Makers Mark: New Works Deepen the Field of Suburban History

In the Afterword of Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, Margaret Crawford identifies three areas of research that expand our understanding of suburban landscapes in the United States. The first is a focus on individual voices. Through oral histories, biographical and ethnographic work, Crawford encourages us to “zoom in for close-ups” of our subjects’ lives (p. 383). She also argues that research centered on habitation—the interaction between the places that people occupy and the people who occupy those places—is more valuable than a focus on either of these aspects separately. In the context of suburbia, a study of habitation blends the analysis of housing production and consumption. In doing so, it offers insights into a domestic arena that is often assumed to be disconnected from the public realm. Finally, Crawford recommends that we study suburban imaginaries, where tangible and intangible experiences of the built environment coalesce into collective representations. Investigations that uncover the ingredients of these imaginaries enable us to know suburbia more deeply and to appreciate the complexities of specific places. The contributors to Making Suburbia address each of these themes individually and as a group. In Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful and the Postwar American Home, Monica Penick deftly weaves together all three themes. TasteMaker is at once a biography, a history of domestic architecture, and a study in taste formation. The book’s principal subject is Elizabeth Gordon, the post–World War II editor of House Beautiful magazine. Born in Indiana in 1906, Gordon attended the University of Chicago in the 1920s. After a brief period teaching high school, she moved to New York City where she worked in an advertising agency and wrote freelance for magazines. Gordon focused her writing on housing and was eventually hired by Good Housekeeping where she became a “recognized authority” on the topic (p. 7). In 1941, Gordon was appointed editor in chief of House Beautiful, a role she held until 1964. Under Gordon’s leadership, the magazine’s circulation grew from less than 250,000 to close to a million, making it one of the most popular shelter magazines in the United States. The biographical focus on Gordon is somewhat complicated by how little we know about her life. Gordon left no diary, and despite significant professional accomplishments, she remains an elusive individual. The woman can only be understood through her work, and so, Penick sets out to find Elizabeth Gordon in the pages of House Beautiful. Journal of Planning History