Quotations

«The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ''Is this all?''»

«Children, for whom suburban life was supposed to make wholesome little Johns and Wendys, became the acid-dropping, classroom-burning hippies of the 1960s.»

«I lived [in Irvine], but I never felt totally accepted as one of these rich white suburban kids. I wasn't economically deprived like so many of my Chicano brothers and sisters, but I felt the tension and the rejection--and that's when I started getting into hip-hop, started break-dancing. `The Message,' `Rapper's Delight,' Run-DMC...that was what was happening around that time.»

«The suburban housewife -- she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife -- freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment.»

«No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.»

«A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car for ever after»

«The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.»

«CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager. The inscriptions following will serve to illustrate the success attained in these Olympian games:His virtues were so conspicuous that his enemies, unable to overlook them, denied them, and his friends, to whose loose lives they were a rebuke, represented them as vices. They are here commemorated by his family, who shared them.In the earth we here prepare a Place to lay our little Clara. --Thomas M. and Mary Frazer P.S. --Gabriel will raise her.»

«The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.»

«The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their ''Hub',' as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.»