1950's Suburban Life

Life in America in the 1950’s post war had changed drastically as it offered a brighter future. The American people saw new opportunities and a way of life. Many things contributed to this change such as the baby boom, civil rights movement and the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War, and Art Movements. With the difficulties of the war behind them the decade gave birth to what is know as the ‘suburban dream’, it was expressed through cinema, visual arts movements and literature. Everyone can recognize what the typical 1950’s housewife looks like, cinema and television has brought this to life for us. As the draw of suburban living built momentum in its idealized location and lifestyle, television was also gaining significant popularity as a preferred

They created this idea of what reality should be and the social norms for one to follow. This is what created the suburban dream. A term we still use today. Everyone wants to have the big, beautiful house, the perfect children, the wife who cooks and cleans and the man of the house makes the decisions and brings in the money. This is what this idea has taught us to believe is correct or what is ideal. I enjoyed I Love Lucy because even though she displayed all of the attributes of the suburban dream and the perfect housewife in that era possessed she broke away from the normatively of it. She would often have plan to make money that would backfire or role reversal with her husband. The 1950’s was an era of change, the war was past them, the economy blossomed, the civil rights movement began to break away racism, television boomed and came to be known as one of the most historic decades for everything it had to offer. But it cannot be forgotten, especially by the families of the victims if the Korean War that over 50,000 American’s died for this ‘suburban Dream’. In Postwar American Literature and Culture, the 1950’s were described as having split personalities. “The split personalities of the fifties culture are dazzling: Joseph McCarthy and the Beats; Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley; Eisenhower and Allen Ginsberg; warm, fuzzy, family sitcoms and fixed, crooked quiz shows; the man in the grey flannel suit and the women of Peyton Place; thew savagery of the Korean War and the peaceful, forgetful home front; John F. kennedy and Martin Luther King; Joseph Papp and Roy Cohn; William Gladdis and Herman Wouk; Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; Robert Lowell and Wallace Stevens; Willie Mays and Maria Callas; John Cheever, the country club band and there Levittown people; the racism of the movie The Searchers and the