May’s key achievement was to use her analytical skills to understand the relationships between these different factors. She traced ways in which domestic life and US foreign policy mirrored one another, showing that the structures and processes they aimed for, while different in scale, were essentially the same. She then carefully brought together different types of historical data, organizing her study to produce a carefully reasoned argument that the American suburban home was in certain direct ways the product of the ‘containment’ policies that ruled American foreign policy at the time.