Download Chapter 28 - Austin Community College

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CH 28
STUDY GUIDE
THE SUBURBAN ERA
PEOPLE, PLACES & EVENTS
1. The automobile culture of mobility
2. The 1950s & the automobile
3. 1920 to 1960 & population center
4. The growth of suburbs
5. The rise of suburbia
6. Major social and economic trends of the post-World War II era
7. The suburban lifestyle problems
8. The baby boom
9. William Levitt & the mass production of houses
10. American “consensus”
11. Church membership in the 1950s
12. Religion in the 1950s
13. Stereotype of women in the 1950s
14. Popular houses of suburbia
15. Alfred Kinsey’s research
16. Modern Republicanism
17. Sustained economic growth of the 1950s
18. President Eisenhower & “a row of dominoes”
19. Corporate diversification and conglomeration
20 Domestic policy style of the Eisenhower era
21. The Cold War in the 1950s
22. The foreign policies of the Eisenhower era
23. The “new look” in Cold War policy & Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles
24. The French-Vietnamese war & help from the United States
25. The Eisenhower 1955 Geneva Summit policy offer of open skies
26. In 1961 President Eisenhower & the dangers of the “military-industrial complex
27. Conscious dissent & the consensus-oriented, organizational culture of the
28. The consensus-oriented, organizational culture & Marilyn Monroe
29. Kennedy’s victory in 1966
30. The Kennedy’s foreign policy in Latin America
COMPLETION
1. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, passed in response
to [
] authorized federal funding of science
and foreign language programs in public schools.
2. The National Defense Highway Act created today’s system of [
] highways.
3. Crucial to the increased reliance on the automobile was the creation of this highway system,
paid for by taxes on [
)].
4. Consistent with suburbia’s leisure-minded lifestyle was a new household technology that
burgeoned in the 1950s: [
].
5. [
] was one of the places where
the CIA orchestrated covert operations that toppled the government.
Chapter 28: The Suburban Era
6. When [
] asked the United States to intervene against
the Viet Minh in 1954 in Indochina, President Eisenhower refused the request.
IDENTIFICATION QUESTIONS
Students should be able to describe the following key terms, concepts, individuals, and places,
and explain their significance:
Terms and Concepts
Interstate Highway Act
organization man
modern Republicanism
New Look
covert operations
Eisenhower Doctrine
Sputnik
beatniks
civil religion
conglomerate
mass automobility
brinksmanship
Open Skies
U-2
Sunbelt phenomenon
abstract expressionism
Individuals and Places
St. Lawrence Seaway
William Whyte
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
Beirut, Lebanon
Billy Graham
John Foster Dulles
Nikita Khrushchev
Gary Powers
MAP IDENTIFICATIONS
Students have been given the following map exercise: On the map on the following page, label
or shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their significance to the chapter.
1. Quemoy
2. Dien Bien Phu
3. South Vietnam
4. Taiwan
5. Hanoi
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Chapter 28: The Suburban Era
CRITICAL THINKING
EVALUATING EVIDENCE (MAPS)
1. Locate Quemoy and Matsu on the map, “Asian Trouble Spots” (page 960). Why would they
be a point of contention between the Nationalist and Communist Chinese governments?
2. Looking again at the Asian map, explain Eisenhower’s domino theory about Vietnam. What
information other than geographic data would you need to evaluate whether or not the
theory was valid?
3. Looking again at the map on page 960, what countries, if any, would you say were vital to
American security? What makes them vital?
EVALUATING EVIDENCE (ILLUSTRATIONS AND CHARTS)
1. In the painting Easter Morning (page 943), how many details of “ideal” suburban life are
shown? What aspect of 1950s culture is Norman Rockwell satirizing?
2. What underlying message does the photograph of a demonstration fallout shelter (page
964) give about the notion of surviving a nuclear war? In what ways does it convey that
message?
3. In the graph, “Average Annual Regional Migration” (page 947), what trends are shown to
continue after the war? How does that continuation contribute to an explanation of the
“Sunbelt phenomenon?” To the rise of the civil rights movement?
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Chapter 28: The Suburban Era
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Students have been asked to read carefully the following excerpt from the text and then answer
the questions that follow.
The increased willingness to see sexual pleasure as an integral part of marriage
received additional attention in 1948, with the publication of an apparently dry scientific
study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Its author, Professor Alfred Kinsey, hardly
expected the storm of publicity received by that study or its companion, Sexual Behavior
in the Human Female (1953). Kinsey began his research career as a zoologist with a
zest for classifying data. During the 1940s he had turned to collecting information on
sexual behavior. Based on more than 10,000 interviews, Kinsey reached conclusions
that were startling for his day. Masturbation and premarital petting, he reported, were
widespread. Women did not just endure sex as a wifely duty; they enjoyed it in much the
same way as men did. Socioeconomic factors of race, class, ethnicity, and age often
dictated sexual preferences. Extramarital sex was common for both husbands and
wives. About 10 percent of the population were homosexual.
It is difficult in more sexually liberated times to appreciate the impact of Kinsey’s work
and the controversy surrounding it. Commentators called his first volume “the most
talked about book of the twentieth century.” Social scientists, with some justice, objected
that Kinsey’s sample was too limited. (Most of his subjects were Midwestern, middle
class, and well-educated.) Later studies challenged some of his figures (for example, the
percentage of homosexuals in the population). More strident critics of the day charged
that Kinsey was a “menace to society” who would destroy the morals of the nation.
Kinsey replied that he had published a “report on what people do which raises no
questions about what they should do.” Polls indicated that most Americans felt
comfortable about having such research published, perhaps partly because they found
liberation in the discovery that behaviors once treated as sinful or perverse were widely
practiced.
PRIMARY SOURCE: BETTY FRIEDAN ATTACKS THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE*
In 1963, Betty Friedan jolted the myth of the contented suburban housewife when she published
The Feminine Mystique. Friedan tried to explain how the image of independent career women,
popular in the 1930s, had become trivialized into a cult of domesticity and submissiveness. She
further wanted to urge women to expand their horizons and develop a stronger sense of
personal identity.
By the end of 1949, only one out of three heroines in the women’s magazines was a
career woman—and she was shown in the act of renouncing her career and discovering
that what she really wanted was to be a housewife. In 1958 and again in 1959, I went
through issue after issue of the three major women’s magazines ...without finding a
single heroine who had a career, a commitment to any work, art, profession, or mission
in the world, other than “Occupation: housewife.” Only one in a hundred heroines had a
job; even the young unmarried heroines no longer worked except at snaring a husband.
These new happy housewife heroines seemed strangely younger than the spirited
career girls of the thirties and forties. They seem to get younger all the time—in looks,
and a childlike dependence. They have no vision of the future, except to have a baby.
The only active growing figure in their world is the child. The housewife heroines are
forever young, because their own image ends in childbirth. Like Peter Pan, they must
*From
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedman, by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1974,
1963 by Betty Friedan.
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Chapter 28: The Suburban Era
remain young, while their children grow up in the world. They must keep on having
babies because the feminine mystique says there is no other way for a woman to be a
heroine. Here is a typical specimen from a story called “The Sandwich Maker” (Ladies’
Home Journal, April, 1959). She took home economics in college, learned how to cook,
never held a job, and still plays the child bride, though she now has three children of her
own. Her problem is money. “Oh nothing boring, like taxes or reciprocal trade
agreements, or foreign aid programs. I leave all that economic jazz to my constitutionally
elected representative in Washington, heaven help him.”
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