This article examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated by certain business industries via mass media during the postwar period. I draw evidence from popular culture, mass media, and marketing and advertising materials to demonstrate that postwar suburban consumers received conflicting messages about the public/private dichotomy. Public discourse on the role of the suburban home promoted the reemergence of the cult of domesticity and the primacy of family life over work. However, efforts by the housing, telecommunications, and office technology industries contradicted this message to promote home-based labor within the suburban home to expand their consumer markets. An examination of the postwar American home, specifically the study/home office as a technologized workspace reveals that the growth of American consumerism advanced the expansion of market labor in the home, especially for women.
...More
Book
Mark W. Robbins;
(2017)
Middle Class Union: Organizing the "consuming public" in Post-World War I America
(/isis/citation/CBB599001222/)
Book
Katie Hindmarch-Watson;
(2020)
Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital
(/isis/citation/CBB834503224/)
Book
Veit, Helen Zoe;
(2013)
Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001201323/)
Article
Mette Simonsen Abildgaard;
Lee Humphreys;
(July 2020)
Landline Natives: Telephone Practices since the 1950s as Innovation
(/isis/citation/CBB656803681/)
Book
Colin B. Burke;
(2014)
Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss
(/isis/citation/CBB321840730/)
Thesis
Luke Stadel;
(2015)
Television as a Sound Medium, 1922-1994
(/isis/citation/CBB291048813/)
Book
James W. Cortada;
(2016)
All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870
(/isis/citation/CBB010653555/)
Article
Mary C. Beaudry;
Stephen A. Mrozowski;
(1988)
The Archeology of Work and Home Life in Lowell, Massachusetts: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Boott Cotton Mills Corporation
(/isis/citation/CBB308369469/)
Article
Williams, Amrys O.;
(2013)
FOOD: Transforming the American Table, 1950--2000: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
(/isis/citation/CBB001320541/)
Book
Parr, Joy;
(1999)
Domestic goods: The material, the moral and the economic in the postwar years
(/isis/citation/CBB001180362/)
Book
S.A. George;
(2013)
Gendering science fiction films: Invaders from the suburbs
(/isis/citation/CBB514146210/)
Book
Craig Robertson;
(2021)
The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information
(/isis/citation/CBB869177821/)
Book
Traci Parker;
(2019)
Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s
(/isis/citation/CBB568276221/)
Thesis
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle;
(2008)
Encoding the Body: Critically Assessing the Collection and Uses of Biometric Information
(/isis/citation/CBB001561133/)
Book
Jan L. Logemann;
(2019)
Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism
(/isis/citation/CBB613870758/)
Book
Emily Remus;
(2019)
A Shoppers’ Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown
(/isis/citation/CBB592344207/)
Thesis
Hsu, Leo Lopung;
(2007)
Hacking Development: How Geeks Do Good in the “Digital Age”
(/isis/citation/CBB001561401/)
Book
Emily E. LB. Twarog;
(2017)
Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB799784631/)
Thesis
Sayers, Jentery;
(2011)
How Text Lost Its Source: Magnetic Recording Cultures
(/isis/citation/CBB001567268/)
Article
Sumner, James;
Gooday, Graeme J. N.;
(2008)
Introduction
(/isis/citation/CBB001023038/)
Be the first to comment!