The Progressive Housewife
Subtitle: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945-1965 (Politics and Culture in Modern America)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: April 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780812237184
Subjects: Women's studies; Women in community organizatio; Political activity; Middle class women; Women's Studies - General; Social Science; United States - State & Local - General; Sociology; United States - 20th Century (1945 to 2000); Women's Studies - History; History / United States / 20th Century; Housewives; Women in community organization; 20th century; History; New York; New York (State)
First sentence: In 1950, Barbara Lee, journalist for the community newspaper Meadow Lark, captured in these words the atmosphere of northeastern Queens at a time when it was in the midst of a profound transformation.
Description: "Fictional characters, such as June Cleaver, and criticism of suburban domestic passivity, notably Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, have profoundly shaped our popular and intellectual view of the immediate postwar decade. It is this image of apolitical domesticity and suburban conformity that Sylvie Murray challenges in The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945-1965. Set in the rapidly developing neighborhoods of northeastern Queens - home of none other than Friedan herself in the early 1950s - this study traces the political activities of a diverse group of middle-class suburbanities and brings into focus the central role played by full-time mothers and housewives as community activists." "Like their famous neighbor, these Queens housewives were at the center of a vital network of civic organizations that used a variety of political strategies - from quiet lobbying to street protests - to build residential neighborhoods of quality. The battles they fought - to improve local schools and other public services, to stop the construction of public housing, and to control the cost and quality of rental housing, among others - cannot be easily pegged to the right or the left on the political spectrum. Rather, they reveal a profound conviction that both citizens and the state were responsible for the well-being of local communities."--Jacket.