| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965. By Sylvie Murray. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. viii, 252 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8122-3718-8.)
Inspired by the New Deal and a promised progressive social order post–World War II, tens of thousands of middle- and working-class men and women enlisted in reform movements for expansion of welfare state benefits, fair labor practices, racial justice, and opportunity for women.	1
The Cold War denigration and near obliteration of the history of U.S. radicalism, plus the widespread acceptance of the notion of The Feminine Mystique (by Betty Friedan, 1963), prompted historians to conclude that female progressive activism disappeared post-war as middle-class women left the labor force and the public sphere to make babies, consume appliances, and submit to political repression.	2
Fortunately, this absolutist view did not prevail for long. By the mid-1970s feminist historians and theorists were already revising Friedan's assumptions. Sylvie Murray's The Progressive Housewife is such a revisionist work. Its stated goal is to prove that a substantial degree of female political activism coexisted along with the conservative political and domestic ideology of the time despite the assertions of earlier historians of the period.	. . .

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