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More is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identityin Postwar America

Nickles, Shelley.

American Quarterly, Volume 54, Number 4, December 2002, pp. 581-622(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/aq.2002.0040

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American Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 4 (December 2002) © 2002 American Studies Association

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Shelley Nickles is a project curator in the Division of Social History at the NationalMuseum of American History. She is completing a book on gender, taste, householdgoods, and the remaking of class in the twentieth century.

More is Better:Mass Consumption, Gender, and

Class Identity in Postwar America

SHELLEY NICKLES

National Museum of American History

“around here, the working class is the middle class”

—suburban worker, 19601

At a series of conferences in the mid-1950s, the nation’s leadingdesigners of appliances, automobiles, and other mass-produced goodsdebated the social and cultural consequences of working-class prosper-ity in the decade following World War II. One invited panelistreportedly “shocked and intrigued” the mostly male group of MadisonAvenue sophisticates.2 The participant who caused such a stir was MissEsther Foley, home service editor of True Story, a confessional-stylemagazine aimed at wage-earners’ wives and published by MacfaddenPublications since 1919. Foley abandoned the usual abstract or statisti-cal profiles of the “average” mass-market consumer. Instead, she usedslides to bring these designers directly into an unfamiliar world—thekitchens and living rooms of her “ten million” working-class womenreaders.3 What “shocked and intrigued” designers was the materialevidence of working-class women’s purchasing power. The debatecentered on “rosebuds,” the flowery flourishes that appeared every-where. Why, the mystified designers demanded to know, did Foley’swomen readers insist on buying silverware decorated with rosebuds?Rosebuds represented a sentimental, ornamental aesthetic associatedwith working-class taste. In designers’ scheme of economic mobility

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leading to cultural uplift, postwar prosperity should have brought anend to rosebuds. As more and more of these women moved into themiddle-income groups, they would trade rosebuds for silverware of asimpler aesthetic preferred by designers and other upper-middle classtastemakers. Instead, these wives of wage earners demanded theirrosebuds.

Foley told designers that she “did not want ‘her’ people to be ignoredor slighted . . . [nor] their motives . . . misunderstood.” She argued that“motivation research” could help designers understand that thesewomen rejected “severe sterile purity” in silverware because it did notembody the “hopes, dreams . . . and despairs” of their increasinglycomfortable but still distinctively working-class lives.4 In other words,working-class women’s preference for shiny ornamental rosebuds wasnot about bad taste, fashion, or status-seeking but about social identity.In fact, designers’ dream of economic mobility leading to cultural uplifthad been turned on its head. Not only was silverware with rosebudsevidence of a persisting working class in a supposedly classlessmiddle-class society, but through the mechanism of mass productionthis ethos actually drove the standards for shiny appliances, automo-biles, and other goods that permeated mainstream culture.

This study offers a reconsideration of postwar class relations byexploring the significant influence of working-class women’s distinc-tive values, as expressed in taste, on American social life and culture.5

By World War II, class had come to be synonymous with the “collarline,” yet historians have shown that, along with income and occupa-tion, patterns of education, sociability, and style of life also have playeda role in class formation and identity.6 The new postwar working classthat was the subject of debate in this public discourse referred to white“blue-collar” wage earners and their families, a predominantly northernindustrial workforce that included the children and grandchildren ofEuropean immigrants for whom ethnicity had become a class marker.7

An increasing number of these blue-collar workers now had middle-class pocketbooks that allowed them to live in suburban “mass-produced domestic comfort” and participate in the white identitydefined by that racially homogenous environment.8 But, these blue-collar men and women nevertheless often retained their distinctiveclass values, lifestyles, and tastes.9 Above all, an ethos I call “more isbetter” defined working-class taste. This ethos represented the preser-vation of working-class values now given new expression in big cars

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and shiny refrigerators. That style, with its boldness and bulk, stood incontrast to a “less is more” aesthetic of simplicity favored by upper-middle class tastemakers.10 By identifying the persistence of working-class taste, this study contributes to the work of labor historians whohave argued that achieving a higher standard of living and commonparticipation in the mass market could strengthen working-class iden-tity and even foster political activism, as opposed to assimilation.11

This study further argues, however, that a “more is better” aestheticas an expression of working-class values not only persisted, butthrough the mechanism of mass production of goods such as kitchenappliances, actually pervaded material culture. Because mass produc-tion aimed at the largest possible market, working-class taste influ-enced design standards for goods purchased by working-class andmiddle-class women alike. Rather than assimilating, this study sug-gests, members of the working class—particularly working-classwomen—reformulated the mainstream material world of suburbiacommonly understood as a middle-class creation.12

The pervasiveness of this gendered blue-collar aesthetic did notcome without a battle from some designers and other upper-middleclass critics who fought to maintain their influence on standards formass-produced goods. Designers of these domestic consumer goodsperceived that working-class consumers moved up economically butnot culturally. Promoters of a “less is more” ethos, many designersresisted this disjunction between economic and cultural mobility.13

Although these battles took place outside the political arenas of votingbooths and union halls, the triumph of tail fins and shiny refrigeratorssignaled the democratization of taste.

This article will trace the impact of working-class values, asexpressed in taste preferences for mass-produced goods, on main-stream culture by looking at the complex interactions among four keysocial groups: working-class women, who preserved their distinctivevalues and taste; designers of mass-produced goods, who had to satisfythe demands of this gendered working-class market; motivation re-searchers linked to social scientists, who articulated and promoted thispersisting taste; and the publishers and editors of True Story magazine.Best known as a confessional magazine featuring stories with suchsensational titles as “I Married Two Men but I Wasn’t a Bigamist,” themagazine’s publishers sponsored numerous motivation research studiesof real blue-collar women who read their largely fictional magazine.


True Story’s publishers and editors then sold this image of a newgendered working-class culture back to their readers through thefictional stories and real home features in the magazine itself.14

War of the Rosebuds

In the five years following World War II, household furnishings andappliance purchases climbed 240 percent. During the next decade, themedian family income rose 30 percent in purchasing power and thesuburban population increased at a faster rate than the general popula-tion.15 Bolstered by increased real wages and purchasing power, asignificant number of wage-earning families swelled the middle-income ranks and moved to the suburbs, and a majority purchasedrefrigerators, automatic washing machines, and other household appli-ances for the first time.16 Did a higher standard of living and the abilityto buy the same basic package of mass-produced goods as their white-collar neighbors make these blue-collar workers middle class? Aconsensus chorus of government policymakers, sociologists, publicintellectuals, and businessmen answered affirmatively that prosperitywas eroding the class identity of the American worker.17 As one reportargued, the suburban development was becoming the “new Americanmelting pot . . . in which ‘blue-collar’ families are taking up the middleclass life.”18 Designers, too, celebrated such reports of a “middle classclassless society” by creating their own visual mythology in whichworkers traded blue-collars for tuxedos and their wives exchangedhousehold drudgery for domestic “elegance.”19 In this view of culturaluplift, designers portrayed entertaining in the kitchen as a “new interestin simple routines,” rather than acknowledging the social kitchen as aworking-class tradition influencing middle-class servantless homes.Even the tools of work, the appliances themselves, were minimized inthis image of upper-middle class uplift (fig. 1). Underlying this notionof social assimilation achieved through mass consumption and house-hold modernization was a gender ideology defined by middle-classdomesticity.20

Foley’s war of the rosebuds was an attempt to counter this view byoffering indisputable visual evidence of real working-class women’shomes. Designers’ disdainful descriptions of the “shiny ‘miracle’appliances in badly arranged kitchens, the inevitable chrome dinetteset, the sentimental and unrelated living room furnishings . . . common

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to this taste group” suggested that these designers were reluctant toadmit that they now had to satisfy the demands of working-classwomen whose incomes allowed them to participate in postwar con-sumer culture but whose values and tastes differed from their own. Thekitchens of Foley’s working-class readers spoke of a middle-incomestandard of living achieved by up-to-date household appliances but notone defined by middle-class values of simplicity, managerial effi-ciency, and refinement that took their cue from professional tastemakerssuch as designers (fig. 2).21

Figure 1. Models pose in a kitchen representing designers’ vision of a “middle-class classless society” based on upper-middle class values and taste. IndustrialDesign (Dec. 1955): 39. Used with permission from I.D. magazine © 2002. Not forreprint without express written permission of the publisher, or parent companyF&W Publications, Inc.


Foley drew on True Story’s own productive collaboration with anew group of market researchers linked to prominent social scientistswho engaged in “motivation research” [hereafter MR] to expose theclass and gender politics of an ongoing cultural debate. Drawing onnumerous MR studies of actual blue-collar women in new suburbs andolder neighborhoods, Foley’s presentation clearly challenged the popu-lar assumption that mass consumption and household modernizationwent hand-in-hand with social assimilation. She implied that thesecommentators confused middle income with middle class and suburbwith middle-class community. The True Story editor’s slides made thepoint that blue-collar consumers had risen on the “economic ladder,” asevidenced by the proliferation of household appliances, but not on the“taste ladder” that designers had constructed.22 Foley suggested thatMR could help designers understand and predict the distinctive prefer-ence of these blue-collar female consumers. Although motivation

Figure 2. A large, shiny, modern stove occupied a prominent place and function inthe working-class kitchen of True Story reader Mary Brewer, who served mealsseven times a day to children, extended family, and her husband, a night-shiftworker. True Story (Oct. 1953): 69. Permission granted from the Sterling/Macfadden Partnership.

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research was criticized as a device to manipulate consumers by someand dismissed as a pseudo-science fad by others, True Story sawmotivation research as a method to uncover the persistence of working-class values, lifestyles, and taste within this middle-income massmarket.23 By linking the symbolism in design to social science,motivation researchers made blue-collar aesthetics evidence not only ofa distinct market segment but of a new social class of suburban workerswithin a changing American social structure.

The retention of working-class taste presented manufacturers with achallenge. Manufacturers of silverware, tableware, textiles, and fur-nishings could offer diverse choices from rosebuds to plain design. But,the huge tooling and advertising costs involved in the mass productionand mass marketing of goods such as household appliances was adisincentive to variety. This meant that manufacturers had to aim at anational mass-market majority comprised of both newly prosperousworking-class and middle-class consumers.24 Designers would have tomake a choice between shiny chrome and plain design as the basis fordetermining increasing value on a ladder of consumption. Foleywarned that designers who ignored this working-class taste in favor oftheir own upper-middle class preference for simplicity would fail.Designers realized that the triumph of a “more is better” aesthetic inmass-produced goods meant they were losing a battle not only to shapea new working-class market but also the middle-class market. Theapplication of ornament through chrome and color even to standardizedrefrigerators suggested the pervasiveness of working-class taste.

Working-Class Sparkle or Upper-Middle Class Simplicity:Who Defines Value?

During the postwar era, the mechanism of mass production becamethe means by which a gendered working-class culture permeated themainstream “middle,” although this process was hotly contested byupper-middle-class tastemakers. The logic of mass production as itdeveloped by the 1920s in the Ford Model T demanded standardizationand thus the creation of design standards for the mass market.25 Howthese design standards, the visual expression of a product’s value,should be defined became a matter of increasing debate during WorldWar II, when it became apparent that the composition of the market forexpensive consumer durables like household appliances would rapidly


move away from an upper-middle class market to a mass market afterthe war ended. In the postwar period, for example, the ownership ofmechanical refrigerators increased from 44 percent to about 90 percentof American households.26 Corporate executives and designers inessence admitted that they had been catering to “an essentially conser-vative group—‘middle class’ and ‘better’”—a group not so differentfrom themselves—in designing and marketing their goods.27 Standardpractice had been to design household appliances based on the majorityopinion of these largely upper-middle class women as expressed insurveys, resulting in designs that favored professional middle-classvalues of hygiene, efficiency, and simplicity.

Manufacturers understood this new postwar “mass market” as “thelow and low middle income classes of our national market.”28 Manu-facturers wondered whether they could “connect” with this new massmarket without losing their former clientele.29 Designers perceived thatconsumers had diverse tastes, and social class became the most usefulway to categorize these tastes for national markets. As opposed todesigners’ own upper-middle class preference for elegant simplicity,consumer research revealed that the working-class masses generallybelieved worth was expressed through three design features. One was“bulk and size”: if “it looks bigger, it must be worth more.” Bulksignified solidity. Another was “embellishment and visual flash.” Thethird was color.30 Although surveys indicated that men generally heldthe purse strings, manufacturers conceptualized the consumer as fe-male and more specifically attributed the desire for styling to theinfluence of women. As one study argued, “whether she has a joboutside the home or not, the wage earner wife decides most familypurchases or investments.” This reflected a dichotomy that genderedfunction and production as masculine and ornamentation and consump-tion as feminine.31

In the postwar period, the question was whether design standardswould have to be “lowered” to accommodate blue-collar women’s“more is better” idea about value or whether the working class wouldbe uplifted by their new prosperity to accept the upper-middle class“good design” available to them. These options were represented bytwo competing models available to determine design standards in adiverse and changing market. Industrial designers generally champi-oned functionalist principles, which argued that design standardsshould reflect universal and everlasting aesthetic ideals defined by

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simplicity and efficiency. In this view, changes in the composition ofthe market would have no impact on design standards. Working-classconsumers would be uplifted by their new prosperity and wouldsimultaneously be compelled by qualities of simplicity to acceptdesigners’ upper-middle class standards. In contrast to this staticmodel, “Sloanism,” the marketing strategies developed at GeneralMotors under Alfred Sloan, opened the door for a dynamic conceptionof design that responded to changes in the social structure of themarket.32 Sloanism used design and flexible mass-production technol-ogy to create mass-market cars in which increasing value was repre-sented visually as one “stepped up” to more expensive cars. Thiscreated a “ladder of consumption” in which cars at different pricepoints corresponding to income groups—from Chevrolet to Cadillac—were defined through a visual vocabulary of increasing value definedby the “average” consumer.33

Not surprisingly, the automobile industry took the lead in recogniz-ing working-class purchasing power to create new postwar designstandards. Contemporary social commentator Eric Larrabee derisivelynoted how this dynamic worked. According to Larrabee, the automo-bile industry was,

democratic in its refusal to assert style leadership by setting genuinelyaristocratic tastes that then filter slowly down; quite to the contrary, throughmarket research it makes style filter up from below.34

In other words, the automobile industry created a ladder of consump-tion based on the idea that “when the American workingman gets alittle money . . . he wants a bigger car.” For these consumers, increasingvalue was expressed through bigger, and more ornamented, cars.35 Theimpact of this mass market aesthetic in automobiles, and how it spreadto household appliances, was most vividly illustrated in the Cadillac.After World War II, General Motors relied upon mass production tolower prices of this high-end car. The Cadillac was no longer aimed atthe elite, but to “the man on his way up.” This linked it clearly to thetop of the ladder in a mass market.36 In addition to large size andchrome, the Cadillac created distinctive design elements that reflectedthe “more is better” taste of a new average consumer. Because theCadillac was the premier status symbol of the 1950s, these designelements then became linked to notions of status. Harley Earl, theinfluential GM designer who created the tail fin, argued that the tail fin


gave the consumer a “visible premium” for the money spent. The tailfin and the “V” emblem were two of the potent design elements thatsignaled “class” to a majority of Americans.37

Immediately after the war, there were signs that this new mass-market aesthetic might spread to household appliances and othergoods. Household appliance designers recognized that automobiledesigners were successful at articulating this “more is better” visuallanguage of value.38 The design motifs on refrigerators began to followsuit. Observers increasingly noted the resemblance between the embel-lishments on refrigerators, such as flashy chrome nameplates, and thegadgets on automobiles.39 Critics singled out Frigidaire as the worstoffender, noting that Frigidaire’s rounded form appeared bulky and was“least attractive [with] a very flashy trademark in gold and chrome, andgold colored plexiglass trim about the handle.”40 The fact that RaymondLoewy, a leader of the profession, had a hand in this design suggestedthe challenge designers faced. Loewy shared the view of his critics thatthe designer should be the “Knight of Good Taste,” educating themasses to appreciate the modernist ideals based on simplicity. But, hedefended “more is better” styling by arguing that “it is a proven fact”that “only a limited segment of sophisticated buyers” accepted “prod-ucts whose design has been reduced to their simplest expression” whilethe masses “love chrome . . . indiscriminately.” 41 Whether designersliked it or not, if they wanted to sell the goods they would have torecognize that social changes inevitably were altering mass-productiondesign standards.

Commentators understood that this trend in household appliancedesign signaled the infiltration of working-class values into mainstreamculture. The shrill debate over taste and suburbia reflected a concernover the growing impact of this new class and gender dynamic in themarketplace. William Whyte captured these class and gender politics inhis influential 1956 book The Organization Man. Whyte wrote dispar-agingly that the unhappy result of the “social revolution” that gave riseto the “emancipation of the worker” was the “pink lampshade in thepicture window.”42 Like shiny chrome refrigerators, the pink lampshade represented a new majority of American women who drovedesign standards in the marketplace and created new suburban domes-tic lifestyles without regard for the values of cultural arbiters.

Tastemakers who hoped that working-class prosperity would resultin uplifted tastes feared this spread of ornamentation influenced by

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working-class purchasing power. The fact that even refrigerators couldbe styled showed the pervasiveness of this new “more is better” culture.Designers realized that it meant that they were losing the battle to shapea new “middle-majority” market consisting of both working-class andlower-middle class consumers.43 A step removed from market pres-sures, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acted as the guardian ofthese values. Beginning in 1950, MoMA launched the “Good Design”program in conjunction with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Throughthis program, MoMA effectively sanctioned certain goods available inthe marketplace that met its aesthetic criteria of simplicity and restraint.When the “Good Design” programs ended in 1955, however, theimpact on the mass market appeared minimal.44 The Museum ofModern Art resorted to evaluating these trends by holding sessions withsuch titles as “What’s Happening to America’s Taste?”45

While some designers desperately tried to stem the tide against this“lowering” of standards in reaction to working-class women’s influ-ence, others promoted the “more is better” aesthetic as a successfulsales strategy. Although there had been a tension within the designprofession between modernist ideals and market realities, now morewas at stake as the social structure of the market changed. The battlelines were clearly drawn in a design competition that the Servelrefrigerator company held in 1950. Servel was a high-end refrigeratorcompany with only 6.5 percent of the market. Company executivesfaced great confusion over the degree to which working-class purchas-ing power would affect their product, the most expensive mass-produced refrigerator. As a result of this uncertainty, the company’spresident invited Walter Dorwin Teague, a prominent designer, tocompete with the proposals of Lurelle Guild, Servel’s consultantdesigner since the early 1930s, to design the 1950 refrigerator line.46

The two designers—Teague and Guild—offered clearly divergentdesign strategies based on different conceptions of what the designstandard should be: Teague offered upper-middle class “good design”uplift, while Guild argued for a new mass aesthetic.

Although he subscribed to modernist principles, Guild prided him-self on his savvy understanding of consumer taste. Displaying thebiases if not the concerns of his fellow designers, Guild once stated thathe often designed “deliberately for people without taste.”47 Now thepurchasing power of these people made them a force in the market forrefrigerators and other expensive consumer goods. Guild correctly


argued that “plain,” “good design” was “utterly obsolete in style forthis market” of the postwar years. The designer observed that this newmarket of working-class women wanted large and bulky refrigeratorswith more features and more “luster.”48 As Guild argued to Servelexecutives: “The Cadillac car looks expensive and is, the Servelrefrigerator is expensive and looks plain.” In other words, consumerswould not “pay such a high price for a plain refrigerator.”49 Rejecting“simple and austere” design, Guild recommended a healthy dose of“sparkling chrome” to keep pace with competition such as Frigidaire.50

In direct contrast to Guild, designer Walter Dorwin Teague pre-scribed an approach of upper-middle class uplift. Teague expressedconfidence that women instinctively wanted “good design,” if it wereavailable to them. Teague came to the conclusion that Servel shoulddefine itself against “flashy” Frigidaires through a visual vocabulary ofausterity and refinement. He achieved this plain aesthetic with a doordesign that minimized curves to reduce bulk and restricted ornament tothe slim chrome door handle and small lettering and “flame insignia”for the requisite nameplate. Teague expressed confidence that “thegreat majority of purchasers respond to the care, restraint, and intelli-gent consideration this design expresses” (fig. 3).51 Accustomed to a“tasteful” high-end niche, Servel, a company dominated by engineers,ignored Guild’s advice that it adopt more ornamentation in order toexpand sales into lower-middle class and working-class markets.Although they agreed with Guild that these consumers defined worth interms of ornamentation rather than restraint, they selected Teague withthe hope they could manipulate consumer demand.52

By the early 1950s, however, Servel’s refrigerators became anillustration of the way that the taste of newly prosperous working-classwomen increasingly influenced design standards for entire productlines through increased ornamentation of household appliances. Evenas Teague’s plain model debuted in 1950, the sales department beganarguing that Servel refrigerators must have “either less cost or greaterglitter” as the key to mass-market success over competitors. As Servelfloundered, company officials turned for a few years to their own in-house designers with assistance from other consultants to designrefrigerators that reflected a “more is better” aesthetic. These refrigera-tors featured two large multi-color door handles with a gold, modified“Cadillac V” surrounded by blue and white rectangles framed bychrome that enhanced the three-dimensional effect. By 1954, the

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nameplate was rendered in large gold lettering, and the line featuredtwo-tone models (fig. 4). Servel executives ultimately brought backTeague but pressured him to abandon the “classic restraint” approachand lower his notion of average taste to reflect the mass market’s ideaof value. By 1955, even Teague had to concede, begrudgingly, to the“request for sparkle” for a new line of Servel refrigerators.53

Throughout the industry, household appliance forms became bulkierand more ornamented to increasingly reflect this “more is better”aesthetic. When working-class women expressed their preference for“white metal kitchens with Cadillac handles” on appliances and

Figure 3. Advertisement for 1950 Servel refrigerator with simple styling. TheD’Arcy Collection of the Communications Library of the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign.


cabinets, designers realized they were losing the battle not only toshape a working-class taste, but also the middle-class market, sincethese standards shaped mass-produced goods aimed at the widestpossible market.54 The extent to which the new mass aesthetic hadbecome the basis for an entire ladder of consumption was bestillustrated in the design strategy of “good, better, best” developed bySears, Roebuck and Company, in which best was always signaled bymore ornamentation and gold color.55 Design critic Thomas Hine hascoined the term “populuxe” to suggest that an ideology of popularizedluxury pervaded these goods.56 But, this “populuxe” styling associatedwith new suburban developments was not popularized in the sense of

Figure 4. Advertisement for 1954 Servel refrigerator with more sparkle aimed atmass market taste. Reprinted with permission of the American Gas Association ®.

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taste trickling down to the newly prosperous masses. As mass-produced shiny appliances blurred the collar line in the kitchen,working-class values pervaded mainstream middle-class culture.

Working-class women’s desire for styling did not mean that theywere unconcerned about function or that styling reflected eitherglamour or status seeking, though designers such as Guild and criticstried to make such links.57 These machines were primary tools forwork, and this concern primarily shaped women’s purchasing deci-sions. Women rewarded major advances in performance, which werefew, with their pocketbooks, and spurned manufacturers’ attempts toget them to trade in appliances that worked for newly styled modelsthat represented no advance. Their interest in color for major purchaseswas bounded by practical considerations.58 But, given two refrigeratorsof comparable price and performance, women demanded one thatrepresented their “more is better” taste as an expression of value.Upper-middle class modernist designers tried to argue that there was arelationship between simple styling and function. In fact, aestheticsoften had little relationship to performance. As a study in ConsumerReports showed, some chrome-laden machines rated low in aestheticterms by designers were rated higher in terms of function than plainones.59 Working-class women’s point remained valid: why should theypay more for a plain refrigerator?

Even as household appliance designers created this visual language,they continued to deride the trend toward bulk and adornment.Ultimately, designers who could not bear these design standards had toget out of the household appliance business and limit themselves todesigning for the home furnishings industries, which supplied marketniches.60 Those who stayed in the business were reduced to privatesymbolic acts of protest. Designer John Vassos, whose own designs forRCA appliances catered to mass-market taste, had the tail fins removedfrom his own Cadillac, an act that garnered accolades from fellowuplifter Philip Johnson of MoMA.61

Critic Vance Packard blamed designers and marketers for fosteringstatus anxiety by designing status symbols, but designers clearly sawthis as a development that was driven from the bottom up specificallyby women. In response to charges that designers’ professional stancewas “undemocratic,” designers suggested that the masses’ preferencefor ornamentation was a sign of feminine weakness. By the mid-1950s,these design critics were blaming this “more is better” aesthetic on a


new group of motivation researchers who promoted it. IndustrialDesign magazine editorialized that the mass-market consumer shouldtrade “motivational styling” for “psychiatry”: “he may as well take hisFreud straight.”62 But, motivation researchers simply analyzed, advo-cated, and gave a name—motivational styling—to changing designstandards. It was designers who, despite protestations, gave materialexpression to persisting working-class values that were then studied bymotivation researchers, in the service of groups such as True Storymagazine.

“Blue-Collar Aesthetic”

Both critics of mass-market taste and the marketers who promoted itunderstood that, despite the prosperity of blue-collar consumers, thereremained a distinction between economic and cultural mobility. Differ-ent taste and opinion makers, including True Story magazine, tried toharness these distinctions for their own ends. In this battle, MR was animportant tool for promoting a working-class ethos. Traditional marketresearch had been primarily quantitative and asked direct questionsabout likes and dislikes. In contrast, the new proponents of MR in thepostwar era used in-depth interviews, “role playing” and other tech-niques, and featured extended quotes from interviewees in their reports.MR emphasized that consumers’ answers to direct questions wereunreliable because consumer motivations were complex. MR wasbased on the assumption that the “symbolic meanings” of an object, inpart expressed through the external design, were important to theaverage housewife.63 Motivation researchers argued that the “hugeeconomic gains of the American worker classes” and their resultingpurchasing power presented an enormous potential for businessmenwho studied the symbolic meanings of design, such as unraveling “theunderlying significance and linkages between such surface phenomenaas the flair for color in cars and . . . shirts and refrigerators.”64 Throughmotivation researchers’ relationship with prominent social scientistssuch as Lloyd Warner, corporate efforts to understand the “taste” of theblue-collar consumer became a way to reinforce distinctions withinAmerican society through material culture.

A pioneering and influential MR firm that used the tools of MR todiscover a distinctive working class after World War II was SocialResearch, Inc. (SRI), founded in Chicago by academic Burleigh

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Gardner in 1946. SRI’s work often focused on social class differencesexpressed through behaviors, values, and consumption choices.65

Gardner’s firm sought, in part, to uncover the ways that design in mass-produced goods conveyed social assumptions that were widely under-stood. For example, the firm conducted an influential MR study ofautomobiles that probed the “nonrational symbols” that made Cadillacsuch a symbol of success. The study found that cars had functioned asan “indicator of social status,” because cars were designed at differentprice points that correlated to social classes that were understood by thedesigners in terms of income groups.66 These studies also concluded,however, that during the 1950s, mass-produced goods like automobilesand appliances were becoming less useful as markers of social distinc-tions because a wide variety of people now occupied the middle-income group and could purchase the same goods.67

Gardner and others argued that “social-class membership,” as deter-mined by an individual’s consumption patterns, offered a richerunderstanding of buying behavior than relying on income alone, whichblurred white-collar and blue-collar. They stressed the importance ofcultural criteria such as domestic lifestyle and “taste.”68 This concep-tion owed its greatest debt to the work of influential University ofChicago social scientist Lloyd Warner, a co-founder of SRI.69 Warnerrejected the rigid dual-class schemes of working versus business classbased on the relation of power at the production site as represented inthe work of Robert Lynd.70 Instead, Warner rank-ordered people intosix primary groups: upper-upper, old families; lower-upper, newlyarrived wealthy; upper-middle, professionals and successful business-men; lower-middle, white-collar salaried; upper-lower, skilled, blue-collar wage earners; lower-lower, unskilled labor. The lower-middleand upper-lower classes were the “middle majority,” the target of mass-market appeals. What was useful to marketing men was the fact thatWarner’s divisions were not by amount of income but by type ofincome, occupation, and consumption patterns, thus revealing the classdistinctions within the middle-majority group. According to thesestudies, the upper-lower wage-earner group represented about 53percent of all families in postwar America.71

Rather than “deny the existence of social class” in America, motiva-tion researchers found that “knowledge of the social structure” allowedthem to sell the U.S. “by class.”72 By using Warner’s stratificationschemes to probe the underlying significance of the whole constellation


of domestic artifacts, these motivation researchers challenged theprevailing perception that the collar line had disappeared. To demon-strate the persistence of the collar line, they shifted the attention fromthe mass-produced environment of the kitchen to a variety of choices inthe living room and therein found a distinctive working-class culturecreated not by men but by women and united not in politics but in taste.They had an important ally, and client, in the publishers of True Storymagazine.

True Story had been commissioning traditional market researchsurveys since the 1920s under the umbrella of its publisher MacfaddenPublications, which had its own internal market research department.73

The primary thrust of the magazine’s interwar surveys was to convinceadvertisers that its working-class readers were becoming part of themainstream consuming public. In these “sociological sermons to thetrade,” the magazine painted a picture of a working class that was animportant market for mass-produced goods.74 At the same time, TrueStory promoted the emergence of what historian Lizabeth Cohen hascalled a “class-differentiated mass market” by arguing for the distinc-tive tastes of the working class as opposed to the “white collars.”75

Despite the fact that True Story vied with Ladies’ Home Journal as theleader among women’s magazines, these publicity campaigns met withlimited success. Although True Story was able to increase advertisingby nationally-branded products such as food and soap through suchappeals, it still received little advertising from makers of expensiveconsumer durables such as automobiles and appliances during theinterwar period.76

In the postwar period, True Story had the opposite problem: not todraw attention to the working class as consumers but to maintain theworking-class consumer as a distinct class. After World War II, fewcould dispute the economic influence of True Story’s wage-earningreaders. No one could achieve a mass market without this group. Asone study argued, the “shift from 35 percent to 65 percent penetrationof a new appliance” depended primarily on “the working class house-wives.”77 The magazine’s challenge, therefore, was proving that theworking class was still a class and had remained true to True Storydespite its prosperity. Macfadden Publications feared that advertiserswould think they now could reach these blue-collar consumers byadvertising in middle-class women’s magazines such as Ladies’ HomeJournal. Macfadden had to find a way to tout workers as prosperous,

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and therefore the same economically as the middle-class, but distinctculturally and therefore worthy of being targeted separately. To expli-cate the distinct interests of True Story readers further, however,required a departure from the traditional division in market research byincome groups.78

Beginning in the late 1940s, True Story commissioned SRI toconduct several motivation research studies to understand “the workingclass woman.”79 Although these studies, written by professional men,occasionally revealed the same gender and class biases as industrialdesigners’ rhetoric, they were nevertheless significant for trying toreclaim a voice that was lost in much public discourse. Interviews withactual True Story readers in their homes provided the bulk of evidencefor these studies. The studies interviewed working-class women in avariety of cities and suburbs and used middle-class women as points ofcomparison. The most famous report, a 1959 study called Workingman’sWife: Her Personality, World and Life Style, was authored by SRIemployees Lee Rainwater, Richard Coleman, and Gerald Handel basedon twelve years’ research commissioned, not coincidentally, byMacfadden Publications. This was followed by another influentialreport, Status of the Working Class in Changing American Society. Afew years later, they completed a study entitled The Working ClassWorld: Identity, World View, Social Relations and Family BehaviorMagazines.80

Taken together, these various studies concluded that business maga-zines such as Fortune and government-issued reports had exaggeratedthe extent of middle-class values and homogeneity in society byconfusing “middle-income” with “middle class” and “suburb” with“middle-class community.”81 They argued that marketing strategieswere based on the erroneous assumption that, “given the same income,the poor man would behave exactly like the rich man.” In other words,they did not account for the difference between economic and culturalmobility. The major point of these Macfadden-sponsored studies wasthat “although a factory worker might now be in the same incomegroup as a white-collar worker,” that worker was unlikely to embracemiddle-class values.82 Instead, these blue-collar families had differentattitudes towards their work, different ways of raising their children,different ways of socializing, and different taste. These class distinc-tions reflected not only status hierarchies identified by sociologists, butalso the persisting working-class self-identification of a majority of


blue-collar suburbanites surveyed.83 Women played a key role inarticulating these distinctions within the domestic culture of suburbia.

SRI’s studies for True Story probed various aspects of working-classwomen’s domestic lifestyles including “patterns of taste and aestheticsin connection with furnishings, appliances, and clothing” to uncoverthese differences. These studies suggested that looking solely at theappliances these women purchased obscured differences in patterns ofsociability and taste because “a prosperous lower class and an uppermiddle class kitchen” might seem similar “when both are well fur-nished with modern appliances, often of the same brands.” As theprevious section has shown, mass-produced appliances themselves didnot express differences, only a greater influence of working-classpurchasing power through an overall adoption of the “more is better”aesthetic. But, as SRI’s Sidney Levy pointed out, “even these ‘samekitchens’ may have important differences in them, and have beenarrived at through rather different marketing processes based ondifferent values, thought processes, and purchasing actions.” Lengthyconversational interviews conducted in these women’s own homesrevealed that the meaning of these appliances differed dramatically.84

It was the distinctive importance of new household appliances andthe kitchen to the working-class woman in this postwar period thatsuggested why her taste prevailed in these mass-produced goods.Working-class women’s preference for up-to-date, substantial, shinyappliances was an expression of their distinctive domestic lifestyles.Their daily routines were dominated by work, including houseworkand childcare. As one woman responded when asked to describe herday, “I just run from one day to the next.” Middle-class women didmuch the same work, but they were more likely to have some help, andto have a varied routine that offered social opportunities outside of thehome. The studies concluded that working-class women saw theirprimary role as houseworkers, whereas middle-class women definedthemselves more as wives.85 The centrality of work to the daily lives ofblue-collar women led to their emphasis on appliance purchasing.Although studies of household appliance purchasing by income madein the 1950s and early 1960s showed that the majority of purchaseswere in the middle-income range, analysis by social-class grouprevealed that blue-collar consumers bought the largest percentage ofappliances. Blue-collar consumers also bought a large percentage oftop-of-the-line appliances.86 Large-capacity, bulky appliances repre-

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sented solidity and potential laborsaving qualities. These womenrealized that modern conveniences had not freed them from drudgery,but they made their work easier and contributed to a more cheerfulkitchen environment.87

Furthermore, the importance of the kitchen to the working-classwoman led to a desire for “more is better” appliances that reflected thatimportance. Even by 1960, the kitchen continued to be the room whereblue-collar women spent the most time working and socializing. Theblue-collar family was more likely to eat in the kitchen, even whenentertaining.88 When asked what the most important room was, oneworking-class resident of Gary, Indiana noted that her kitchen was mostimportant because “that’s where all your expensive household equip-ment is . . . and that’s where I do the biggest part of my work.89 Anotherwoman living in a new suburban house in Louisville indicated that thekitchen was the most important room to her because “that’s where westay most of the time. We eat in the kitchen. If neighbors come in, wesit in the kitchen.” Many women expressed the importance of a“bright” and “cheerful” kitchen as the “heart of the home.”90 Therefore,these studies concluded, it was “not surprising that they should wantthe kitchen fixed to order, since the kitchen is the focal point of theworking class wife’s existence.”91

Finally, a “modernized up-to-the-minute kitchen” with modernstyled appliances signified these blue-collar families’ “arrival into a1950’s middle-American level of . . . respectability.” These studiesconcluded that “solid heavy appliances” were “symbols of security” forworking-class folks.92 Motivation researchers emphasized that thisquest for “respectability” meant pride in achieving a hard-earnedstandard of living, not necessarily middle-class identity. The studiesimplicitly suggested that designers, even those who promoted a massaesthetic, misunderstood women’s reasons for embracing styling. De-signers thought women wanted “glamour” and advertised them in thisway, but MR studies suggested that women viewed shiny appliances asa reflection of “modernity,” an acknowledgment that they had achieveda higher standard of living defined by new household technology.93

Researchers identified middle-class women by their distinctive useof their domestic spaces.94 Middle-class women also wanted similarkitchens, but their motivations were different; they wanted the latestappliances to facilitate their escape from the kitchen, since traditionallythe kitchen was associated exclusively with work, and socializing took


place elsewhere. The living room was most important to the middleclass housewife.95 Whereas working-class women expressed pride intheir large refrigerator and ranges, middle-class women were interestedin minimizing the appearance of these machines in their kitchens.96

Furthermore, these women often achieved these up-to-date kitchensdifferently. Working-class families were more likely to update theirkitchen using their own extensive manual skills and labor.97 Whereasworking-class women most often named an appliance as their mostvalued possession, middle-class women named possessions that ap-pealed to “aesthetic sensitivities,” such as living room furnishings.98

These studies comparing blue-collar True Story readers to wives ofwhite-collar workers argued that it was in these living room furnishingsthat social class differences were most evident. SRI identified threemajor taste cultures by social class as manifested in furniture (fig. 5).The working class rejected the “severely plain, functional styling offurniture.” They preferred “an overelaboration of detail” in large,substantial-looking furniture and sought dependability and comfort. Bylooking in the living rooms of these women in suburbia, one could seethat there was a distinct “blue collar aesthetic.” In contrast, the“anxious” middle class was concerned about “good taste” and most aptto be influenced by professional tastemakers such as designers. Theupper class had a “hodgepodge” of styles because they were secure intheir status.99 These studies tended to define “middle-class” by aconcern for taste and by the “status-anxiety” that resulted from thisconcern.100 With mass-produced goods such as appliances, working-class taste influenced design standards for the largest possible market.In contrast, “taste in furniture” was “much more elusive and subtle.”Brand names were unknown; the variety was seemingly endless.101

Therefore, women’s selection of furniture was an expression of classidentity, as well as an impediment to social mobility.102

The intentions of True Story’s editors and publishers were limited todefining a market segment of working-class consumers in order toinfluence manufacturers and advertisers and sell magazines, not topromote collective class-consciousness.103 In probing blue-collar taste,however, these studies also reinforced the work of those sociologistswho discovered the persistence of a distinct working-class identity.104

For example, Bennett Berger’s influential sociological study of blue-collar suburbanites also made “taste” central to defining social identity.He argued:

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[I]mpressions garnered from a survey of furnishing style of the [wage earner]living rooms leads one to doubt the success of the [middle-class] “women’sand home” magazines in providing a viable model. The living room tends tobe crowded with . . . overstuffed furniture. . . . The mantle tends to becomea glass or plaster menagerie.105

While a national ideology promised middle-class status to those whoparticipated in mass consumption, through their discoveries about tastethese motivation researchers and sociologists secured a place for apersisting working-class identity in the new postwar social order. As anexpression of social values and identity, taste was an impediment tosocial mobility from the working to middle class and within the middle

Figure 5. Interviewers from the motivation research firm Social Research, Inc.documented working-class women’s homes as an expression of class identity.(Social Research, Inc. for Hearst Co., 1954). Reprinted with permission of GoodHousekeeping/Hearst Communications, Inc.


class. As Bennett Berger noted, the upper-middle class was “tighteningtheir entrance requirements” by emphasizing those things that moneycouldn’t buy, such as “good taste.”106 As one woman who married alawyer and moved to the suburbs later remembered:

You were trying to live out this ideal of life in the suburbs, in a way, that yousaw in Life magazines. But you always considered yourself just a little aboveit. You know, you had the Eames chair.107

These researchers differed amongst themselves about the relativesignificance of the boundaries between the lower-middle class and theworking class, acknowledging the commonalities women were forgingin new suburban communities while distinctions in taste, outlook, andvalues remained. What was being created, Berger argued, was a newworking-class culture, one that differed both from the middle class andfrom the urban working class of the past. The sociologist ultimatelyconcluded that the suburban working-class and portions of the lower-middle class formed a “middle-class working class” with “finergradations of status” existing between them. Perhaps Berger’s phrasebest expressed the complex ways in which this newly prosperousworking class influenced a segment of mainstream culture defined asmiddle class through mass consumption while it maintained its distinc-tive identity through taste, expressed most notably in the living room.108

For example, the increasing emphasis on the kitchen as a space forsociability within the suburban middle class reflected the increasingprevalence of working-class lifestyles.109

Motivation researchers and sociologists had uncovered an importantdivision between the economic and cultural mobility of the workingclass and articulated the influence of this powerful, working-classmarket on the material world of suburbia as a whole. After discoveringthis persisting identity, True Story magazine sold back the image of thesuburban working-class woman to its readers. Just as True Story’spatronage influenced the work of motivation researchers, so too theperspective of the actual women readers interviewed for this researchwas reflected in the magazine itself.110 As a study by Eung-Sook Kimhas noted, the editorial formula of True Story was tailored to a“feminine psychology in a working-class setting, with fears, anxieties(and pocketbooks) raised to the middle-class level.”111 Whereas the MRreports of actual working-class women and Esther Foley’s conferenceappearances were aimed at business, the magazine promoted working-

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class distinctiveness to its own women readers. The magazine offeredits readers advice to navigate this new suburban lifestyle on their ownterms.112 The result was a dialectic between the actual readers surveyedand quoted in the reports, the composite portrait of the “workingman’swife” constructed by motivation researchers from the individual re-sponses, and the readers—imagined and actual—portrayed in themagazine.

Throughout the postwar period, True Story magazine’s monthlyfeatures offered strategies for working-class wives to achieve their newstandard of living, often within a suburban milieu, without conformingto middle-class values. In articles such as “Washing Work Clothes is aTough Job,” home service editor Esther Foley and her associatesunabashedly promoted automatic washing machines and other up-to-date modern styled household appliances, but in a way that spoke toworking-class domestic routines and family circumstances.113 Home-maker stories focusing on actual True Story readers—a regular fea-ture—depicted this “more is better” aesthetic as one aspect of adistinctive blue-collar lifestyle. For example, Alexandra Angelov,Yugoslavian-born wife of a machinist in Indiana, and GenevieveSherpa, wife of an Italian-American worker in Syracuse, used their newappliances to make the traditional ethnic recipes they brought withthem into these kitchens.114 “Shining” and “sparkling” were the phrasesused most often by readers interviewed in the magazine to describemodern equipment and the new kitchens where they most often atefamily meals and socialized. In 1948, Rae Berling of Detroit told TrueStory’s editors that she “would love to have a brand-new shiny”refrigerator. True Story reader Patsy Brennan achieved that goal in1963. She told the magazine that “a kitchen is the heart of the home,worth spending money on to make as perfect as possible,” a phrasingwhich perfectly mimicked those of readers surveyed in an earlier MRreport.115

Letters in the “Village Pump” column, purportedly sent from actualreaders, confirmed the persistence of working-class identity in suburbiaby reporting tensions with new white-collar neighbors. One womancomplained that despite her “reasonably attractive home” she had to“take a back seat socially” because her father was a manual worker. Shesuggested that “the white collar attitude towards us of the workingclass” made her “wonder how we can honestly claim our country is areal democracy.”116 Even the “true stories,” first-person dramas written


by professionals drawing on reader submissions, occasionally focusedon the class tensions embedded in new suburban domestic lifestyles.117

Traditionally, the typical “true story” featured a heroine and a sensa-tionalistic, but highly moralistic, story with themes that often combinedseemingly conflicting ideas.118 The new suburban domestic dramasoccasionally featured in the postwar era were tamer, but they were stillmoralistic dramas that sent ambivalent messages about consumption.In “The Yellow Refrigerator,” when a man proposed marriage to hisfiancée, he promised her a yellow refrigerator, the color signifying up-to-date styling and a better life. After marriage, some expense alwaysprevented them from getting a new refrigerator. After learning she waspregnant with yet another child, the author lamented: “There goes myyellow refrigerator.” The story concluded with the author deciding thather family was more important to her than the elusive yellow refrigera-tor. The magazine acknowledged women’s desires for colorful appli-ances and cheerful up-to-date kitchens as legitimate expressions oftheir social identity, but it also suggested limitations.119

Stories featured the kitchen as a place where neighbors of different“collars” united and where working-class women wielded influence intheir neighborhoods. In “Duchess in My Kitchen,” the wife of amechanic felt inferior to a more sophisticated woman who moved intothe town and invited herself into her home. Ultimately, however, themiddle-class woman found respite from her own troubles in theworking-class “author’s” kitchen. Significantly, it was the kitchen thatserved to unite the two women (fig. 6). In “Frozen Friendship,” awoman received new-found popularity in her neighborhood when shepurchased a large freezer, but the freezer also became a source oftension when neighbors took advantage of her. The tension ultimatelywas resolved after the freezer-owning woman asserted herself.120

Finally, “Split Level Blues” epitomized the complex portrait of theworking-class suburban woman. This fictional author represented avirtual composite of the real True Story women readers quoted in theMR surveys. The working-class woman featured in this “true story”was proud of her up-to-date suburban kitchen with “shiny machines”that were equal to those of her neighbors. Yet the tension in the storyarose from her feeling that she did not fit in with her white-collarneighbors. Not only was her husband a manual worker who didn’t playgolf like the others, but she cleaned her house everyday, whereas thewhite-collar housewives—like the middle-class women interviewed in

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the MR reports—had a daily schedule for cleaning particular rooms. Asthe author told her husband, “they don’t . . . think like we do.”Differences manifested themselves in areas as diverse as parenting andliving-room decorating styles. The author felt like an outcast at aneighbor’s party because of the “ultra modern furniture, I guess you’dcall it. Everything looked flat and bare and cold, with almost nodecorations except some crazy abstract paintings.” The turning pointcame when neighbors joined her in singing songs from her working-class youth. She concluded her story with the realization that herneighbors would accept her despite her differences in taste and valuesif she accepted herself.121 Like the MR reports suggested, and as theactual readers featured in the magazine confirmed, this fictional storysuggested that shiny appliances and living room furnishings added upto a new suburban culture where women were reformulating classrelations as they shopped, worked, and raised families, forging newcommonalities and distinctions.

Figure 6. This fictional feature in True Story (March 1958) set in a modern, blue-collar kitchen illustrated the gendered postwar drama of class distinctions playingout amidst mass consumption. Permission granted from the Sterling/MacfaddenPartnership.


Conclusion

The prosperity of the “workingman’s wife” after World War IIspurred a debate on taste precisely because mass-production designbegan catering to her. Rather than try to reform taste, ultimatelybusiness found it useful to reify, embrace, and even amplify thisstratification and diversification to sell more and to sell to a new massmarket. Together, mass-produced industrial design and motivationresearchers’ study of its social meanings provided material expressionto changes in the economy and social structure. Because working-classprosperity fostered changes in material culture, the goods themselveshelped to shape a new understanding of class relations that was framedin terms of taste and domestic lifestyle. The dynamic interactionsbetween designers, motivation researchers, and sociologists ensuredthat debates about taste moved beyond the realm of the market tosociety and culture.122 T.J. Jackson Lears has argued that this focus ontaste deradicalized debates over class and indicated that a new profes-sional class, including tastemakers such as industrial designers, had“come into its own.”123 But, as this article has suggested, the emphasison a “more is better” aesthetic was in some ways destabilizing totraditional class and gender hierarchies. What lay behind this “more isbetter” ethos was the new power of working-class women in main-stream culture.124 The older upper-middle-class group failed to main-tain their own cultural authority. The battle over design reflected a“status anxiety” of a social class that no longer controlled a massconsumption economy that they had helped shape.125

If critics understood suburbia through its purchased symbols—theplace where the “chrome shines brighter”—so did its residents. Oralhistories of women who moved to the suburbs, combined with thesesociological studies of suburban blue-collar wives, and the stories thatTrue Story subscribers read, suggested that these women were pioneers.No one knew how to be suburban in these new communities formed inpostwar America. In part, this new mainstream culture of “mass-produced domestic comfort”—along with its inner divisions—wasworked out in the process of designing these goods.126

The combination of mass-produced household appliances and pro-duction of domestic furnishings aimed at distinctive markets gavewomen in suburbia the tools to reformulate social relations. Women’soutlook and work in the home were influenced by their husbands’ jobs

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and their prospects limited by them, but on a day-to-day basis thesewomen were largely on their own to develop a new domestic culture.Vance Packard described this domestic consumption as “status-seek-ing” and blamed manufacturers, designers, and marketers for intensify-ing this urge by designing status symbols.127 Viewed from the perspec-tive of women in suburbia, this was not so much about seeking status asit was creating society. Because they reflected changes in the economyand social structure, goods helped women create new social bonds anddistinctions. As Bennett Berger argued, contemporaries mistakenlytook these goods to be “‘middle-class’ symbols” that suggested thedisappearance of the working class rather than understanding thesehigher standards of living as “conditions capable of generating aconsciousness of collective achievement which is worth fighting topreserve.”128 By questioning the popular assumption of suburbia as areflection of narrowly-defined middle-class values, this study takesseriously struggles over taste and suggests why shiny appliances wereworth fighting over in postwar America. Viewed through this lens, stylecan be understood as a tool that women used to preserve class identityand reformulate social relations. More broadly, we need to reconsiderthe purported classless nature of postwar society and the popularassumption that assimilation necessarily went hand-in-hand with house-hold modernization and mass consumption. In particular, we need toappreciate the ways that working-class women wielded influence in thebattle to define standards for a new mainstream material worldcommonly understood as middle class.129

NOTES

An earlier version of this paper was first presented at the 1997 American StudiesAssociation meeting. I wish to thank Eileen Boris, Robert Friedel, Daniel Horowitz,Charles McGovern, Jeffrey Meikle, John Nickles, Joy Parr, Susan Strasser, and OlivierZunz for their helpful comments on various drafts of this essay. Special thanks go toMeg Jacobs for offering invaluable suggestions that strengthened this article innumerous ways.

The research for this article was made possible by financial support provided by aSmithsonian Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and a University of Virginia Academic Enhance-ment Fellowship, by the assistance of library staff at the National Museum of AmericanHistory and Syracuse University Library Special Collections, and by the helpfulcommunication of former SRI staff Richard Coleman, Gerald Handel, Sidney Levy,and Lee Rainwater.


1. Quoted in Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers inSuburbia (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1960), 84.

2. “Eleventh Annual ASID Conference,” Industrial Design 2 (Dec. 1955): 122–23.See also Foley’s attendance at another ASID conference described by Eric Larrabee,“Rosebuds on the Silverware,” Industrial Design 2 (Feb. 1955): 62–63. The followingdiscussion of Foley’s attendance at conferences held in 1954 and 1955 is based onthese two articles.

3. On Foley, see her obituary in The New York Times, Dec. 13, 1974, p. 48. Theseslides have not been located in Macfadden company files, according to inquiries madeto Janet Tanke, Lisa Rabidoux-Finn, and Tina Paptalardo, of True Story magazine.Foley may have used slides taken by the motivation research firm SRI, but thesematerials have not been saved. Personal communication from Sidney J. Levy to author,Oct. 18, 2001. The readership figure is from Larrabee, “Rosebuds,” 63. The circulationof all Macfadden publications’ “True Story Women’s Group” magazines, whichincluded not only True Story but also True Romance, Photoplay, and others, was 6.5million in 1957, but market research placed the total number of homes reached by themagazine including second-hand readership at about 12 million. “Come on In . . . TheMarket’s Fine,” advertisement, Electrical Merchandising 89 (July 1957): 58–59.According to True Story magazine figures, 81 percent of the magazine’s readers were“working class housewives,” whom they defined as wives of blue-collar workers,including craftsmen, factory operatives, and service workers such as truck drivers. LeeRainwater, Richard Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Workingman’s Wife: Her Personal-ity, World and Life Style (New York: Oceana Publications, 1959), 219.

4. Larrabee, “Rosebuds,” 62–63.5. An argument for putting class relations back into the study of consumption has

been effectively made by Victoria de Grazia and Lizabeth Cohen, “Introduction: Classand Consumption,” International Labor and Working-Class History 55 (spring 1999):1–5. Historians have provided useful discussions of debates over postwar classrelations in Olivier Zunz, Why The American Century? (Chicago: Univ. of ChicagoPress, 1998); James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 320–26; Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard andAmerican Social Criticism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994),110–12, 118; Lizabeth Cohen, “A Middle-Class Utopia? The Suburban Home in the1950s” in Janice Tauer Wass, ed., Making Choices: A New Perspective on the Historyof Domestic Life in Illinois (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Museum, 1995), 58–67; MegJacobs, “Inflation: The Permanent Dilemma of the American Middle Classes” inOlivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari, eds., Postwar Social Con-tracts Under Stress (New York: Russell Sage, 2002), 130–53. See also the introductionby Olivier Zunz, ibid., 1–17.

6. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in theAmerican City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), particularly hisdiscussion of Giddens’s theory of structuration, has been useful in articulating thisapproach to defining class (5–12); see also Olivier Zunz, “Class” in The Encyclopediaof the United States in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley I. Kutler (New York: CharlesScribner and Sons, 1996).

7. For two perspectives on the process by which ethnicity became a moredistinctively working-class attribute by the mid-twentieth century, see Olivier Zunz,The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immi-grants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982); LizabethCohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 7. As debated in this public discourse, the “working

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class” excluded non-white workers as well as the poorest members of society.Although True Story magazine occasionally included African American stories andletters, the two major MR studies completed for the magazine made explicit the beliefthat “Negroes and Puerto Ricans” were a different category and therefore excludedfrom their studies of working-class women. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel,Workingman’s Wife, 17; Lee Rainwater and Gerald Handel, Status of the WorkingClass in Changing American Society (Chicago: Social Research Inc. for MacfaddenPublications, 1961), 176. This racial distinction is clearly articulated in S.M. Miller,“The ‘New’ Working Class” in Arthur B. Shostak and William Gomberg, eds. Blue-Collar World: Studies of the American Worker (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,Inc., 1964), 2–9. In the pre-World War II period, when the working class was not seenas a significant market for expensive mass-produced durables, industrial designersoften lumped the ethnic working class together with non-whites as consumers outsidethe middle-class norm. See Shelley K. Nickles, “Object Lessons: Household ApplianceDesign and the American Middle Class” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1999), ch. 3.On the African American consumer market, see Robert F. Weems, Jr. Desegregatingthe Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: NewYork Univ. Press, 1998).

8. The phrase is from Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 101. The blue-collar workerswere the higher income group contemporary sociologists labeled the “stable workingclass” or “upper lower class.” Lizabeth Cohen makes the point that racial exclusionmeant that the “recruitment” into postwar suburbanization was also a recruitment into“whiteness” in Cohen, “A Middle-Class Utopia,” 65–66. See also George Lipsitz,” ThePossessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘WhiteProblem’ in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47 (Sept. 1995): 373–74. Onracial segregation in suburbia, see David Halle, America’s Working Man: Work, Home,and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago: The Univ. of ChicagoPress, 1984), 26–31. Historical studies that address postwar suburbanization includeKenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Barbara M.Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany,N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993). On the working-class composition ofpostwar suburban development, see Daniel Seligman, “The New Masses,” Fortune,May 1959, p. 108.

9. Contemporary sociological studies that address the ways that blue-collar workersmaintained their distinctive class identity through domestic consumption in suburbiaduring the 1950s and 1960s include: Berger, Working-Class Suburb; William M.Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963); ArthurShostak and William Gomberg, eds., Blue-Collar World: Studies of the AmericanWorker (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964); Herbert Gans, The Levittowners:Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books,1967). Those specifically focusing on working-class women include, Rainwater,Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife; Helena Znaniecki Lopata, Occupation:Housewife (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971); and Mirra Komarovsky, Blue-Collar Marriage (New York: Random House, 1962), although the latter does not focuson consumption per se.

10. On a distinctive working-class aesthetic in earlier periods, see Lizabeth A.Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture ofWorking-Class Homes, 1885–1915” in Material Culture Studies in America, ed.Thomas J. Schlereth (Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local


History, 1982); Jenna Weissman Joselit and Susan L. Braunstein, Getting Comfortablein New York: The American Jewish Home (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1990);Nickles, “Object Lessons,” ch. 3; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers:Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.Press, 2000), 139–41; Nan Enstadt, “Fashioning Political Identities: Cultural Studiesand the Historical Construction of Political Subjects,” American Quarterly 50 (Dec.1998): 745–82; and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure inTurn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1986).

11. These historians have provided a useful corrective to the dominant view ofpostwar society as infused by middle-class culture in historical studies such as DavidHalberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), and in contemporarysociological studies that connected mass consumption to alienation, such as ElyChinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream (New York: Random House,1955). Studies that have been influential in revising this view, although focusing on anearlier period, include: Cohen, Making a New Deal; and Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hoursfor What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). For the postwar period, see George Lipsitz, Class andCulture in Cold War America: A Rainbow at Midnight (New York: Praeger, 1981);Lizabeth Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration ofCommunity Marketplaces in Postwar America” in His and Hers: Gender, Consump-tion, and Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun (Charlottesville, Va.:Univ. Press of Virginia, 1998); On mass culture’s potentially politicizing role forwomen, see Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment ofPostwar Mass Culture, 1946–1961” in Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver:Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ.Press, 1994), 229–62; Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up FemaleWith the Mass Media (New York: Random House, 1994). For a study of postwarworking-class culture in the South, see Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the1950s (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000). On African Americanconsumer politics, see Weems, Desegregating the Dollar.

12. I thank Meg Jacobs for her help in articulating this formulation. For an excellentstudy that explores the influence of working-class prosperity on the postwar landscape,see Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the AmericanDream in Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Whilenumerous studies have focused on women’s roles in articulating class identity throughdomestic consumption in the Victorian era, few historians have done so for the postwarperiod. Exceptions focusing on middle-class identity include May, Homeward Bound;and Alison J. Clarke, Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). Historical scholarship usu-ally treats working-class women’s domestic consumption as assimilation. On postwarmaterial culture as part of a new broad middle-class taste, see Thomas Hine Populuxe(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The VisualCulture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994),129–62, 243–83. For a more complicated, albeit brief treatment, see Cohen, “AMiddle-Class Utopia.” On working-class women’s domestic culture in postwar Canada,see Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in thePostwar Years (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999).

13. Not all designers espoused uplift. The pragmatic approach is represented in J.Gordon Lippincott, Design for Business (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947). For accountsof the design profession in the postwar period, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, “From Celebrityto Anonymity: The Professionalization of American Industrial Design” in Raymond

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Loewy: Pioneer of American Industrial Design, ed. Angela Schönberger (Munich:Presetel-Verlag, 1990); Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure, 1940–1975(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). On the notion of taste as an expression of classinterests and a struggle over cultural capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: ACritique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1984). See also Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: AnAnalysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974), and “Design and theConsumer: A View of the Sociology and Culture of Good Design” in Design Since1945, ed. Kathryn B. Hiesinger (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983). Forbroad discussions of competing value systems in defining consumer culture, seeLizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal; Meg Jacobs, “‘Democracy’s Third Estate’: NewDeal Politics and the Construction of a Consuming Public,” International Labor andWorking-Class History 55 (spring 1999); Charles McGovern, “Consumption andCitizenship in the United States, 1900–1940,” in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern,and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American ConsumerSocieties in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute,1998), 37–58.

14. On the gendered, working-class culture promoted in True Story, see Ann Fabian,“Making a Commodity of Truth: Speculations on the Career of Bernarr Macfadden,”American Literary History 5 (spring 1993): 51–76; Eung-Sook Kim, “Confession,Control, and Consumption: The Working-Class Market World of True Story Maga-zine” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Iowa, 1992).

15. Statistics may be found in: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were:American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 24–5;James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 312; Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center,” 190.See also, “Labor: A New Social Revolution” Fortune, Apr. 1958, p. 218. DanielSeligman, “The New Masses,” 108.

16. Labor leaders focused on gaining higher wages and shorter hours for unionizedworkers. See Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: WalterReuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995); NelsonLichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and theEclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle,eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press, 1989).

17. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, How American Buying Habits Change(Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, 1959). “Worker Loses HisClass Identity,” Business Week, July 11, 1959, p. 90–91, specifically responded to theLabor Department report; William H. Whyte, Jr. “The Consumer in the New Suburbia”in Lincoln Clark, ed., Consumer Behavior: The Dynamics of Consumer Reaction (NewYork: New York Univ. Press, 1955), 1–14. See also numerous Fortune magazinearticles from 1954 through 1960, including “The Rich Middle Income Class,” Fortune,May 1954, p. 98, which refers to workers as the “new bourgeoisie,” and Gilbert Burke,“How American Taste is Changing,” Fortune, July 1959, p. 114–16. Major contempo-rary accounts linking mass consumption and changes in the class structure include:Daniel Bell, “Labor’s Coming of Middle Age,” Fortune, Oct. 1951, p. 114; DanielBell, The End of Ideology (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1960); DavidM. Potter, People of Plenty: Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 1954); David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, TheLonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday & Co., 1955). For a popular contemporary critique, see Vance Packard, The


Status Seekers (New York: David McKay, 1959). Horowitz, Vance Packard, makes thepoint that even critics of the consensus view such as Packard tended to exaggerate theextent of affluence in American society by ignoring persisting poverty and racialexclusion (110–12, 118). On the tendency for commentators to exaggerate thehomogeneity in American society, see Roland Marchand, “Visions of Classlessness,Quests for Dominion: American Popular Culture, 1945–1960” in Robert H. Brennerand Gary W. Reichard, eds., Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945–1960(Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Univ. Press), 163–82; T.J. Jackson Lears, “A Matter ofTaste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass Consumer Society” in Lary May, ed.,Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1989), 38–57; Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver.

18. Seligman, “The New Masses,” 106.19. The phrase is from “A New Kind of Elegance Emerges,” Industrial Design 2

(Dec. 1955): 39. This seemed to be a visual interpretation of a report appearing a yearearlier, Stan Wellisz, “The Designer’s Stake in The Changing American Market,”Industrial Design 1 (Apr. 1954): 97–101, which had discussed the implications of “TheChanging American Market” series in Fortune.

20. This conflation of mass consumption and middle-class gender ideology reachedits apex at the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow in 1959. See May,Homeward Bound, 16–19, 162–65; Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: ExhibitingAmerican Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian InstitutionPress, 1997). The classic contemporary critique of this ideology is found in BettyFriedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963), which focusedlargely on the plight of upper-middle class women. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Workfor Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to theMicrowave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), discusses how the shift from servants tohousehold appliances made middle-class women’s work more like their working-classcounterparts. Other studies of household modernization include Katherine Jellison,Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1919–1963 (Chapel Hill, N.C.:Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History ofAmerican Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Ronald C. Tobey, Technol-ogy as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the AmericanHome (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1996). On changes in middle-classuse of space for dining, see Richard N. Jones, “Changing Concepts of Home Building”in Marketing’s Role in Scientific Management, ed. Robert L. Clewett (Chicago:American Marketing Association, 1957), 527–39.

21. “Eleventh Annual ASID Conference,” 62–63.22. These are phrases used by Larrabee, reporting on Foley’s presentation in

“Rosebuds on the Silverware.” This official viewpoint of Macfadden publications wasargued most forcefully in Rainwater and Handel, “Status of the Working Class,” 3.

23. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957; New York: Pocket Books, 1958),was a popular contemporary criticism of MR. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystiquecondemned the work of motivation researcher Ernest Dichter. On the pioneering role ofDichter, see Daniel Horowitz, “The Émigré as Celebrant of American ConsumerCulture” in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, Matthias Judt, eds., Getting andSpending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (NewYork: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 157–66. The differences between Dichter’spsychoanalytical approach and the sociological approach used by SRI in the service ofMacfadden and other clients are effectively described in Michael A. Karesh, “TheSocial Scientific Origins of Symbolic Consumer Research: Social Research, Inc.,” 7thMarketing History Conference Proceedings 7 (1995): 101–2. For differing conclusions

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about the impact of MR, see the following interpretations: David Gartman, AutoOpium: A Social History of Automobile Design (London: Routledge, 1994), 173, 179;Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure, 258–60; T.J. Jackson Lears, Fablesof Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books,1994), 251–54; Russell W. Belk, “Studies in the New Consumer Behavior” in DanielMiller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge,1995), 59. For a contemporary discussion of MR and design, see Avrom Fleishman,“M/R.: A Survey of Problems, Techniques, Schools of Thought in Market Research:Part I,” Industrial Design 5 (Jan. 1958): 26–29, and “Postscript to M/R,” IndustrialDesign 5 (June 1958): 70.

24. On diversity in the home furnishings industries, see Blaszczyk, ImaginingConsumers; Philip Scranton, “Manufacturing Diversity: Production Systems, Markets,and an American Consumer Society, 1870–1930,” Technology and Culture 35 (July1994): 476–505. On mass production, see David A. Hounshell, From the AmericanSystem to Mass Production, 1880–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technol-ogy in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984); Ben Nash,Developing Marketable Products and Their Packagings (New York: McGraw Hill,1945). On the construction of national markets for branded, standardized goods, seeSusan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market(New York: Pantheon, 1989). On the dynamic between mass consumption and marketsegmentation in postwar America, see Lizabeth Cohen, “The Class Experience of MassConsumption: Workers as Consumers in Interwar America,” in The Power of Culture:Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. JacksonLears (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 158–60; Nickles, “Object Lessons,” 279–390; Zunz, Why the American Century, 93–112.

25. On Fordism, see Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production. Forits impact on industrial design, see also Heskett, Industrial Design.

26. For the earlier figure, see Tobey, Technology as Freedom, 115; for the laterfigure, see Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness, 113.

27. B.L. Aldridge to George Throckmorton (July 23, 1942), Box 292, folder: Memofrom Mr. Throckmorton, Radio Corporation of America collection (Acc. 2069),Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware [hereafter RCA/Hagley].

28. R.J. Candiff, “Comments on Servel’s 1950 Refrigerator Designs from anAdvertising and Sales Promotion Concept” [1949], reel 16.28, Walter Dorwin Teaguepapers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafterTeague/Syracuse].

29. Aldridge to Throckmorton (July 23, 1942), RCA/Hagley.30. Ben Nash, Developing Marketable Products, 19–25, 139. See also Stan Wellisz,

“The Designer’s Stake in the Changing American Market,: 97; Harold Van Doren,Industrial Design, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940), 46. On a class-differentiatedmarket in the ceramics and glass industries, see Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers,139–41. In the prewar period, the “masses” were largely associated with poverty, andmanufacturers catered to a “class” market of upper-middle class consumers. Mass-market ornamentation had been used to sell cheap novelty goods but could be largelyignored by industrial designers of expensive consumer durables, since the averageconsumer was solidly middle class. Nickles, “Object Lessons,” ch. 2, 3.

31. Quote from This is Your Market: America Today, 1954 (New York: MacfaddenPub., 1954), 9. On the gendering of styling, see Roland Marchand, Advertising theAmerican Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1985); Gartman, Auto Opium, 166–67. On these hierarchies moregenerally within modernism, see Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression


of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson,1996), intro.

32. On the development of these two models in the interwar period, see Nickles,“Object Lessons,” ch. 1 and 2. For a useful summary, see Nigel Whitely, Design forSociety (London: Reaktion Books, 1993). On the aesthetic ideals and commercialpragmatism of the industrial design profession in the 1930s, see Jeffrey L. Meikle,Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America (Philadelphia: Temple Univ.Press, 1979); Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993).

33. On Sloanism, see Alfred P. Sloan, My Years With General Motors, ed. JohnMcDonald and Catherine Steven (1963; New York: Doubleday and Co., 1990), 58–70,149–68, 179–81, 238–47, 264–78; “A New Kind of Car Market,” Fortune, Sept. 1953,p. 224; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 263–301; DanielBoorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House,1973); James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988),229–50; Whiteley, Design for Society, 13. On creating these visual symbols of value,see Nash, Developing Marketable Products, 19–25, 139–42.

34. Eric Larrabee, “Autos and Americans: The Great Love Affair,” IndustrialDesign 2 (Oct. 1955): 98.

35. George Walker quoted in Gartman, Auto Opium, 153.36. Gartman, Auto Opium, ch. 6; William H. Whyte, Jr., “The Cadillac Phenom-

enon,” Fortune, Feb. 1955, p. 106–9, 174–84; Pierre Martineau, “It’s Time to Researchthe Consumer,” Harvard Business Review 33 (July–Aug. 1955): 47.

37. Earl quoted in Phil Patton, Made in U.S.A.: The Secret Histories of the Thingsthat Made America (New York: Penguin, 1992), 245. Cadillac began using the “V”emblem in their postwar cars; the first tailfin appeared in 1948. Consumer Guide,Cadillac: Standard of Excellence (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1980). On the reasonsCadillac became a successful status symbol, see Whyte, “The Cadillac Phenomenon,”106–9, 174–84.

38. Nash, Developing Marketable Products, 139. On this assumption, see EgmontArens to H.S. Spencer (April 20, 1943) box 26, folder: refrigerators, Egmont Arenspapers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafterArens/Syracuse].

39. Eliot F. Noyes, “The Shape of Things: Refrigerators,” Consumer Reports 12(May 1947): 176.

40. Catherine Moran, “Report on Market Survey made on Home Refrigerators”(Feb. 15, 1949), Reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse.

41. Raymond Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1951), 221–23, 371. Frigidaire advertised this refrigerator in True Storyduring this period. For Loewy’s role as consultant to Frigidaire at this time, see alsoRaymond Loewy, Industrial Design (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1979);and contracts between Loewy’s firm and Frigidaire, box 40, folder: contracts, Ga-Ge,Raymond Loewy Papers, Library of Congress.

42. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday & Co.,1956), 341. See also Lears, “A Matter of Taste,” 44.

43. On the idea of a “middle majority market,” see the Social Research, Inc.pamphlet, “Women and Advertising: A Motivation Study of the Attitudes of WomenToward Eight Magazines” (New York: Hearst Corp. 1954); and “The Rich MiddleIncome Class,” 98.

44. Pulos, American Design Adventure, 110–121. The sociologist Herbert J. Gansexposed the cultural politics of “good design” in “Design and the Consumer: A View

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of the Sociology and Culture of Good Design” in Kathryn B. Hiesinger, ed., DesignSince 1945 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983).

45. See “Persuading Image: A Symposium,” Design 138 (June 1960): 54–57.MoMA, “What’s Happening to America’s Taste? A Panel Forum” (Apr 22, 1955), reel16.32, Teague/Syracuse.

46. On Teague, see Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 43–48. Despite the technicaldifferences between gas and electric refrigerators, industrial design was consistent. Foran elaborated discussion of this case study, see Nickles, “Object Lessons,” ch. 5. Forstats on market share: Market Research Department, “Mechanical Refrigerator Units—Confidential” (Mar. 9, 1949), folder #79–10.4–35a, Frigidaire Collection, Kettering/GMI Alumni Foundation Collection of Industrial History, Flint, Mich. [hereafterFrigidaire/GMI]. For the refrigerator industry in this period, see Robert C. Haring,Marketing of Mechanical Household Refrigerators (Missoula, Mont.: Montana StateUniv., 1963).

47. “Both Fish and Fowl,” Fortune, Feb. 1934, p. 90.48. Lurelle Guild to Louis Ruthenberg (Mar. 30, 1949), box 17, folder: Servel 1940–

51, Lurelle Guild papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, SyracuseUniv. [hereafter Guild/Syracuse]. These assumptions were confirmed in numerousmarket research reports. For example, see Estep & Associates, Inc., “ConsumerReaction to Large Refrigerator Freezers: A Research Report Prepared for RaymondLoewy Associates (Oct. 24, 1960), 15, box 138, folder: Market Planning ResearchDivision 1960 Admiral Corp, Raymond Loewy papers, Library of Congress.

49. William Hainsworth to Louis Ruthenberg, “Refrigerator Appearance, Dr. FrankSteining’s visit” (Sept. 13, 1948), box 17, folder: Servel 1948, Guild/Syracuse.

50. This is based on written descriptions. No images of this suggested design,rejected by Servel, have been located. Lurelle Guild to Louis Ruthenberg (Mar. 30,1949); and Guild to Ruthenberg, letter draft [1950], box 17, folder: Servel 1950–51,Guild/Syracuse.

51. Catherine Moran, “Report on Market Survey made on Home Refrigerators”(Feb. 15, 1949); W.D. Teague, “Presentation of Model in Evansville” (Mar. 17, 1949);W.D Teague, “Servel 860 for 1950” (Sept. 15, 1949), all reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse.Although ornamentation was clearly part of a general marketing strategy to increaseprice paid by consumers for “deluxe” models based on a “more is better” idea of value,correspondence in the Teague papers makes it clear that plain design was notnecessarily cost saving. In fact, Teague’s initial design proposed reducing the exteriorcorner radius much more dramatically to eliminate the bulky, rounded appearance, buthe was rebuffed by Servel because of the new tooling costs that would have beenincurred. Walter Dorwin Teague to R.S. Taylor (Feb. 18, 1949); Taylor to Teague (Feb.21, 1949), both reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse.

52. R.J. Caniff, “Comment on Servel’s 1950 Refrigerator Designs” [1949], reel16.28, Teague/Syracuse. Servel clearly viewed working-class consumers as an impor-tant market, as evidenced by its frequent advertising in True Story magazine in thisperiod.

53. For the “less cost or greater glitter” quote, see Dailey to Teague (Sept. 18, 1950).During 1950, Servel was already at work on the 1952 model. Servel hired staff designerDonald Dailey in 1950. Dailey to Teague (Sept. 18, 1950); Dailey to Teague (Apr. 5,1951), all reel 16.28, Teague/Syracuse. Teague to Mr. Menzies (June 22, 1955); DanCardozo memo “re: Telephone conference with Fred Eilers (July 25, 1955), both reel16.28, Teague/Syracuse. R.H. Ensign, conference report (May 26, 1956), reel 16.28,WDT/Syracuse. This discussion is based on numerous correspondence and othermaterials in Guild/Syracuse and Teague/Syracuse. For a fuller discussion of thesedevelopments, see Nickles, “Object Lessons,” ch. 5.


54. On the Cadillac V on RCA televisions and radios, see John Vassos to TuckerMadawick (May 2, 1964), box 3, folder: RCA II correspondence, John Vassos Papers,The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter Vassos/Syracuse]; Henry Dreyfuss archive, box 12, folders: RCA #6–8, Cooper-HewittNational Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution, New York, New York [hereafterDreyfuss/CHM]; box 15, notebook 1: 1947–57, the Tucker Madawick papers, TheGeorge Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ. [hereafter Madawick/Syracuse]. For refrigerators with the “V” emblem, see Larrabee, “Automobiles: TheGreat Love Affair,” 97. On working-class women’s preference for “Cadillac handles”on kitchen cabinets see Larrabee, “Rosebuds on the Silverware.”

55. “Department 817,” Industrial Design 1 (Oct. 1954): 85. Elizabeth S. Weirick,“What Sears Roebuck and Co. are Doing to Give Their Customers The Best ofMaterials Obtainable” (Nov. 30. 1932); and T.V. Houser, “The Whys and Whereforesof Sears Merchandise” (Mar. 30, 1939): 11–13, Sears Roebuck, & Co. Archives.Richard S. Latham, “The Artifact as Cultural Cipher” in Laurence B. Holland, ed., WhoDesigns America? (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), 266–67, criticizes thissystem. Van Doren, Industrial Design, 114–15, explicitly describes the design strategybehind the line and the step-up.

56. Hine, Populuxe.57. For the complex values influencing women’s consumption choices, see Parr,

Domestic Goods; and Clarke, Tupperware.58. Parr, Domestic Goods. Pierre Martineau to John Manning (May 21, 1962),

folder: 79–10.7–59, Frigidaire/GMI. On household appliance manufacturers’ attemptsto promote style obsolescence, see Nickles, “Object Lessons,” ch. 6.

59. Consumer Reports 12 (May 1947). Compare “Reports on Products: MechanicalRefrigerators”: 135, with Eliot Noyes, “The Shape of Things: Refrigerators,” 176. Fora study of the social milieu that guided the establishment of Consumer Reports, seeCharles F. McGovern, “Sold American: Inventing the Consumer, 1890–1940” (Ph.D.diss., Harvard Univ., 1993). Ralph Nader pointed out the larger detrimental conse-quences of corporations’ focus on styling at the expense of engineering in Nader,Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Bantam, 1973).

60. See “Persuading Image: A Symposium,” Design 138 (June 1960): 54–57;MoMA, “What’s Happening to America’s Taste?”

61. See Hollis Baker to John Vassos (Mar. 6, 1959); and Vassos to Baker (Mar. 16,1959), box 7, folder: B, John Vassos Papers, Archives of American Art, SmithsonianInstitution, Washington, D.C. [hereafter Vassos/AAA].

62. “Are Designers Undemocratic?” Industrial Design 5 (Nov. 1958): 31.63. Pierre Martineau, the Research Director of the Chicago Tribune, became an

influential promoter and sponsor of MR using Lloyd Warner’s social categories.Martineau hired SRI to conduct several studies for the newspaper. See Pierre D.Martineau, “The Pattern of Social Classes” in Marketing’s Role in Scientific Manage-ment, ed. Robert L. Clewett (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1957), 233–49. The quote is from The Chicago Tribune’s Advertising Dept. in a printed butunpublished report, The Consumer Speaks About Appliances: A Presentation Based ona Motivation Study . . . of Major Appliances (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1959). Forthese assumptions, see also the Industrial Designers’ Institute press release [Oct. 1959],box 99, folder: National Conference Chicago 1959 (Oct.), Industrial Designers Societyof America papers, The George Arents Library for Special Collections, Syracuse Univ.[hereafter IDSA/Syracuse].

64. Pierre Martineau, Motivation in Advertising (New York: McGraw Hill, 1957),163; Pierre Martineau, “New Look at Old Symbols,” Printer’s Ink 247 (June 4, 1954):32. See also Horowitz “The Émigré and American Consumer Culture,” 159–66.

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65. SRI’s assumptions about social class and consumer psychology and its researchmethodology is outlined in Burleigh J. Gardner, Women and Advertising: A MotivationStudy of the Attitudes of Women Toward Eight Magazines (Chicago: Social Research,Inc. for Hearst Corp., 1954) and Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’sWife, iv–xiv, 219–36. On SRI, see Karesh, “The Social Scientific Origins of SymbolicConsumer Research.”

66. Chicago Tribune Research Division, Automobiles: What They Mean to Ameri-cans (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1954), 21–23. The study was directed by SidneyLevy who joined SRI in 1948. See Karesh, “The Social Scientific Origins of ConsumerResearch,” 104. This quote is from Martineau, “It’s Time to Research the Consumer,”46.

67. On the blurring of the status meanings of automobiles in the 1950s, see LeeRainwater and Gerald Handel, Status of the Working Class in Changing AmericanSociety, prepared for Macfadden (Chicago: Social Research, Inc., 1961), 2–3; Robert P.Weeks, “Detroit Discovers the Consumer,” The Nation (Oct. 19, 1959): 151–52.

68. Pierre Martineau, “Social Classes and Spending Behavior,” Journal of Market-ing 36 (Oct. 1958): 121.

69. Warner’s official role at SRI was as a consultant. Gardner had trained as a socialanthropologist, had studied under Warner at Harvard, and had done field work forWarner in Newburyport, Mass., the subject of Warner’s “Yankee City” study. Anon.,“Burleigh Gardner: Selling the U.S. By Class,” Printer’s Ink 270 (Mar. 25, 1960): 77.Burck, “How American Taste is Changing,” 188, credited Gardner with “pioneeringthe status symbol concept of advertising” by using Warner’s social categories.

70. On Warner and his critics, see Olivier Zunz, Why The American Century, 100–2. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern AmericanCulture (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956). William Lloyd Warnerand Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniv. Press, 1941).

71. Martineau, “Social Classes and Spending Behavior,” 122; statistics in “This isYour Market: America Today . . . 1954” (Chicago: Macfadden Pub., 1954).

72. “Selling the U.S. By Class,” 79.73. For an example of the earlier market research reports, see Magazine Homes and

Branded Merchandise (New York: Macfadden Pub., 1937).74. Quoted in Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 71, 54. True Story

magazine, The American Economic Evolution 1 (New York: Macfadden Pub., 1930),cited in Cohen, Making a New Deal, 101–2.

75. Lizabeth Cohen, “The Class Experience of Mass Consumption” in RichardWightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays inAmerican History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 158.

76. On True Story, see Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century(Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964), 298–301. I make this point regardingadvertising based on my comparison of sample issues of True Story and McCall’s,published between 1920 and 1940.

77. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 18.78. See “Come on in . . . the Market’s Fine,” 58–59. Macfadden continued to sponsor

and produce statistical market research reports in this period, including True StoryWomen’s Group, This is Your Market: America Today . . . 1954 (New York:Macfadden, 1954); W.R. Simmons and Associates, Inc., The Women Behind theMarket (New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1962). See also Kim, “Confession,” 163.

79. Burleigh R. Gardner introduction in Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel,Workingman’s Wife, xiii.


80. About half of the sample of both working-class and middle-class womeninterviewed for the 1959 study lived in newly-built houses in postwar suburbs.Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 221. Status of the WorkingClass was published in 1961. The last Social Research, Inc. study for Macfadden thatI have located is A Study of Working-Class Women in a Changing World (May 1973).

81. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 3–5. They were respondingto the popular notion that “people in the same income groups today tend to resembleeach other” in lifestyle, outlook, and consumption. This view was promoted in articlessuch as “Selling to an Age of Plenty” Business Week, May 5, 1956, p. 132.

82. Martineau, quoted in Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, xi.Martineau, “Social Classes and Spending Behavior,” 124.

83. For example, Berger, Blue-Collar Suburb, table A.21.84. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 23, 154. Sidney J. Levy,

“Social Class and Consumer Behavior” in On Knowing the Consumer, ed. JosephNewman (New York: John Wiley, and Sons, 1966), 147. I am grateful to Sidney Levyfor providing this reference.

85. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, ch. 2, quote at 30.86. This argument of appliance purchase percentages by social class within income

group is made by Martineau, “The Pattern of Social Classes,” 240. On top-of-the-lineappliances, see “Look National Appliance Survey, 1963” (New York: Cowles Maga-zine and Broadcasting, 1963).

87. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’ Wife, ch. 2.88. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 21–2, 111. Rainwater,

Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 176–7789. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 109.90. Ibid., 108–11. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 177.91. Ibid., 176.92. Ibid., 171; Martineau, “Social Classes and Spending Behavior,” 126.93. Ibid,, 175. Martineau, “The Consumer Speaks About Appliances.”94. Martineau, “Social Classes and Spending Behavior,” 125.95. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 21–2, 111.96. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 179. Chicago Tribune’s

Advertising Dept. derived this conclusion about upper-middle class women in TheConsumer Speaks About Appliances.

97. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class. Many home service articlesin True Story documented the changes readers made to their homes. See, for example,“How Happy Can a Woman Be,” True Story (Nov. 1957): 88–89.

98. Rainwater and Handel, Status of the Working Class, 181.99. “Blue-collar aesthetics,” a chapter title in Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel,

Workingman’s Wife, pointed out the differences between working-class women’s ownstated preferences for the “simple” and “modern” and the meanings the middle classgave to these terms, as well as the differences observed in their furnishings. Gardnerspelled out these categories for designers in the Industrial Designers’ Institute Pressrelease, [1959]. See also “Burleigh Gardner: Selling the U.S. by Class,” 77; Burleigh B.Gardner, S.J. Levy, R.F. Camp, N.B. Zisook, and S. Greene, The Homemaker andHome Furnishings (Chicago: Social Research Inc., 1967); Martineau, Motivation inAdvertising, 168.

100. Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 184. On the concept ofstatus anxiety, see Vance Packard, The Status Seekers.

101. Martineau, “Social Classes and Spending Behavior,” 122.

621MORE IS BETTER

102. “The New Customer: Skilled, Choosy, Culture-Hungry,” Business Week, May4, 1957, p. 69–70.

103. See Kim, “Confession,” 118–19; and, more generally, Zunz, Why the AmericanCentury, 109.

104. Although some sociologists criticized Workingman’s Wife as a commercialproduct, they also cited it as an important resource for information. See Shostak andGomberg, eds., Blue-Collar World.

105. Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 76–78. See also Shostak and Gomberg, BlueCollar World. The importance of the living room as an indicator of class had beennoted in the 1930s by the sociologist Stuart Chapin, who concocted a “Living RoomScale” as a measurement of social class. On Chapin, see Alan Roy Berolzheimer, “ANation of Consumers: Mass Consumption, Middle-Class Standards of Living, andAmerican National Identity, 1910–1950” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1996), 323–36. See also Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (NewYork: Summit Books, 1983), on Chapin and other efforts to use furnishing choices asan index of class.

106. Berger, Working Class Suburb, 93–97. On the politics of taste cultures andsocial class distinctions, see Gans, “Design and the Consumer,” 31–36, and PopularCulture and High Culture; and Bourdieu, Distinction.

107. Quoted in Brett Harvey, The Fifties: A Women’s Oral History (New York:HarperCollins, 1993), 127.

108. Berger, Working Class Suburb, 93–97. On the distinctions between SRI’s view,which accepted the usefulness of a “middle majority” market despite class differences,and Martineau’s contrary view, see Martineau “The Pattern of Social Classes,” 244,and Motivation in Advertising, 163–172. For an analysis of the “middle majority”market, see also Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 12–19.

109. On the working-class association of the social kitchen, see Kelly, Expandingthe American Dream, 135.

110. One study specifically analyzed actual readers’ views of the magazine itselfthrough motivational style interviews. Lee Rainwater and Marc J. Swartz, The WorkingClass World: Identity, World View, Social Relations and Family Behavior Magazines(Chicago: Social Research, Inc. for Macfadden-Bartell, 1965).

111. Kim, “Confession,” 191.112. This section is based on my analysis of every issue of True Story magazine from

1945 through 1965. I am grateful to Rachel Fincken and Kirsten Brinker for theirassistance in collecting and analyzing these materials.

113. On appliance purchases, see in True Story: Adeline Garner, “Washing Work-Clothes is a Tough Job,” TS (Apr. 1963): 94–95; Hyla O’Connor, “New RefrigeratorsDo Wonders,” TS (Aug. 1948): 54–55; Esther Foley, “How Happy Can a Woman Be,”TS (Nov. 1957): 88–89, “A Modern Range is a Clean Range,” TS (Feb. 1960): 68–69,“The Endless Diaper . . . and Your Machine,” TS (Dec. 1955): 76–77, “For Our NewBaby . . . I Got This New Kitchen,” TS (Nov. 1954): 72–73, and “New Ways to KitchenHappiness,” TS (Nov. 1952): 66. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 302–3. The home section, although proportionately small in relation to the stories, wasdeemed to be of great interest to True Story readers, according to Rainwater, Coleman,and Handel, Workingman’s Wife, 128. Esther Foley, the home service editor from 1949to 1962, was preceded by Esther Kimmel. Various people served as food andequipment editor. Adeline Garner replaced Foley as home service editor in 1962.

114. Anon., “A New Treat From an Ancient Land,” TS (Mar. 1963): 82–83; EstherFoley, “I Make Tomato Sauce from an Old Recipe,” TS (July 1953): 68.


115. Hyla O’Connor, “New Refrigerators Do Wonders,” TS (Aug. 1948): 55, and“Remodeling Magic Made This Perfect Family Kitchen,” TS (Jan. 1963): 57.

116. Letter in the “Village Pump,” TS (Nov. 1948). For a similar letter, see TS (Sept.1949). In an extended essay in the Feb. 1960 issue, “We Wait and We Worry,” the wifeof a steel worker living in a new development with modern appliances recounted theanxieties brought on by a strike.

117. For the derivation of the “true stories,” see Fabian, “Making a Commodity ofTruth,” 64–65.

118. See Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 53–55; Peterson, Magazinesin the Twentieth Century. For True Story, see also: Fabian, “Making a Commodity ofTruth,” 51–76; Kim, “Confession”; Rainwater and Swartz, “Working Class World,”179.

119. “The Yellow Refrigerator,” TS (Oct. 1961): 48–51. A similar message may befound in “I Wanted a House,” TS (Dec. 1954).

120. “Duchess in My Kitchen,” TS (Mar. 1958): 48–51, 109. For other example ofTS stories that feature the kitchen, see “I Wanted A House”; “Frozen Friendship: IBecame the Most Popular Woman on Our Block . . . After My Husband Gave Me aDeep Freeze,” TS (May 1953): 28; “The Woman Next Door,” TS (Jan. 1953): 14.

121. “Split Level Blues,” TS (Mar. 1962): 46, 112–18.122. One of the first commentators to suggest that a new social structure had

emerged in which class divisions were replaced by distinctions of tastes and lifestyleafter World War II was Russell Lynes in his essay on highbrow, middlebrow, andlowbrow culture published in the pages of Harper’s and Life magazines in 1949 as wellas in a book called The Tastemakers. Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Grosset andDunlap, 1949), 310–33. For an analysis of the impact of brow categories on industrialdesigners, see Ibid., 300–5. On Lynes see, Michael Kammen, American Culture,American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books,2000), 97.

123. Lears, “A Matter of Taste.” For a nuanced discussion of these debates overclass, see Zunz, Why The American Century, ch. 5.

124. See Berger, Working-Class Suburb, although he does not put this point ingendered terms. On the influence of women in the postwar market, see Clarke,Tupperware; Sparke, The Sexual Politics of Taste. For a Canadian study that offers anilluminating comparison, see Parr, Domestic Goods.

125. My appreciation to Jeffrey Meikle for helping to develop this point.126. Quotes from Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 99, 101. For oral histories, see

Harvey, The Fifties. See also Lopata, Occupation: Housewife.127. Packard, The Status Seekers. For a thoughtful analysis of Packard, see

Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism.128. Berger, Working-Class Suburb, 103.129. De Grazia and Cohen use the term “middle-mass” in “Class and Consumption,”

2. See also Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender andConsumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press,1996), 280; Zunz, Why the American Century, 74–75.

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