Suburbanization and Change in the American Family

Abstract

Suburbanization and Change in the American Family Episodic accounts of social processes have proven generally unsatisfying to recent historians. One reason that Warner's Streetcar Suburbs so quickly attained the status of a classic in urban history is that it makes processual sense out of a range of phenomena formerly of interest mainly to a variety of antiquarians. Warner's inquiry into the growth of residential Boston in the late nineteenth century taught urban historians that suburbanization has been, for a century, a critical process of American urbanization, and not just a characteristic alarum of the 1950s. The most suggestive element of Warner's account has been its indication that even in the era of the streetcar, American cities did not simply expand: cities differentiated as they grew, redistributing individuals and activities in non-random ways, serving different categories of individuals differently. Warner's work conveyed the powerful message that the restructuring of social space within cities has affected lives in systematic ways which call for close scholarly attention.1 Although systematic social historians are in Warner's debt for his processual account, Streetcar Suburbs is nevertheless a case study, and, like much of Warner's work, proceeds intuitively rather than by spelling out implications. Among the most important of these implications is the notion that the family not only affected but was systematically affected by urban form. The present paper pursues this line of analysis.