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Maintaining the home was made more difficult by product shortages that resulted from filling war needs first.

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Introduction

After decades of steady growth, the Great Depression had a devastating impact on the housing industry in the United States. Between 1890 and 1930, the percentage of Americans owning their own home had increased from 37 percent to 46 percent. But the Depression abruptly ended this upward trend. New housing construction declined from 937,000 units in 1925 to 93,000 in 1933, and over 1.5 million homes went into foreclosure that year.

The New York World’s Fair of 1939, with the theme "Building the World of Tomorrow," was intended to focus America’s attention away from the Depression and onto the bright future that was clearly on the horizon. The fair celebrated all things modern. One attraction was the "Town of Tomorrow" which featured demonstration homes meant to show off the latest in domestic architectural design. But the biggest attraction at the fair was General Motors’ "Futurama," a three dimensional diorama that showed what the United States was expected to look like in 1960. The landscape consisted of cities, farms—and most importantly, suburbs—that were linked through a system of highways that provided easy travel in private cars. The exhibit displayed 500,000 miniature homes, and 50,000 automobiles.

The Homefront

But before Americans could realize the dreams of the "Town of Tomorrow" or "Futurama," war intruded. On September 1, 1939, Adolph Hitler and the German army invaded Poland, and World War II began. After avoiding direct involvement in the conflict, the United States had no choice but to enter the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The sudden need for military supplies revitalized the economy and brought the Depression to an end. The nation’s gross domestic product measure grew from $88.6 billion in 1939 to $135 billion in 1944 thanks to wartime manufacturing.

With many men enlisting or drafted into the war, women filled the employment gaps in wartime factories. The nation’s civilian unemployment rate dropped to an all-time low, and by war’s end, 19 million women worked outside the home. Many were employed in traditional female occupations as clerks and secretaries, but many others stepped into jobs usually filled by men. Typified by the iconic "Rosie the Riveter" as pictured in government propaganda, women were expected to fill dual roles as both war industry worker and housewife.

Maintaining the home was made more difficult by product shortages that resulted from filling war needs first. In January 1942, the Emergency Price Control Act established wartime rationing. Food staples such as sugar, coffee, milk, and cheese could only be purchased with ration coupons. Women adapted by changing recipes to fit their rations. "Victory cakes" were made with less sugar and fewer eggs. "Victory gardens" were planted for fresh produce. By 1943, the Department of Agriculture estimated there were 18 million victory gardens in the United States that produced up to one-third of all vegetables grown during the war.

Despite the economic upturn during the war, the American housing market fared poorly. The construction industry repurposed itself for wartime demands. Limited construction supplies and labor shortages meant fewer private homes were built. By 1944, the construction of new homes was down to 120,000 a year—in stark contrast to the 1920s’ peak. By war’s end, 3.6 million families lacked housing.

When the war finally ended in 1945 with Allied victories in Europe and the Pacific, it had cost 400,000 American lives.

Post-War Planning

Even before the war ended, Toledo government officials began to plan for a post-war economy. In 1944, the Toledo and Lucas County Plan Commissions published What About Our Future?, a plan for growth once the war was finally won. City leaders were concerned that the end of lucrative wartime production contracts (especially the contract to build Jeeps) would spell a downward trend in the economy of the city. "Now the war has curtailed construction and raised the specter of unemployment after it is won. Plans are urgently needed," stated the publication’s introduction. The report included ideas for developing neighborhoods, streets, recreation, and transportation. One concern was that too many suburbs were being planned for areas outside the city limits.

The end of the war was celebrated by an exhibit that imagined Toledo as it would look at some unspecified time in the future. Underwritten by Paul Block, Jr., publisher of the Toledo Blade, "Toledo Tomorrow" was designed by Norman Bel Geddes, the same person who designed "Futurama" at the New York World’s Fair. Bel Geddes had a connection to Toledo, having been born in the area and married to a Toledoan. He had also previously worked on a major project for Toledo Scale to design a new headquarters.

"Toledo Tomorrow" opened on July 3, 1945, in the Toledo Zoo’s museum. It was 61 feet in diameter, and was a three-dimensional model of what the city would look like at some unspecified time in the future when its population had doubled in size. It included 5,000 buildings and roads, and purported to show the entire horizontal scale of the Greater Toledo area. Visitors walked up a ramp to view the diorama from above, and the lights could be lowered to show the city at night. Planning experts from many specialty areas were consulted in planning the model. It envisioned the nation’s first terminal to combine air, rail, and bus transportation. A system of highways would lead in and out of the city. No fewer than five airports were included.

For neighborhoods, "Toledo Tomorrow" suggested cul-de-sacs that would restrict car traffic. This model would also promote parklike living areas. The publication emphasized seclusion and safety:

"Within these communities of houses can be located shopping centers, churches, schools, playgrounds—most of the needs of a little city itself—protected from the noises and dangers of traffic which can move by direct routes over streets which do enter the community."

In the end, little of "Toledo Tomorrow" was ever realized. One aspect that was built was an interstate highway system that cut through the city. But rather than encourage housing development within Toledo, this system actually promoted development of suburbs that would drain the city of many residents.

Post-War Suburban Housing

The post-war development of Toledo reflected trends that were occurring all across the country. The desperate need for housing after the war was exacerbated by the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, which provided low-cost housing loans backed by the Veterans Administration for those returning from service in the war. A baby boom, which would continue for the next 25 years, also added to the challenge of housing.

To meet this challenge, home builders and suburban developers looked for ways to streamline construction. At the national level, the developers who first addressed the need for rapid housing construction were the brothers William and Alfred Levitt. Levittown was a planned housing community built in a field on Long Island, New York, beginning in 1946. Houses were built on concrete slabs using assembly-line techniques similar to those employed by Henry Ford to build cars, and they were constructed using prefabricated components. At its peak, Levitt and Sons was completing 30 houses each day. The houses were nearly identical. They sold for around $8,000, and veterans could finance the cost at $56 a month. The community included schools and recreational areas that included swimming pools.

The need for the rapid construction of housing was also facilitated by a new style of architecture known as the International Style. It emphasized the low, sleek, simple lines of a ranch house—a far cry from the fancy gingerbread embellishments of the Queen Anne of a century before. Materials developed during the war were utilized in the post-war home, including aluminum, plastic, linoleum, and fiberglass. These products were convenient because they were easy to clean. By the 1950s, central heating and air conditioning were widespread, and natural gas powered the furnace, eliminating the need to shovel coal, and making the air in homes cleaner.

A major component of the International Style as translated into domestic architecture was the "picture window," one of the defining characteristics of the middle class mid-century home. While the picture window was incorporated into millions of homes built in the 1950s and 1960s, it required decades of technological innovation to create the windows. Plate glass was difficult to produce. In the early part of the 20th century, plate glass was made by pouring molten glass onto a large mold and then grinding and polishing it until it was of even thickness and clarity. This was the technique used at the Ford Plate Glass Company in Rossford, Ohio, since the company’s founding in 1898. In 1912, Michael Owens and the Toledo Glass Company worked on perfecting a new plate glass production method that drew molten glass between a series of rollers in a method that mimicked the way paper was produced. While the concept seemed simple, Owens spent over $1 million to perfect it.

Owens and his partner Edward Drummond Libbey formed a new company to exploit the new production method called the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company. In 1929, that company merged with the Ford Plate Glass Company to form Libbey-Owens-Ford.

L-O-F saw the possibility for incorporating large windows in homes built in the International Style, especially the smaller houses being constructed in the 1950s by the thousands in large suburban housing tracts. The windows were built using a new product developed by L-O-F called Thermopane. Thermopane consisted of two pieces of glass separated by dehydrated air space and hermetically sealed. These properties resulted in glass with a warmer interior-facing side. In addition to their insulating properties, L-O-F touted Thermopane’s other benefits: increasing the amount of useable floor space by eliminating drafts near windows, and reducing outside noise. The intent of the picture window was to provide a sense of spaciousness within the small house. They allowed for an unobstructed view of the outdoors, and they also provided a frame meant to enhance the picture of the happy family that lived within the home. Thermopane glass was so popular in post-war homes that in 1946, L-O-F opened a factory in Rossford to manufacture it exclusively.

Libbey-Owens-Ford was without equal in promoting picture windows. They even appear to have been the first to use the name "picture window" in an advertising campaign. The company marketed the windows directly to the real estate developers and builders who were building large suburban housing developments. In addition to picture windows, Libbey-Owens-Ford also marketed new ways to use other glass products in homes in a campaign of the period called "Designed for Happiness." The company teamed with the Federal Housing Administration to produce a short film featuring a young couple who bought their first home. The film was shown to 12 million people in 5,000 theatres nationwide.

It was not just L-O-F that found a market for its product in the modern suburban home. Owens-Corning Fiberglas, another Toledo company, struggled to find a market in the post-war economy for its products that had been used so successfully by the military. It found it could sell insulation to homebuilders as a way to reduce heating and cooling costs. In 1957, the company began an advertising campaign to promote the "Comfort Conditioned Home Program," which featured a house that could be heated and cooled for less than $10 a month. A booklet the company produced to market the campaign included testimonials from families living in homes fully insulated with Owens-Corning Fiberglas. Owens-Corning Fiberglas’s home insulation made possible the expansion of suburban tract developments into places that previously were not easily habitable, like southern California, New Mexico, and Arizona.

And if the houses’ picture windows allowed in too much cold or heat, Owens-Corning also developed insulating curtains made of Fiberglas. The curtains allowed in natural light, but were flame resistant, and did not stretch, sag, shrink, or rot, did not need to be ironed, and did not require frequent cleaning. The brightly-patterned curtains came in various colors and were a fixture in most postwar homes. Fiberglas was also used as insulation in ovens, refrigerators, boilers, and hot water heaters, all of which increased the energy efficiency in these products.

There is no doubt that suburban housing developments characterized by small, cheaply built houses that looked similar to one another vastly expanded home ownership. They were the perfect solution to the baby boom and the post-war economic boom. The economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s and relatively cheap housing produced real prosperity for the middle class. Good schools and safe living conditions in the suburbs meant the next generation prospered as well.

A New Consumer Market – Women

As with other housing styles, the suburban tract house and its interior design elements were marketed directly to women. The suburban location away from cities and the large number of children typical of the family of the time meant that women were kept in the home for most of the day. They were expected to create the type of family life that emphasized comfort and happiness for their husband and children. A new entertainment device, the television, helped to keep the family at home and happy. Televisions were first shown to Americans at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and by the end of the 1950s, they were in 90 percent of living rooms.

The post-war house also emphasized the kitchen and the woman’s place within that room. Kitchens moved from the back of the house to the front. Libbey-Owens-Ford devoted much effort to marketing a futuristic, efficient kitchen. H. Creston Doner, head of the company’s design division, envisioned a Kitchen of Tomorrow that utilized many wartime innovations for post-war civilian life. It was, of course, a showcase for the company’s products, including glass-top ovens (which included a motor-driven rotisserie) and glass-front cabinets. Doner’s vision was for a kitchen that required no servants and featured appliances that would ease the monotonous activities of daily life. The sink had no faucet handles that could possibly damage fragile dishes and glasses, but instead had foot pedals. Many small appliances were built in, including the toaster, waffle iron, and a combination mixer/juicer/meat grinder. The Kitchen of Tomorrow opened up into the dining room, creating a unified work space. Everything was designed with convenience in mind, including a comfortable counter height and even a vegetable drawer located next to the sink that opened at a downward angle, allowing needed items to roll forward. When not in use, the sink and the cooktops were hidden from view by uniform covers.

L-O-F built three models of the Kitchen of Tomorrow to travel around the country from 1943 to 1944, and over one million people viewed them. Paramount Pictures also produced a short film about the kitchen which was shown in movie theatres, and it appeared in newspaper and magazine advertisements. In the years that followed, many other manufacturers produced designs for futuristic kitchens. In 1957, Frigidaire introduced its Design for Dreaming the Kitchen of the Future that included an oven that not only baked the cake, but also frosted it and put candles on it. The kitchen was automated in every aspect, to the point that the housewife needed only to set a few controls and walk away. RCA/Whirpool’s 1959 Miracle Kitchen boasted of baking a cake in three minutes, cooking a steak in two minutes, and appliances activated with the wave of a hand.

The futuristic kitchens were not practical, however, and seemed only to confirm society’s expected domestic role for women as "housewife." The L-O-F Kitchen of Tomorrow was installed in only a few homes (including a company executive’s home in Toledo). It was a dream not quite ready to be realized.

Women Seek a Role Outside the Home

The fact that suburban houses looked like every other house in the neighborhood directly or indirectly instilled a sense of conformity on behaviors, especially among women. Advertisements for houses showed a beautiful wife next to a handsome husband and lovely children. The woman’s social life was focused on her neighborhood and other women who were living under similar conditions in similar houses with similar lives. The picture window, which was intended to frame the outside as an inviting, beautiful landscape instead looked out on rows and rows of the same. The picture window came to epitomize not a window into the world, but a symbol of the confinement of suburban living.

In a sense, the 1950s and 1960s were a return to the "Cult of Domesticity" of Victorian times. The women who had served their country as "Rosie the Riveters" were suddenly declared too delicate to devote themselves to anything other than the hearth and home. Married with children was seen as the ideal life. Few dared to contradict this role, although the popular LIFE magazine published articles hinting at women’s discontent in 1947, 1949, and 1956. The isolation, frustration, and depression that plagued many housewives was explored in Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex, published in the United States in 1953, and Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique, both of which influenced the start of what became known as the women’s liberation movement.

The conformity and confinement of post-war lives could not last. Activism of the 1960s—especially opposition to the war in Vietnam—brought the social order into question. The first generation of women born after World War II grew up consciously rejecting the ideals of marriage, motherhood, and homemaking. These women saw how the Cult of Domesticity stunted their mother’s ambitions, and were determined to avoid the same fate. In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the oral contraceptive, and women’s lives changed forever. "The pill" provided a safe, convenient way to plan for the number of children a woman would have, a revolutionary idea.

Feminism called into question the second-class status of women. While many women continued to stay at home in their suburban dwelling, thousands of others began to demand educational opportunities and careers outside the home. New laws were enacted to protect against discrimination based on gender. A new organization formed in 1966 called the National Organization for Women, and it became a vehicle for women to focus on issues unique to them. Even the suburban house came under criticism—the row upon row of "ticky-tacky little boxes" of look-alike houses were criticized for their lack of imagination in a popular song of the day.

The upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not kill the suburb, but it did much to kill the prefabricated mid-century house with the large picture window. Also causing the downfall of many of these developments was the poor quality of construction, which meant the houses did not retain their value. Those who could sold their mid-century suburban box for larger suburban homes even farther from the city. These second-generation suburbs featured Colonial Revival or Tudor Revival architectural styles, or more unique and less cookie-cutter International styles. Living in suburbs did not mean that everyone looked alike, or even acted alike. Society could embrace differences and dissent.

For women, the gains of the 1970s were celebrated on one hand by the producers of consumer products and advertisers, but also resisted by them on the other. While women were allowed to work outside the home, inside the home they were still expected to provide a happy environment for their husbands and children. New consumer goods that would allow women to "have it all" were sold as time- and family-savers like the microwave oven, the frost-free refrigerator, the coffee maker, and a whole host of pre-made packaged food items.

Bibliography

• Doordan, Dennis P. et al. The Alliance of Art and Industry: Toledo Designs for a Modern America. Toledo, OH: The Toledo Museum of Art, 2002.
• Floyd, Barbara. The Glass City: Toledo and the Industry that Built It. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2015.
• Isenstadt, Sandy. The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle Class Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Jandl, H. Ward. Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow: Innovative American Homes, 1850-1950. Washington, D.C.: The Preservation Press, 1991.
• Kupiec Cayton, Mary, Ellio J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, ed. "The Post-War Period through the 1950s." Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993).
• McDonough, John and Karen Egolf, eds. "The Impact of War on Advertising." The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising (New York: Fizroy Dearborn, 2003). Rielly, Edward J. The 1960s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.
• Rome, Adam. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.

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Originally published by the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, The University of Toledo, 10.19.2016, under an Open Access license.

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