ABSTRACT
Between 1945 and 1960, thousands of Americans purchased a home of their own for the first time. Buying small houses that averaged one thousand square feet in size in newly constructed suburbs, they exercised their perceived rights to ownership of a single-family home, and in the process they began to reconfigure and affirm their identities. The ordinary house—whether a plywood or stuccoed ranch house, a concrete block two-bedroom unit built on a concrete slab, or a split-level (to name a few types)—served as an important framework for racial, class, and ethnic assimilation for a large number of Americans in the immediate postwar period (see Figure 7.1). Those identified as “white” made up the vast majority of new home buyers because others were largely excluded from suburban housing through the racist practices of government lending programs, real estate steering, and restrictive covenants. 1 New houses were produced primarily for a generically conceived “white” audience of presumed middle-class status. In this way the industries attendant to domestic building and design became complicit in the formation of good Americans—which in the context of the postwar era meant implicitly “white” Americans—out of every new home owner in the nation. These houses supported and aided the refashioning of a new personal and family identity that was, whenever possible, constructed with little or no reference to a past tradition. As recent scholars have noted, and as I expand on here, “home” must be understood not only as a site of safety and shelter “but also as the site of an enormously creative process—the formation of a cultural identity.” 2
