Dolores E. Janiewski

Towards a new suburban history

Considered together, these four monographs and one edited collection describe American suburbs as the products of political strategies rather than as the outcome of inexorable market forces. Selfdescribed participants in the ‘new suburban history’, the authors dedicate themselves to moving beyond the ‘shortcomings’ of the original critique of suburbia and later scholarship such as Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, 1985). They reject the ‘standard tale of suburban homogeneity along racial and socio-economic lines’ and place the suburbs within their economic and political context (Kruse and Sugrue, 4). The majority of these studies explicitly understand metropolitan space as a site of capital accumulation and political and ideological conflict that reveals a theoretical indebtedness to Marxist urban geographer David Harvey and preceding monographs by Thomas J. Sugrue, Lizabeth Cohen, Becky Nicolaides and Arnold Hirsch. Largely focused on the period from the Second World War to the 1980s, these case-studies explore the post-war reconstruction of the United States as a suburban nation and the accompanying growth of political movements in conservative, liberal and radical forms that reinforced or contested the forces remaking the southern and western regions in the process of becoming what is now called the Sunbelt. Social History Vol. 33 No. 1 February 2008

Margaret Mead and the Ambiguities of Sexual Citizenship for Women

From the time of the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, Margaret Mead has been popularly associated with the issue of women’s sexual citizenship, that is, women’s right to act ‘free morally and sexually’, as they could exercise intellectual, political, economic and legal freedoms. She gained a reputation for her insights into the ‘domain of erotics’. As a critic of sexual repression, she appeared to belong to the group of flapper-age feminists who extended feminism beyond suffrage. As an exponent of the sexually enfranchised woman, whose ‘opinionizing’ was a ‘sort of public sexual behavior’, Mead became popularly associated with the ‘sexualization of modern society’. Credited and blamed for fostering the so-called ‘sexual revolution’, Mead would become one of the major intellectual influences on second wave feminism.1