During the 1950’s millions of white middle class Americans, mainly ex veterans with wives and children escaped the financial blackout of city culture through economic expansion, substantial quantities of cheap housing estates and advanced service of social Technology in mass produced suburbs. A middle class community who replaced the bourgeoisie class as a social standard of society. A conformist society where belonging to the neighbourhood network was just as important as the return to family life. The social structure depends partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters that are in frequent contact with a wide circle of people. Public characters need no special talents or wisdom to fulfil their function, just presence among ones counter parts which basically binds respect. The long term relation settles for a simple form of togetherness like the Barbeque or Salad bar. A plain contrast of characteristics that regards serendipity.

 

Modern design created an element of illusion called the French windows with their function as sliding doors. Daniel Boorstin doubted the comfort of this invention as a declining of importance concerning indoors and outdoors which erased the border between public and private space.

 

The Post War Television of the 1950’s was a general guide to family values, neighbourhood bonding and community participation. The television rose within one decade from 9% to nearly 90% in all American homes offering an ability to combine private with public spaces. The modernism of magazines, films and airwaves became the cultural representatives of this “good life” and the average citizen watched about five hours of television per day. Privatization of spectator’s amusements and separation of the public sphere were contemporary topics of the main media.

 

Suburban space was designed to represent the young, middle class community patterns of nuclear family life. Black Americans, older people, gay or lesbian people and unmarried people were simply written of these community spaces and kept in the cities. Suburban space was the purified ideal that carried America throughout the industrial depression.

 

The magazine House Beautiful reviewed female TV space for daughters to find “peace of mind away from the house yet still at home.” Promising to keep children away from unsupervised, varied spaces whilst offering desires to the very people who were considered dirty and diseased. They applauded televisions ability of confronting the lives of disadvantaged groups with the public spaces in which they were typically unwelcome. Although social critics honoured television’s ability to combine public and private domains, this fantasy of space binding revealed an unpleasant underside. Metaphors of disease were continually used to discuss television’s unwelcome presence in domestic life. Television was praised by some to keep children out of dangerous public spaces. Others saw the electrical environment as a threatening extension of the public sphere.

 

People left their families and long life friends in the city to find instant neighbourhoods in pre planned communities. A sense of community was vital for newcomers experiencing rootless ness. While the garden barbeque was yet to obtain its purpose of purchase, the developers of the mass produced suburbs tried to smooth tensions causing rootless ness. They promised an increase of community life in their advertisements. But as the newcomers arrived in their suburban communities, they were confronted by something different from the ideal that the magazines and advertisements suggested. The neighbourhood planning was compressed to the extent that the French windows gazed not onto a calm horizon of green acres, but into the neighbour’s living room. An awkward situation usually known as the “goldfish bowl” affect that caused claustrophobia. These neighbourhood ideals required therefore an enormous amount of pressure to conform to the group.

These televised neighbours seemed to ease the painful transition from the city to the suburb. But more than simply supplying a tonic for displaced sub urbanities, television promised modes of spectator pleasure premised upon the sense of an illusionary-rather than a real-community of friends. It maintained ideals of community togetherness and social interconnection by placing the community at a fictional distance.

 

Joshua Meyrowitz stated “During the male labour time, televisions first and strongest impact regarded the degree of the public space females obtain or require." He assumes that public space is male and private space is female. So television was not bringing male space into female space but transposed one system of sexually organized space onto another. Postwar media often suggested that television would increase women’s social isolation from the public life by reinforcing spatial power structures that had already defined their everyday experiences in male dominated cultures. So family theatres were typically broadcasted to confront his leisure time and limit her isolation as she presented her freshly baked pie from the oven.

 

Household claustrophobia was also experienced by teenagers. 80 percent of the girls admitted they would rather go to a low budget movie than stay home and watch television. Experts considered these old values of human progress as becoming manifest. However the women and children left in empty suburban towns with no particular cultural life did not enjoy the routine of drone monotone life in identical designed houses with neighbours who desired to unfold themselves far from it.

 

Films like Marlon Brando’s The Wild One in 1953 portrayed the rebelliousness of the new and young middle class. Middle class affluence put money in the pockets of their children who became economic factors themselves which created the youth culture who liberated from their one dimensional suburbs to rage against the world. The conscious of Motherhood then establishment the 2nd Female Liberation, one decade later.

 

 

Most of the given Information above was attained from Lynn Spigel with Beatrix Colomina's book : Sexuality & Space