Gender, Family, and the Postwar Landscape of Mass Consumption Consumer Culture and U.S. Civic Identity

Suburbanization baby boom consumerism set the tone of postwar American life Levittown circa 1950

World War II and Postwar Consumer Culture: "In the context of World War II, good citizenship and good consumership were promoted as inseparable, and women gained special stewardship over both.” Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 83.

Many groups “endorsed the importance of mass consumption to making a successful reconversion from wartime to peacetime, although each came to value mass consumption for its own reasons." (Cohen, 114)

Postwar American Dream widespread postwar affluence Democratization through shared abundance (Cohen) by 1953, average US family enjoyed twice as much real income as in the 1920s

"Suburbia is becoming the most important single market in the country. It is the suburbanite who starts the mass fashions—for children, … dungarees, vodka martinis, outdoor barbecues, functional furniture, [and] picture windows … All suburbs are not alike, but they are more alike than they are different.” William H. Whyte, Organization Man. Watch clip: In the SuburbsIn the Suburbs

Dan Ryan Expressway, Chicao

Consequences of superhighway development for urban, ethnic neighborhoods

suburban sprawl – note dependence on cars

FHA, Redlining, and Covenants

Cold War and consumerism Politicians conflated “free choice as consumers…with political freedom“ Nixon-Kruschev Kitchen Debate in 1959 (Cohen, 126) What does Elaine Tyler May say about the Kitchen Debate and the relative construction of U.S. and Soviet womanhood?

To us, diversity, the right to choose,... is the most important thing. We don't have one decision made at the top by one government official.... We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewives have a choice.... Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets? -Vice President Richard Nixon at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959 (quoted in Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 1988, 17)

Consumer Credit First credit card in 1950; AmEx follows in 1958 installment buying, home mortgages, and auto loans raised Americans’ total private indebtedness in the 1950s from $73 billion to $196 billion

Consumerism and Domestic Ideology

"Regardless of the Levittown house which you choose, you will be acquiring the latest in modern design with the most up to date appliances and features." Levitt and Sons sales brochure Interior of the Country Clubber model. [Levittown Regional Library] n/one/d.html

Woman standing in Levittowner model kitchen. [Rita Calzarette] n/one/d.html

The Tender Trap, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955 “A woman isn’t a woman until she’s been married and had children”

Educational film produced by the Centron Corporation, See yStudy1955.

“[The] landscape of mass consumption created a metropolitan society where people no longer left their residential enclaves to enter central marketplaces, and the parks, streets, and public buildings that surrounded them, but rather were separated by class, race, and less so gender in differentiated commercial subcenters." (Cohen, 288) Hillsdale Shopping Mall, San Mateo, California circa 1960

Civil Rights The "firm connection between citizenship and consumption presented African Americans with new opportunities for fighting the discrimination in public places that had so angered them during wartime," and hence the Montgomery bus boycotts and Woolworth sit-ins across the South. (166)

Race and Suburban Property Ownership [R]acism conspired with the fear of losing purchasing power to create racially segregated suburbs the nation over... "[A]s a majority of white Americans invested most of their life savings in a home by 1960, fear of racial mixing moved beyond a simple white discomfort with sharing neighborhoods and public institutions. The presence of black neighbors threatened to depress property values and hence to jeopardize people's basic economic security, or so homeowners were convinced." (Cohen, 213)