Suburbia

The Emergence of Suburban Manhood in the Nineteenth Century

Suburban manhood drew on several major sources. The first was the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal of the early nineteenth century, according to which owning and working land as a yeoman farmer in close physical proximity to one's family made a man complete. The social reality behind this ideal faded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as increasingly fewer American men (particularly those living in suburbia) farmed for a living or worked near their homes. But the ideal itself persisted, and many urban men alienated by their corporate work experiences sought to counteract their sense of distance from nature, family, and an idealized rural American past by owning a small plot of land, a home, and often a garden.

A second source of suburban male identity, which developed during the early to mid–nineteenth century, was a growing separation of work from the home (and the division of labor by gender that accompanied it), called by historians the “cult of domesticity.” According to this social construct, men were solely responsible for providing economic support for their families through paid labor—and for representing the family's interests in the public sphere. This role gave the male breadwinner a feeling of empowerment and autonomy, even as the corporate work that underwrote it allowed most men little control over the nature of their work and often afforded them little personal satisfaction. The cult of domesticity was not unique to the suburban experience, but it was magnified by the physical separation of suburbia from the male workplace.

During the late nineteenth century, in particular, suburban manhood (and the move to suburbia generally) was informed by the husband/father's belief that leaving urban areas protected his family, or at least protected white, middle-class family ideals. Concerns over the social unrest and urban violence produced by growing immigration, nativism, class and racial conflict, and escalating crime rates resulted in an important ideological underpinning of suburban masculinity: the perceived duty of protecting women and children in a new and safe haven.

Suburban Manhood in the Twentieth Century

Between the 1880s and 1920s, the growth of suburban living generated a suburban model of manhood, sometimes called by scholars “masculine domesticity.” This emergent male identity emphasized an interest in the physical aspects of the house and property, an engagement in family life, a reaction against the female-centered domesticity characteristic of Victorian culture in the United States, and a desire to counteract consequent feminization of the home and children. Feeling separated from domestic life by the increasing distances between the home and the workplace, men who aspired to this style of maleness sought to replace the mid-nineteenth-century image of the dispassionate and often emotionally and physically absent patriarch. Suburban design—from the layout of streets, parks, and social clubs to the architecture of suburban homes—emphasized the family as a complete unit and reflected the suburban man's role as participant and caregiver.

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