It’s 1943, and your husband has just gone off to war, leaving you on the homefront with two children, a new job in a munitions factory, and a run-down rental house with a peeling paintjob from 1929 and lacking a single modern appliance. Ice is delivered for your ice box, coal for your stove. Until the war, the Great Depression was the single most important event of your lifetime; it was, in fact, the lens through which you saw so much of the world. But the deferred dreams of the Depression quickly turned into the deferred dreams of the war. Wartime rationing and restrictions on non-military building has made it difficult to behave like an ordinary consumer. The deprivations of the homefront, moreover, impose different restraints than the Depression had. For the first time, you recycle metals, avoid unnecessary travel in order to conserve rubber and gasoline, and plant a victory garden in order to increase the food supply, and, in the context of all of these contributions to the war, you are asked to begin planning your post-war house. An unusual genre of architectural literature appears to help you do so. Popular magazines and corporations in the building industry offer free or inexpensive scrapbooks for women to collect ideas and clippings about postwar houses.
Houses were absorbed into a Clausewitz-like argument about war by other means. While housers continued earnest New Deal arguments about the importance of healthful housing for the masses, advertisers, magazines, and builders turned homefront house planning into a patriotic act. To plan a postwar house, the pitch went, would not only contribute to national well-being, it would eventually pay dividends, much in the way war bonds would transform wartime investment into an era of postwar abundance.
Ready plans for new homes would boost the American economy when it needed it most. They would save the nation from falling into depression by absorbing the excess labor of returning troops and speeding reconversion to the peacetime economy. The stakes were enormous. An acute housing shortage had followed World War I and experts anticipated the largest building boom in American history. As corporations jockeyed for position, articles and advertisements promoting the postwar house inundated the popular and architectural press.
Alongside visions of a world transformed by pre-fabrication, as Joseph Hudnut predicted in “The Post-Modern House,” the scrapbooks promised a house planned through consumption in the guise of a well-known craft activity. Parents’ Magazine provided an “Idea File” with empty folders for the “raw material” supplied by the articles and advertisements found in the magazine. It used an icon of its Idea File on notable articles. A scissors shows readers exactly how the editors imagined their magazine being used.