Emma's Blog

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Suburbia and one Woman’s Opinion

June 13, 2013 by Emma · 15 Comments · Uncategorized

In Jackson’s book, “The Crabgrass Frontier”, the author draws attention to the fact that city fringe areas were once reserved for the working class and poor.  Being far away from the center of the city was less fashionable and required more effort to travel to work each day.  Before the omnibus, ferries and railways, everyone walked to work, typically living in a space connected to their family business.  As transportation options increased and city areas grew more densely populated, wealthy citizens began building homes in country areas, seeking solitude and retreat.  Transportation providers partnered with newly developed properties to advertise the easy and short trip to the city.  Row homes inside city limits were seen as starter houses, but homes with a surrounding yard became the ideal.  Suddenly, the “good life” involved living in a home surrounded by grass and a fence, separated from the mayhem and health concerns associated with the city.  It is easy to see how the fashionable lusts of the mid to late 1800’s area citizens gave way to many of the trends we see today, such as “keeping up with the Jones'”.

One thing that struck me as particularly interesting is how the 1850’s ideal family reminded me of that of the 1950’s, just without dishwashers.  Jackson outlines this on page 48: “Between 1820 and 1850, work and men left the home. The growth of manufacturing meant that married couples became more and more isolated from each other during the working day, with the husband employed away from home and the wife responsible for everything connected with the residence.  The family became isolated and feminized, and this ‘woman’s sphere’ came to be regarded as superior to the nondomestic institutions of the world.” As I imagine the flourishing of the original suburbs in the 1800’s, I wonder: could they have happened without a stay-at-home household manager?  Before washing machines, Little Caesars and microwave dinners, could men have lived so far from their employers, leaving an empty home each day to tend itself?  The primary message to women of the day was to stay home and keep a good, clean house for your husband and children. Once women were married, their legal rights were forfeit to their husbands anyway (even in 1960s and 70s women struggled to get their own lines of credit).  Besides, keeping a home was much better than working at a factory or mill.

Clearly defined gender roles helped the suburban system to prosper, and this didn’t just weigh on women.  As women were confined to the home, men were shoved around by employers who knew they were too tied down by a house note to strike.  All these years later, many of these pressures still exist.  Just last month, there was pushback to the notion of mothers as breadwinners. The standard of the absent male breadwinner and the female homemaker does not spring from “science” (as some claim) as much as history.  Because of gender inequality, women were the ones to forfeit their names and legal rights to their husbands, keeping them constricted from upward societal movement.  While the original dichotomy of roles helped suburbs to form, I believe the standard is no longer necessary today. And though the statistics suggest that many agree, I have to wonder: why are we asking the same questions in 2013 that we asked in the 1850’s?

Megyn Kelly questioning Erick Erickson about his quote: “when you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role.”

15 Comments so far ↓

  • TruthSayer

    Lou Dobbs’ face is terrifying…So is the gentrification of semi-urban neighborhoods a step forward for feminism?

  • Emma

    Honestly, I am not sure how modern neighborhood gentrification would effect feminism, but it is something I would love to explore. I wish I could have spent more time on it in the blog, but I have to keep posts under 500 words! I do think that though a heavy standard of gender roles lead to the formation of modern suburbs, that they are no longer necessary today.

  • mhwllmrn

    Interesting take on the roles of women and suburbanization. I wonder, though, can we really say that women’s roles changed that drastically during the period of massive suburbanization? I would content that “traditional” women’s roles pre-dated that by hundreds of years. It may be, instead, that men were just a little more present at home In a way, it is ironic that the very debt and pressure wrought by suburban living may actually have served as an impetus for women to enter the workforce en masse.

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  • thoyugh

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