Desperately trying to close the gap with Joe Biden, President Trump is reaching for a segment of the population he sees as reliably Republican — suburban voters, especially White suburban mothers. During Tuesday’s first presidential debate, Biden shut down Trump’s talk of suburbia: “He wouldn’t know a suburb unless he took a wrong turn.” Biden is echoing those who’ve noted that the president’s conception of the suburbs is outdated, as they have steadily moved leftward, favoring Democrats by a seven-point margin in the 2018 midterm elections. Trump’s archaic understanding can be found not in the suburbs of 2020 but in the Republican imagination, where “suburb,” “American Dream” and “housewife” stand as symbols of White middle-class success. Biden’s barb highlighted this gap between vision and reality.
The Republican concept of the suburbs dates to the 19th century. As the United States industrialized, middle-class families took advantage of streetcar technology to flee the smoky air and crowded environs of cities for more bucolic homesteads on the outskirts. From popular magazines and national newspapers grew a shared set of ideals regarding success, virtuous living and the attributes of a happy home.
At the center stood the industrious, White, Christian housewife who applied as much ambition to the work of domestic life as her husband did to maximizing efficiency and production in the nation’s growing manufacturing sector. Two of the most widely read authorities on housewifery in their day, Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” declared in their now classic 1869 tome, “The American Woman’s Home,” “It has been shown that it is the best end for a woman to seek the training of God’s children for their eternal home by guiding them to intelligence, virtue, and true happiness.”
Yet, instead of confining women to the home, the fusion of femininity and domesticity actually animated female activity in social, community and political affairs across the ideological spectrum. The progressive spirit of the late 19th century inspired what reformers called “social housekeeping” to describe what they perceived as women’s distinct ability to clean up corrupt politics. Elevated class status and imagined female moral superiority carried a responsibility to participate in the era’s improvement projects.
Others felt a similar obligation, but for the purposes of preserving the racial status quo of the Jim Crow era. White female supremacists in Virginia, for example, used their position in the community to police the lines of segregation by going door to door as registrars, classifying the racial status of residents for enforcement of the state’s Racial Integrity Act.