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3. Creative Living at Home
- University of Minnesota Press
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71 3 C r e a t i v e l i v i n g a t h O m e T H E E D U C A T I o n A L- T o Y I n D U S T R Y emphasized the creative potential of playing with blocks, cards, and other construction toys. Although these were age-old favorites of the middle-class toy box, in the years after World War II the act of building itself acquired new relevance. One of the biggest problems facing postwar reconstruction was housing. A severe shortage throughout the Depression and limited wartime building made housing a pressing social and architectural issue. Returning GIs, a rising birthrate, and an increasing demand led to the Housing Act of 1949, which promised a decent home for all Americans but disproportionately benefited middleclass suburban families with children.1 Depression-era legislation, such as that which the Federal Housing Administration created to stimulate construction of moderate-cost housing, had made the single-family dwelling a national cause. Although housing starts were low throughout World War II, families anticipated and planned their postwar dwellings, clipping out pictures and collecting ideas for plans, materials, and products as the home became a singular image of patriotic hopefulness.2 A March 1945 ad for building materials in American Home magazine showed a small child wearing Uncle Sam’s hat, sitting on a globe and holding a straightedge. The text declared, “In the years ahead we’ll build millions of new homes! Beautiful, livable, economical homes—the kind Mummy and Daddy dream of for you!” (Plate 5).3 Given the ingrained belief that families with children belonged in nonurban settings and federal financing policies that reinforced it, the smaller, single-family house with its combined living-dining room, picture window, and gleaming kitchen, became a reigning symbol of the ambitions of white middle-class postwar America.4 The preoccupation with housing and domestic life was a particular motif of postwar culture, and the design and furnishing of household crE AtIVE lIVInG At hoME 72 spaces for children’s use gained new importance as a measure of national self-image. The anthropologist Margaret Mead argued, “Americans show their consciousness that each age has its own distinctive character by all the things that are fitted to the child’s size, not only the crib and the cradle gym and the bathinette, but the small chair and table, too, and the special bowl and cup and spoon which together make a child-sized world out of a corner of the room.”5 Mead’s vision of American childhood was fundamentally bound to material goods; the making of a “child-sized world” in the postwar family house was, therefore, a discourse not only of spatial planning but also of consumer culture. Although the social and political dynamics of postwar domestic architecture have been well documented, the design and decoration of children ’s spaces has received little scholarly attention, even though these areas became a new focus of household planning in the increasingly informal middle-class houses built after the war.6 The organization and decoration of the children’s playroom, bedroom, and outdoor play areas, which were widely discussed in popular magazines, advice literature, and housing exhibits , reflect not only parents’ increased buying power and child-centered attitudes but also a more subtle discourse of personal improvement. For designers such as Norman Cherner, the presence of children in the household required a new outlook: “A child-conscious home should have a casual atmosphere; yet it should be clean and esthetic. It should be an example for Peter and help him develop positive attitudes and standards for neatness and good taste. Peter can very well serve as an incentive for Parent to plan a more effective home for all those who live in it, a home conducive to wellbalanced and creative living.”7 The moral discourse of providing a clean, well-appointed environment recalled nineteenth-century prescriptive literature, but the desire for wholesome “creative living” was a singularly postwar obsession. In the debates on housing and parenting, an important and consistent theme was the provision of play space to encourage a child’s inner life. Children’s playrooms , nurseries, and bedrooms in postwar housing reveal how parents, designers, and psychologists envisioned and idealized creativity and imagination . If areas in the single-family house seemed to offer cognitive benefits for developing children, they also appeared to satisfy parents who labored to meet...