HIST 280 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Comfort Food, Consumerism, Betty Friedan
HIST 280 – Lecture 9
Consumerism
Lecture Overview
• In post-ww2, North Americans were eager to “make up for lost time” by expanding
their families, and embracing more comfortable lifestyles
• These men and women were pursuing the “Good Life” – a term used to describe
the many “advantages” of post-war affluence and suburban-living
• This unit explores the post-war era’s
liberating and confining
tendencies in order to
capture a broader range of historical experience
• After a decade of depression followed by wartime austerity, North Americans were
ready to spend their money and splurged on new cars, telephones, radios and
household appliances; they revelled in the expanded set of consumer-choices that
were available to them (between 1945-1960)
• Fads like hula-hooping caught on, and many families joined the “viewing classes”
meaning that they bought TV sets and watched programs such as Howdy-Doody
and I Love Lucy
• “Ad Men”
• 1963: second-wave feminist Betty Friedan caused an uproar by penning a scathing
critique of other women’s willingness to play the role of the naïve and acquiescent
“suburban housewife” – a phenomenon which she aptly termed “the feminine
mystique”
o She popularized the idea that millions of white, middle class women were
“unhappy with their lives” bc they were not pursuing higher education and
professional careers;
o In response, many Canadian & American women wrote to popular
magazines and newspapers that they were in fact feeling trapped in the
domestic sphere
• Sociologists also discovered what they called “new suburbanites” that they
described as placid and content
o Postwar discontent, attributed to the boredom of attending mindless social
functions like neighbourhood bbqs and PTA meetings
o To them, “suburban sadness” stemmed more from the excessive pursuit of
leisure than from the rigidity of post-war gender ideology
Gender Roles & Domestic Ideology
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