Word: suburbias
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Auto Nation. In Suburbia's pedocracy huge emphasis is placed on activities for the young (Washington's suburban Montgomery County, Md.-pop. 358,000 -spends about $34 million a year on youth programs). The suburban housewife might well be a can-opener cook, but she must have an appointment book and a driver's license and must be able to steer a menagerie of leggy youngsters through the streets with the coolness of a driver at the Sebring trials; the suburban sprawl and the near absence of public transportation generally mean that any destination is just beyond...
...Suburbia is a particular kind of American phenomenon, and its roots lie in a particular kind of American heritage. In a casual, ill-planned way it is the meeting ground between the growing, thriving city and the authentic U.S. legend of smalltown life. Says Sociologist Alvin Scaff, who lives in Los Angeles' suburban Claremont: "If you live in the city, you may be a good citizen and interest yourself in a school-board election, but it is seldom meaningful in human terms. In a suburb, the chances are you know the man who is running for the school board...
...early 20th century, middle-class Suburbia was a reality in England, and Social Historian C.F.G. Masterman was perhaps the first of a legion of urban critics to draw a bead on it. Each little red house, he wrote in 1909, "boasts its pleasant drawing room, its bow window, its little front garden . . . The women, with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get. and so exacting when found, find time hangs rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to shopping centers in the West End and pious sociabilities, occasional theater visits and the interests of home...
...first the countryside communities leafed and budded with the homes of the well to do, who could afford to come and go by the seasons. By the turn of the century, U.S. Suburbia was flowering with permanent residents. Freed from the city by the trolley and rapid-transit services, and then by the automobile, hoisted gradually by a strengthening economy, the new middle-income families swept beyond the gates to buy homes of their own, from which they could commute to their jobs. When World War II ended, the sweep to the suburbs turned into a stampede. The veterans came...
...Women. The key figure in all Suburbia, the thread that weaves between family and community-the keeper of the suburban dream-is the suburban housewife. In the absence of her commuting, city-working husband, she is first of all the manager of home and brood, and beyond that a sort of aproned activist with a penchant for keeping the neighborhood and community kettle whistling. With children on her mind and under her foot, she is breakfast getter ("You can't have ice cream for breakfast because I say you can't"); laundress, house cleaner, dishwasher, shopper, gardener, encyclopedia...