Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick
Picure a suburban housewife of the 1950s. Her name is Mrs. John Drone (Mary), and she lives in Rolling Knolls Estates, a new development of what the salesman calls "California Cape Cod Ramblers" on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Whatever knolls might have rolled gently over the land at one time have been flattened for muddy streets of two-bedroom houses, named after famous conflicts of World War II.
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Suburban alienation, especially that of the 1950s housewife, has become such a familiar cultural trope that we take it for granted. What’s unusual about the Gordons’ portrait of Alice Hager, though, is her utter solitude. Other writers describe suburban neurosis flourishing in a hothouse atmosphere of hyper-socialization, which could not be escaped and which broke down moral boundaries.