants, secretaries, and you see conformity around what’s supposed to happen.”

Add to that the virulent anti-Communism of the era, as well as television programs and magazines that had vast penetration, and you get a cultural monolith. People were falling into “helpless conformity,” as Betty Friedan called it.108 Those who aroused any suspicion of disloyalty to the U.S. risked being fired from their jobs. Even liberals were considered, in the words of one U.S. intelligence officer, “a hop, skip, and a jump” from sympathizing with the Reds.109 Various societal ills, including mentally ill children, were blamed on “wives who are not feminine enough and husbands [who are] not truly male,”110 as one 1950s writer put it. Standing out simply wasn’t worth the risk.

The historian Stephanie Coontz, who read dozens of 1950s- and ’60s-era advice books and women’s magazines for her book A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, says that everyone was on the lookout for Mr. or Mrs. Right—but there was only one way to be right. “With only a few exceptions,” she told me, “they all emphasized the importance of a woman adjusting to her husband’s work, friends, interests, and hobbies, and especially of putting her own interests and aspirations second, if not entirely aside.”

“I quote one writer,” Coontz added, “who says that if a wife must take a job, she should be sure that it’s not interesting enough to compete with her dedication to him.”