Soccer Mom Research Articles

“I was a soccer mom—high or not”: The intersecting roles of parenting and recovery

AbstractObjectiveThe overarching goal of this study was to analyze qualitatively how parents in a state‐mandated family treatment court (FTC) intervention revised and performed their parental role while navigating a novel recovery role.BackgroundA large proportion of parents are involved with the child welfare system for reasons related to substance misuse. Prior literature makes clear that navigating child welfare interventions is incredibly challenging given the many requirements and expectations parents must meet to resume parenting without state oversight. No work to date has explored the role strain arguably inherent to the experience of being tasked with simultaneously revising the parental role and adopting and performing a new recovery role in the context of nonvoluntary state intervention.MethodData came from transcripts of in‐depth, semistructured interviews with 21 parents who were former participants in FTC. Interview questions were designed to elicit rich, personal narratives, with probes for concrete examples wherever possible.ResultsVariation in parents' role definitions and trajectories of both parental and recovery role performance were used to develop a typology of roles: role enactors, role revisors, and role rejectors. The three groups differed in how closely their views around substance misuse, parenting, and recovery aligned with the role expectations put forth by the state, leading to varying degrees of role strain and conflict across groups.ConclusionFindings shed light on the experiences of parents involuntarily participating in both child protective interventions and substance use treatment—a growing proportion of parents that have been largely ignored in prior literature.

The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe

Reviewed by: The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe Jared Strange THE WOLVES. By Sarah DeLappe. Directed by Nell Bang-Jensen. Philadelphia Theatre Company, Philadelphia. Livestreamed, December 14, 2020. There were times when Philadelphia Theatre Company’s (PTC’s) The Wolves could be quite overwhelming. The production was streamed into homes everywhere following the cancellation of its indoor engagement early in the pandemic, a move that forced the nine girls on its eponymous indoor soccer team off the stage and into all-too-familiar Brady Bunch Zoom boxes. Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s symphony of teenage chatter, rarely limited to a single conversational stream, now gushed out of a wall of talking heads. Throughout the opening minutes of my first viewing, my eyes darted back and forth across my laptop screen in a mostly futile attempt to identify who was talking and to whom. Eventually, my attention rested on lonely #46 (Emma Lenderman), occupying the center box with a quiet desperation akin to my own. I later came to appreciate her astute positioning: it alerted me to the sense of isolation that this production brought out in DeLappe’s play that others might not have. Click for larger view View full resolution The nine members of the Wolves, an indoor soccer team, pose for a photograph using orange slices brought by #14’s mom. This is a screenshot from the streaming production of The Wolves, presented by Philadelphia Theatre Company. (Source: Chris Swetcky was the director of photography.) Prior to viewing PTC’s version, I would have said that any successful production of The Wolves depends on an abundance of space and respect for how it shapes the girls’ sociality. In her preface to the Overlook Press edition, DeLappe highlights the importance of the indoor arena in which the play takes place, noting that it both insulates the Wolves from the outer world, for good and for ill, and gives them a slice of AstroTurf to call their own. The play unfolds across that turf through a series of pre-match warm-up sessions. Each session acts as a slice of the team’s life, showcasing, among other things, the integration of a new member, the breakdown of a friendship, the rising stakes of each [End Page 249] subsequent game, and the aftermath following the death of a teammate. Embodied in this production by an excellent cast under the direction of Nell Bang-Jensen, the girls use these sessions to negotiate the slippery terrain of late adolescence: sexual maturation and its horrors, pressure to achieve on the pitch and in life, the politics of post-genocide Cambodia, and so on. Despite being known primarily by their squad numbers, each girl is distinctly drawn, albeit with the aid of archetypal shaping. #7 (Hannah Gaffney) is talented, tough, and crass; she and able sidekick #14 (Iraisa Ann Reilly) clash with #25 (Tori Lewis), the driven and dutiful captain. #8 (Margaret Morgan) is earnest and willfully childish, unlike #11 (Donovan Lockett), the daughter of therapists and the picture of “mature for her age.” #13 (Annika Cowles) self-consciously leans into her goofiness, while #2 (Alison Ormsby) and #00 (Michelle Tsai) occupy the outskirts of the group, the former religious and possibly anorexic, the latter overcommitted and anxious. Then there is #46, the perennial new girl, whose cockeyed perspective and air of mystery belie a natural talent for the Beautiful Game. Apart from the grief-stricken Soccer Mom (Leah Walton) who appears in the final scene, the girls’ huddle exists undisturbed by outsiders. Click for larger view View full resolution Hannah Gaffney (#7), Michelle Tsai (#00), and Tori Lewis (#25) in a promotional photograph for The Wolves, presented by Philadelphia Theatre Company. (Photo: Anthony Werhun.) While we never see them in action on the pitch, having the space to literally stretch out typically gives the play both its athletic bona fides and that sense of insularity. The Goodman Theatre’s 2018 production in Chicago, for example, staged the play in its arena space and employed a low wall and nets around the stage, outlining the girls’ bubble and allowing them to kick the ball with little fear of causing an incident. Naturally, PTC’s Zoom setup could...

College Dropout to College Professor

Being a college dropout wasn’t something to be proud of; it just happened. Life doesn’t always turn out the way we want or expect. Yet, it is often how we deal with defeat that defines us – figuring out when to lick our wounds and when to come back fighting. It took a few years to redefine my dream, start a family, and seem to move forward, but the ache for more was always in the back of my mind. Could I succeed at something at which I had already failed? Going back to school at a community college at the age of 32 when my youngest was six years old, I earned my doctorate the year my oldest graduated with her bachelor’s degree in math. Thirteen years of blood, sweat, and tears. Getting kids on and off the bus, college classes during the day, milk & cookies in the afternoon, soccer mom in the evening, and homework after everyone else was in bed. Learning to balance school and family, and then work and family has given me tremendous insights that I can share with my students, as many of them struggle to find balance in their own lives. This article is a reflection on my experience with motherhood and the pursuit of my dreams; my daughter, now with her own doctorate, brings special insight into what it means to have a mother in mathematics. Looking back, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Soccer Mom to Urban Farmer: Small Livestock in the City

Soccer Mom to Urban Farmer: Small Livestock in the City

The Mysterious Case of Aafia Siddiqui: Gothic Intertextual Analysis of Neo-Orientalist Narratives

When Aafia Siddiqui ‘disappeared’ from her upper-middle class life in Boston in 2003 due to accusations that she was involved in al Qaeda, competing narratives from the US government, media, and her family emerged striving to convince the American public of her guilt or innocence. These narratives were rooted in a gendered form of neo-Orientalism that informed and structured the War on Terror. The narratives, of innocent Soccer Mom, nefarious Lady al Qaeda, and mentally fragile Grey lady, sought to explain how a well-educated woman could possibly be involved with a terrorist organisation. This article uses intertextual analysis to draw parallels between Gothic literature and the Siddiqui narratives. Gothic literature’s dependency upon gendered unease is particularly evident in the Siddiqui narratives, which then reveal the uncertainties within the War on Terror, particularly those related to American exceptionalism.

A generational divide within the class-based production of girls in American youth soccer

By building upon earlier research on social class and soccer, the following study specifically provides insight into American, adolescent girls’ experiences with youth soccer (Swanson, ‘Complicating the “Soccer Mom”’; Swanson, ‘Soccer Fields’; Andrews, ‘Contextualizing Suburban Soccer’; and Zwick and Andrews, ‘The Suburban Soccer Field’). Driven by Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts regarding social class reproduction, I engaged in ethnographic-style conversations regarding recreational youth soccer with girls ages 11–14 and their Baby-Boom-Generation mothers in order to further understand how the American, middle-class habitus may be contributing to a particular gender-based path in youth sport (Bourdieu, Distinction). Additionally, Grossberg’s and Giroux’s literature on youth and politics of culture informed my understanding of the discrepancies between parents’ views and their children’s views on youth soccer experiences (Grossberg, ‘Cultural Studies’; Giroux, Stealing Innocence). In this paper, I recognize American involvement in youth soccer as a class-based form of childrearing as I describe parents’ expectations of girls in youth soccer. The participants’ thoughts on race, social class, gender, and today’s youth as related to their soccer experiences are provided.

The Power of Storytelling

In the last several decades, we have become much better at doing things right. Well-understood project management tools help companies manage schedule, cost, and require- ments; program management tools help companies leverage value across projects; and portfolio management techniques help spread risk across projects and across time.But innovators face a conundrum: we're doing things right, but are we doing the right things? That's a harder ques- tion to answer, because it requires seeing into the future, and our tools for peering into the future are far less developed than our tools for managing the present. For example, we can use mathematical technology-forecasting techniques to estimate the likely growth of an industry or market or the adoption rates of technologies, or to compare the anticipated performance of a new technology with an existing one. We can also develop scenarios of alternative future states by ex- trapolating from a few key forces or trends. Yet these tech- niques really don't paint a complete picture of the future-they don't help us understand the challenges that the customer of the future will face. For that, we need a different tool, one not usually associated with technological innovation: storytelling. Storytelling links potential future states to the actors within them. Once this link is made, problems that will exist, and potential solutions, become much clearer.One of the main reasons companies fail to see the future coming is i nnovation blindness-the inability to see how the future might unfold in a manner different from the way the past has evolved. The more successful an established com- pany is, the more likely it is to suffer from innovation blind- ness. Established business computer companies nodded as personal computers displaced mainframes for business use, and many of these same companies later failed to recognize that tablet usage would outpace PC use, not over decades but in just a couple of years. Large steel companies never thought that mini-mills would successfully compete with them, let alone disrupt the entire industry. And who would have pre- dicted that Chrysler's minivan would displace the station wagon and revolutionize the auto industry-or that this rev- olution would blend into the political landscape with the rise of the "soccer mom" a decade later?While Stage-Gate and lean manufacturing techniques have helped many companies better manage resources and reduce waste, their focus on efficient linear handoffs within the innovation cycle or the reduction of variation with the production environment has contributed to innovation blindness by reinforcing existing beliefs about how things work. This seriously constricts innovation-not the incre- mental innovation that expands novel ideas into powerful brands or product families, but the breakthrough innova- tions that seed new industries or disrupt established products or services. Applying existing beliefs to future states rarely leads to nonobvious conclusions.We can escape the trap of innovation blindness, but that requires looking past what we know to what we can imag- ine. Storytelling is a powerful imaginative tool. Stories can allow us to see the world through the eyes of characters very different from ourselves. They free us from the constraints of our own experience and help us to envision other lives. In doing so, stories weave together alternative cause-and-effect relationships, offering vivid windows into different versions of the future. I'm not the first to note this. John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor claimed that we learn best from hearing stories that strike a chord within us, arguing that leaders who fail to grasp the power of stories risk failure.Beyond the emotional appeal of stories, narrative structure can help guide thinking about breakthrough innovation. Stories typically unfold in three acts. Act one begins with the set-up, laying out the players, their relationships to one an- other, and their situation. …

Not a Suburban Soccer Mom? Political Engagement Among Lower SES Women

AbstractAnalysis of recent Census data by the National Women's Law Center indicates that poverty is worse than ever, especially for women. While studies of socioeconomic status and participation as well as social networks and poverty are quite numerous, there has been little systematic quantitative study of the interaction of poverty and gender on social networks and participation in collective action. We ask whether the paths to social capital and participation are different for poor women than for their non‐poor counterparts. And, are poor women different from poor men? The types of social networking in which the poor and non‐poor may participate should logically be very different: More formal organizations often require significant resources for participation (e.g., sports clubs). Further, poor individuals often rely on informal networks of assistance and cooperation, but women are most reliant on such networks because they are most likely to be single heads of household. Certainly, scholars suggest that women are more likely to engage in informal networking and have established social capital, making voting more likely among women (Harell, 2009), but to our knowledge, scholars have not compared those of low and higher incomes in terms of their types of social capital building. We use the Current Population Survey Civic Engagement Supplement and the Voting Supplement (2010) to examine civic engagement of citizens, with a theoretical eye toward understanding the differences in participation between low‐income women and higher‐income women. The analyses herein suggest differences in social capital among women of different income levels. The overall findings of this research contradict what we originally theorized, that income drives social capital–creating avenues, yet add a new and important understanding to how social capital may be created and what influence it might have on political engagement.

Points of Unease with the Spiritual Formation Movement

This paper offers a critique of certain aspects of the spiritual formation movement as it has been manifested in evangelical churches in the past few decades. My experience with this facet of the spiritual formation movement has grown out of my former ministry as a pastor in a large, evangelical, suburban congregation and out of my current role as a professor serving at a Christian university and seminary. It is a friendly critique, offered by a person who has been directly involved in facilitating spiritual formation in various settings within the evangelical community. Taken together, the points of unease I will identify are not a “cease and desist” order, but rather a cautionary word for all of us who seek to press the spiritual formation movement forward. These points of unease include: 1) unease about a dualistic tendency to value spirituality at the expense of the material world, 2) unease with devotional practices grown in the soil of monastic Catholicism rather than Protestantism, 3) unease with a rhetorical strategy that sharply distinguishes between being and doing, 4) unease with devotional practices that fail the “soccer mom” test, and 5) an unease with certain ways of using Scripture which are devotionally fruitful but hermeneutically faulty.

Not a Suburban Soccer Mom? Political Engagement Among Lower SES Women

Analysis of recent Census data by the National Women’s Law Center indicates that poverty is worse than ever, especially for women. While studies of socioeconomic status and participation as well as social networks and poverty are quite numerous, there has been little systematic quantitative study of the interaction of poverty and gender on social networks and participation in collective action. We ask whether the paths to social capital and participation are different for poor women than their non-poor counterparts? And, are poor women different from poor men? The types of social networking in which the poor and non-poor may participate should logically be very different: more formal organizations often require significant resources for participation (e.g., sports clubs). Further, poor individuals often rely on informal networks of assistance and cooperation, but women are most reliant on such networks because they are most likely to be single heads of household. Certainly, scholars suggest that women are more likely to engage in informal networking and have established such social capital makes voting more likely among women (Harrell, 2009), but to our knowledge, scholars have not compared those of low and higher incomes in terms of their types of social capital building. We use the Current Population Survey Civic Engagement Supplement and the Voting Supplement (2010) to examine civic engagement of citizens, with a theoretical eye toward understanding the differences in participation between low-income women and higher-income income women. Preliminary analyses suggest differences in social capital among women of different income levels. The overall findings of this research contradict what was originally theorized, that income drives social capital-creating avenues, yet add a new and important understanding to how social capital may be created and what influence this might have on political engagement.

Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture: “Music Moms” and the Performance of Asian and Asian American Identities

In a series of articles about summer camps, the New York Times reported on the Perlman Music Program, a prestigious six-week instructional program led by the world-renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. The article focused less on the teenagers who attend than on the efforts and ambitions of the moms who enroll their children in advanced programs of music study. As the reporters note: moms' seasons are far longer than those of moms. Their financial payoffs are far smaller and more elusive than those of tennis moms. But they are every bit as competitive, protective, ambitious, and self-sacrificing. The ethos of self-sacrifice emerges clearly in a comment offered by one of the article's featured mothers, Mrs. Kim, who bluntly states: First priority is Yoon-jee.1 For Mrs. Kim, this has meant living apart from her husband, a South Korean diplomat whose work required him to return to Seoul, so that her daughter, Yoon-jee, could continue her piano studies at the Juilliard Schools Pre-College Division. From the initial decision to enroll their children in music lessons to the continued labor of driving back and forth to music lessons, performances, auditions, and rehearsals, moms are active architects of their children's musical development. What the New York Times article makes clear is the integral part that parents?in particular mothers?play in the realm of classical music training. Indeed, to understand the broad context of Western classical music making, an examination of the role of moms who facilitate and support their children's musical pursuits is critical. Variations of the stage mom exist in many different realms, from competitive sports to beauty pageants. Yet, while the soccer mom typically brings to mind the image of a middle-class, white, suburban mother, as this essay reveals, the traits of sacrifice, pushiness, and determination embodied in the mom have increasingly become as sociated with being Asian.2 The contemporary racialization of the mom is not necessarily surprising given the large number of Asians and Asian Americans involved

Homo Sacer vs. Homo Soccer Mom: Reading Agamben and Foucault in the War on Terror

In the past decade there have been efforts to understand the war on terror through the writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Some analyses reify certain concepts employed by Foucault and Agamben. Others do not accurately represent the actual occurrence of violence at ground level. Without claiming to present a sovereign gaze on the literature and the reading of sovereign violence in places such as Guántanamo, this article argues that there are at least three central elements that philosophers and theorists might want to reconsider in connection with sovereignty, biopower, and subjectivity: that there is a Derridean logic at play between sovereignty and biopower; that there is a connection between sovereignty and subjectivity informed by a “dangerous connection” between power and knowledge; and that sovereignty is informed by a classifying and hierarchizing regime characteristic of a regime of truth. Although Agamben claims to correct Foucault, he betrays important methodological and epistemological elements of Foucault's work. Nevertheless, there are elements in Agamben's work that can shape our understanding of a “biopolitical reading” of our contemporary era.

Micro Economics: Soccer Mom Messaging Is the Poetry of Our Age

It is too expensive to erase the digital past. In brief, the modern Internet lacks an undo button.

Complicating the “Soccer Mom”

Using Pierre Bourdieu's theories of social class differentiation and class reproduction, this paper provides an analysis of class-based identity politics in contemporary suburban America. Through a critical ethnography of the emergent, American, upper-middle-class “soccer mom” phenomenon, this study contributes to a growing body of research that interrogates class-based, cultural practices of status differentiation. As part of a larger, longitudinal ethnographic study, this paper specifically focuses on the ways in which women, who are driven by upper-middle-class habitus, contest and construct their identity as mothers of young, soccerplaying children.

Where Do the Children Play?

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 19 No. 1 (Spring 2009) ISSN: 1546-2250 Where Do the Children Play? Film Review Louise Chawla Louise Chawla Louise Chawla Louise Chawla University of Colorado Jeffrey Cushing Citation: Chawla, Louise, Louise Chawla, Louise Chawla, Louise Chawla and Jeffrey Cushing. (2009). "Where Do the Children Play? Film Review." Children, Youth and Environments 19 (1). Cook, Christopher M. (producer) 2007-2008. Where Do the Children Play? Michigan Television. 60 mins. English. PBS. While the essential dystopian nature of suburbia has become familiar to many of us through numerous visual, literary, and academic works in recent years, the impact that these changing environments have had on children has been addressed in popular culture to a far lesser degree. Where Do the Children Play? is a one-hour PBS documentary produced by Christopher Cook (2007-08) that begins to address some of the impacts these changes have produced on children. [See accompanying reviews of the film’s companion book and study guide]. We are probably all familiar to some degree with current statistics that point to rising occurrences of obesity, behavioral problems, and the use of pharmaceuticals to treat those behavioral problems in children and youth today. In addition, the paradigm of the suburban “soccer mom” has also become familiar: children are endlessly shuttled between a range of regimented activities—from sports to music lessons to clubs and religious activities. Many of these activities are promoted by parents with an eye ultimately turned to creating the sort of 375 resumé believed to be most advantageous to eventually getting children into the “best” colleges and universities. In addition, the post-World War II mass migration from cities and countryside to the suburbs has also drastically changed children’s environments, with two effects being particularly noticeable: a lack of easily-accessible common spaces, and an increasing isolation of children indoors. The net effect on children of all of these changes, according to Where Do the Children Play?, has been a de-emphasis on the importance of spontaneous play, particularly in nature or natural settings. The differences between indoor-centered and outdoor-centered environments are striking. The average child today spends four to six hours a day in front of a screen (television, computer, video game). While these types of environments can have some beneficial effects, such as increasing children’s vocabulary and their general knowledge of the world, they nonetheless present some limitations as well. Among the most important of these limitations is the fact that screens, unlike natural settings, do not allow one to engage all of one’s senses at the same time. This factor is particularly important in that natural and immersive sensory environments allow and even promote the use of imagination in children. Unregimented environments allow us to develop a sense of what our own intrinsic predilections and abilities might be. The end result is that instead of producing regimented children who have been programmed to please adults in an essentially parent-driven process, play in natural environments in particular can ultimately foster creativity and innovation, and most importantly, producing people with the ability to think for themselves. The documentary is broken up into a number of chapters, including “The Nature of Play,” “Suburbs,” “The City,” and “What’s Bugging Parents,” that address these aforementioned issues. 376 The good news is that rather than attempting to ship all children out to the countryside—an obviously impractical solution—urban environments too can produce a unique combination of benefits. Once the question of children’s basic safety in urban environments has been addressed, cities can often (contrary to popular belief) actually offer more benefits to children than more affluent suburbs. Chief among these benefits are a sense of community and an ability to effectively negotiate with peers in a social setting. Where Do the Children Play? is primarily aimed at a lay audience, and in that sense successfully challenges popular notions of self-directed play as being unproductive. Cook’s background as a reporter and investigative journalist helps structure the narrative in an accessible way, and permits the documentary to present these ideas free from technical jargon. Nonetheless, a number of academic studies and case examples are presented...

Complicating the "Soccer Mom:" The Cultural Politics of Forming Class-Based Identity, Distinction, and Necessity

Complicating the "Soccer Mom:" The Cultural Politics of Forming Class-Based Identity, Distinction, and Necessity

Volvo Trash

Volvo Trash Katy Read (bio) My car was not beautiful, nor was it supposed to be. A '92 Volvo 240 sedan, it was a safe-deposit box on wheels, dowdy by design, far too dignified to tart itself up with froufrou like curves or chrome. But it was bright red, a color that made my Volvo look uncharacteristically lighthearted, like a history professor wearing a flowered Hawaiian shirt on vacation. And it was in decent shape, at least on the outside. Inside was another story. Stains ranging from condiments to unidentifiable body fluids mottled the upholstery. The floor was a heaving slough of petrified french fries, crumpled receipts, grimy unmatched socks, broken Happy Meal toys, loose change, sand-encrusted candy. Empty cans and bottles rolled beneath the seats, clinking at every stop sign. A colorful blob under the rear window was a souvenir of crayons left out on a sunny day. Brown splotches speckled the ceiling, as if someone had sprayed Coca-Cola like celebratory champagne. When people asked how I liked my Volvo I told them that it was expensive to repair and terrible in snow. I did not give my Volvo an affectionate nickname. I did not greet other Volvo drivers like fellow alumni of a beloved alma mater. Americans are used to thinking of cars as extensions of their drivers' identities; our fine-tuned sense of vehicular semiotics lets us connect "minivan" with "soccer mom," "shiny red convertible" with "combed-over middle manager." I would not have drawn a line from "Volvo" to myself. But my car had come to reflect my life: presentable on the outside, a garbage can within. Or so my husband and I liked to joke. "Volvo trash," we called ourselves, back when we both drove Volvos (Mike's was black, older but cleaner). It was shorthand for the contrast between the way we thought we were expected to behave and the way we actually lived. [End Page 33] The evening we invented the term Mike and I sat with our two small boys watching The Simpsons, a program that we were acutely aware most of our sons' playmates were forbidden to see. As if to prove those parental fears well founded, the four of us crowded together on the sofa in front of the TV set just the way the Simpson family does at the opening of the show, only we were, if anything, more pathetic than our cartoon counterparts. The house was a mess. Cy and Jack were whiny, had dirty faces, and lacked key articles of clothing. "Look at this place," Mike said during a commercial, gazing around at the squalor. "We're trailer trash." "How can we be?" I asked. Slouched on the sofa I imagined propelling myself into the kitchen and whipping whatever ingredients I might find there—mango chutney, kalamata olives, Count Chocula—into a dinner somebody would eat. "We don't live in a trailer. There are two Volvos in the driveway, for God's sake." "OK, so we're Volvo trash," Mike said, punctuating the remark with a long swig of microbrew. The name stuck, a way to mockingly flagellate ourselves whenever we fell short of what we considered the standards for contemporary, educated, progressive, middle-class parents. That is to say it popped up frequently. Not that we were wildly irresponsible. We didn't dodge bill collectors or leave the children home alone while we went out barhopping. We kept up the property, cheered from the sidelines at youth sporting events, toted pesto dip—artfully garnished with basil from our backyard herb garden—to National Night Out block parties. But privately we never thought our lives quite matched the expectations of our demographic, our milieu, our zip code, our zeitgeist. Standing alongside Cy's hockey game on a brittle January night in Minneapolis, watery eyed and numb lipped, I would watch the other parents cheering the on-ice action, unfailingly attentive and supportive ("Let's go, Zachary!" "All right, Dylan!"), none complaining about the cold or even surreptitiously checking their watches, none looking remotely tempted to turn and bolt through shin-deep snow to the warming house. In the pediatrician's waiting room, as...

The Middle Class Fourth Amendment

During October Term 2000 the Supreme Court decided five major Fourth Amendment cases. In chronological order they are: Indianapolis v. Edmond (the drug roadblock case), Illinois v. McArthur (involving search warrant execution), Ferguson v. City of Charleston (the maternity drug testing case), Atwater v. City of Lago Vista (the soccer mom seatbelt arrest case), and Kyllo v. United States (the thermal imaging case). In October Term 2001, the Court decided five more, somewhat less significant, cases: United States v. Arvizu (reasonable suspicion for a stop), United States v. Knights (warrantless search of probationer’s house), United States v. Drayton (consent search), Kirk v. Louisiana (exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement), and Board of Education v. Earls. Because of the unusual voting lineups in some of these cases, it may be thought that the Court was simply deciding each case as it came along, according to the predilections of an ever-shifting majority, rather than adhering to any larger theme. This article will argue that there is actually a strikingly consistent theme to the Court’s decisions in

Generational differences.

Generational differences.

Monticello, The Usonian House, and Levittown: The Making of the Modern American Home

li' Historically ¿peaking ' · February 200l Alexander O. Boulton monticello,the usonian house,and levittown: The Making of the Modern American Home The search for the origins of the modern American suburban home often starts in Levittown, the planned community on Long Island built by William and Alfred Levitt after World War II. Both as a work of architecture and as a reflection ofwho we are as Americans, however, the modern American suburban home's real origins can be traced back to the nation's founding and die architecture ofThomasJefferson's Monticello. William and Alfred Levitt are not generally known as great architects. The tract housing suburban developments that they built and named after themselves in Long Island, New York, and in Pennsylvania, have long been scorned byarchitects, urban planners , and social critics. The name Levittown has become virtuallysynonymous with all die worst features of Cold War America. The lack ofaesdietic appeal is only one ofa number of criticisms that includes conformity, racism, and gender inequality. Nevertheless, the Levitt brotliers helped launch a revolution in American life. The development of the modern American suburban home was largely the result of a sudden release of consumerism following the Great Depression and World War II. During the 1930s and early 1940s, the housing industry, like other industries, had stalled. When GIs returned from the war and sought new homes for their baby boomer families, they hoped to escape from both the poverty and the uncertaintythat had marked the preceding years. They led one of the greatest migrations inAmerican history, fleeing from the cities in search oftheir own small plot of land and, with it, their place in die American Dream. The Levitt brothers were there to give them exacdywhat theywanted. Using assembly line techniques, which they had learned frombuildinghousingfor die militaryduring the war, they were able to manufacture dozens ofhouses a day, transforming farmland and forests into suburban tracts. The boom in housing stimulated all sectors ofdie economy. In the years after World War II, America led the world in die construction of automobiles, highways, shopping malls, and all the consumer goods—vacuum cleaners, washing machines, lawn mowers, barbecue grills, and televisions—that came to symbolize the good life. The new housing developments built by the Levitts and dieir manyimitators helped to shape new social patterns that came to define the American way of life. For many, the American family reached its apex ofperfection in the 1950s. It was the heyday of the single wage-earner, nuclear family, immortalized in a new American art form, the television situation comedy. The new American suburban middle class emerged as a potent political force as well; by die end ofthe century the suburban "soccer mom" became the constituent most courted by both political parties. However, some social critics were not so sanguine. As Americans fled the cities, they became, the critics said, not only physically, but also emotionally distant from their fellow citizens. As federal funds shifted from die cities to the suburbs, many urban areas went into decline. Crime and drugs proliferated in die cities and a new form ofintolerance, hiding behind die face ofapathy, emerged in die suburbs; black Americans were excluded by racial covenants and by lending institutions from purchasing houses in Levittown and odier suburbs. In addition, feminists accused the new housing patterns ofcreating virtual prison cells for suburban housewives who were physicallyremoved from each other and die life of the nation. Environmentalists, at the same time, complained that the new developments wasted natural resources and diat an increasing dependence on die automobile polluted the environment. The Levitts, ofcourse, were not responsible for creatingall ofthe promises and problems ofmodern America. They only occupy a prominent place in a long line ofhistorical developments that reach backto die Founding Fathers. The critical linkbetween Levittown and die era of die nation's founding is perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright. Sometimes identified as America's greatest architect, Wright is probably most famous for building die great show homes ofwealthy businessmen such as Edgar Kaufmann's Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, and die house for Frederick Robie in Chicago, or for public buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. YetWright's mostinfluential buildings were the small, relativelyinexpensive...