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At 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 home, the legion of war workers burst out of crowded city quarters, and in battalions they set out to find homes where the land was greener and cheaper. New settlements spread across acre upon acre; small, sleepy old towns were inundated by newcomers, and the suburban way of life became the visible substance of what a hard-working nation was working so hard for. "Eventually," observes Humorist-Exurbanite James Thurber (Cornwall, Conn.) of the steady spread of Suburbia, "this country will be called the United Cities of America. One suburb will pile into another until in New York State there'll only be Albany and New York City; and they can really fight it out in the streets. If they start shoveling in San Diego, buildings will tumble in Bangor."
The 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, arbitrator of children's disputes, policeman ("Tommy, didn't your mother ever tell you that it's not nice to go into people's houses and open their refrigerators?").
If she is not pregnant, she wonders if she is. She takes her peanut-butter sandwich lunch while standing, thinks she looks a fright, watches her weight (periodically), jabbers over the short-distance telephone with the next-door neighbor. She runs a worn track to the front door, buys more Girl Scout cookies and raffle tickets than she thinks she should, cringes from the suburban locust—the door-to-door salesman who peddles everything from storm windows to potato chips, fire-alarm systems to vacuum cleaners, diaper sendee to magazine subscriptions. She keeps the checkbook, frets for the day that her husband's next raise will top the flood of monthly bills (it never will)—a tide that never seems to rise as high in the city as it does in the suburbs.
She wonders if her husband will send her flowers (on no special occasion), shoos the children next door to play at the neighbor's house for a change, paints her face for her husband's return before she wrestles with dinner. Spotted through her day are blessed moments of relief or dark thoughts of escape.