ABSTRACT
Women, families, and suburbia: for more than one hundred years the three have been intertwined in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States. Suburbs exist in that critical fluid region between city centres and rural spaces. While individual suburbs may change remarkably over time and range widely in their specifics, their quintessential representation identifies them as low-density, familycentred residential spaces, sometimes revealingly characterized as ‘bedroom’ or ‘dormitory’ communities. Although differentiated in many ways across the four countries, such imagined suburbs lie at the heart of many discourses about modernity, forecasting either national promise or nightmare. Women and their work, or, more broadly, gender relations haunt the majority of these accounts. However, sustained deconstruction of the ‘taken-for-granted’ association between women and ‘the family’ within residential suburbs had to await the arrival of feminist scholars in the late-twentieth century.
