More is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America

"around here, the working class is the middle class"

—suburban worker, 1960 ¹

At a series of conferences in the mid-1950s, the nation's leading designers of appliances, automobiles, and other mass-produced goods debated the social and cultural consequences of working-class prosperity in the decade following World War II. One invited panelist reportedly "shocked and intrigued" the mostly male group of Madison Avenue sophisticates. ² The participant who caused such a stir was Miss Esther Foley, home service editor of True Story, a confessional-style magazine aimed at wage-earners' wives and published by Macfadden Publications since 1919. Foley abandoned the usual abstract or statistical profiles of the "average" mass-market consumer. Instead, she used slides to bring these designers directly into an unfamiliar world—the kitchens and living rooms of her "ten million" working-class women readers. ³ What "shocked and intrigued" designers was the material evidence of working-class women's purchasing power. The debate centered on "rosebuds," the flowery flourishes that appeared everywhere. Why, the mystified designers demanded to know, did Foley's women readers insist on buying silverware decorated with rosebuds? Rosebuds represented a sentimental, ornamental aesthetic associated with working-class taste. In designers' scheme of economic mobility leading to cultural uplift, postwar prosperity should have brought an end to rosebuds. As more and more of these women moved into the middle-income groups, they would trade rosebuds for silverware of a simpler aesthetic preferred by designers and other upper-middle class tastemakers. Instead, these wives of wage earners demanded their rosebuds.

Foley told designers that she "did not want 'her' people to be ignored or slighted . . . [nor] their motives . . . misunderstood." She argued that "motivation research" could help designers understand that these women rejected "severe sterile purity" in silverware because it did not embody the "hopes, dreams . . . and despairs" of their increasingly comfortable but still distinctively working-class lives. ⁴ In other words, working-class women's preference for shiny ornamental rosebuds was not about bad taste, fashion, or status-seeking but about social identity. In fact, designers' dream of economic mobility leading to cultural uplift had been turned on its head. Not only was silverware with rosebuds evidence of a persisting working class in a supposedly classless middle-class society, but through the mechanism of mass production this ethos actually drove the standards for shiny appliances, automobiles, and other goods that permeated mainstream culture.

This study offers a reconsideration of postwar class relations by exploring the significant influence of working-class women's distinctive values, as expressed in taste, on American social life and culture. ⁵ By World War II, class had come to be synonymous with the "collar line," yet historians have shown that, along with income and occupation, patterns of education, sociability, and style of life also have played a role in class formation and identity. ⁶ The new postwar working class that was the subject of debate in this public discourse referred to white "blue-collar" wage earners and their families, a predominantly northern industrial workforce that included the children and grandchildren of European immigrants for whom ethnicity had become a class marker. ⁷ An increasing number of these blue-collar workers now had middle-class pocketbooks that allowed them to live in suburban "mass-produced domestic comfort" and participate in the white identity defined by that racially homogenous environment. ⁸ But, these blue-collar men and women nevertheless often retained their distinctive class values, lifestyles, and tastes. ⁹ Above all, an ethos I call "more is better" defined working-class taste. This ethos represented the preservation of working-class values now given new expression in big cars and shiny refrigerators. That style, with its boldness and bulk, stood in contrast to a "less is more" aesthetic of simplicity favored by upper-middle class tastemakers. ¹⁰ By identifying the persistence of working-class taste...