Perfectly Average

As Anna G. Creadick demonstrates in this brisk, persuasive study, the idea of the “perfectly average” life represented a post–World War II reaction to the dual upheavals of the depression and the war. It reflected a desire for middle-class stability, one made affordable by the relative prosperity of the late 1940s and early 1950s and codified by popular life-style discourse. It became an institutional gauge for health and character, fashion and the border between modesty and flamboyance, and, of course, sexual desire. Today it seems eminently mockable, its imagery and discourse tweaked in satires of high school social guidance films, suburban development, Ozzie and Harriet, and just about any other era relic that reeks of conformity. Creadick’s achievement is to reach beyond those easy targets to examine a range of non-kitschy examples that remind us of how the benefits of being normal were sold before “hip” became the commodified standard

Art · Character (mathematics · Commodification · Conformity · Economics · Economy · Great Depression · Literature · Middle class · Miller · Political science · Prosperity · Sociology · Style (visual arts · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society