The Past and Future of Galactic Suburbia
American suburbia of the 1950s and 60s had one foot in the future and the other in the past. The suburban mindset was a vast and ambitiously idealistic movement that claimed future happiness could be found in uniformity, not to mention a detached home, an accessible mall, and automobile dependent lifestyle. The extent of its cultural homogeneity was not only alien in its scope—assuming a lifestyle that could satisfy many and exist in perpetuity—but also bred estrangement among those who could not fit within it. Beneath the fantasy simmered a tension, which found its voice in a literary movement: Galactic Suburbia.
“Galactic Suburbia” was a genre of science-fiction that derived from the American suburbs in the 1950s and 60s. As Lisa Yaszek explains in her 2007 book “Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction,” Galactic Suburbia writers extrapolated futures out of the hopes and anxieties of the post-war American era. What made them distinct, however, was that their work “revolved around the impact of science and technology on women and their families, and it was told from the perspective of women who defined themselves primarily (although not exclusively) as lovers, wives, and mothers.” Consisting of nearly 300 authors, this group of writers, most notably Judith Merril, Alice Eleanor Jones, and Shirley Jackson, played on a paradox between the supernatural and the everyday demands of domestic work. At the same time, they reconfigured the home as a prism through which broader existential concerns—of mechanization and the Cold War—could be more intimately understood.
A superficial reading of Galactic Suburbia would take it as a mere extension of consumer culture. Emulating an advertisement, the most concerning of these stories reified the worst of suburban values, presenting shopping as both a civic duty to the American economy as well as the backbone of family life. They fed into the trope of the housewife as a domestic practitioner, who could find new meaning in life through the mastery of home appliances and who could liberate herself by successfully automating her chores. Even though these themes were present in some Galactic Suburbia works, to entirely dismiss the movement as a gaudy techno-optimist fad would be to make a straw man of it.
“Beneath the fantasy simmered a tension, which found its voice in a literary movement: Galactic Suburbia.”
Galactic Suburbia can be taken as a pertinent critique of what domestic technology actually achieves. When discussing the industrialization of the home, these authors also tackled the consequences of an increasingly commercialized family life. In “Captive Audience,” Ann Warren Griffiths shows how technology meant to facilitate greater privacy actually opened the home to corporate interests. Preempting smart home technology, she imagined a future in which products talked to consumers and earplugs were banned, making it a legal and moral imperative to hear every advertisement out. As the story progresses, we watch the family unit become more atomized as the demands of companies are further prioritized: “She finished the dishes and was just leaving the kitchen when the floor wax bottle called out, "Ladies, look at your floors! You know that others judge you by your floors. Are you proud of yours? Are they ready-spotless and gleaming for the most discerning friend who might drop in?" What Griffiths gestures to is the fear that domestic tech might act as another means of control and surveillance, whereby women were not only judged by their community and family but also by companies.
This alienation from domestic tech was only exacerbated by fears that it might intensify women's work. For example, Judith Merril’s “Woman’s Work is Never Done” conceives of a future in which housework necessitates specialist qualification and new gadgets are so ubiquitous that they mediate nearly every family interaction. Her account of the home is cluttered with domestic tech: “velvadown linoleum'' that soundproof rooms; “speaker tubes” that function as telecoms; and “X-ray-inspect-shute” that check the contents of packages. A lot of this is largely superfluous and puts unnecessary pressure on a relatively simple task, leaving the mother feeling increasingly uptight. The story concludes with her berating her daughter for cutting the bread the wrong way, showing how rather than facilitating chores, these appliances merely inflate the standards put on women.
Likewise, in Margaret St. Clair’s “New Rituals,” she presents the story of Marie Bates who invests in a new deep freezer, which she describes as “better-looking” and “more useful” than her husband, Henry. To her surprise, it possesses special powers and converts whatever she stores in it to something new and improved. For instance, she converts apricots to blueberries and an old blue rayon dress into a silk gown. Through the freezer she transforms her appearance to impress her husband and yet the stagnancy of their marriage persists. This all leads up to the final moment whereupon she coaxes her husband into the freezer to change who he is.
What both Merril and St. Clair’s stories have in common—and what separates their writing from the frivolity of advertisements—is an acknowledgment that the progress of domestic tech will always be framed by values. As Yaszek discusses, the 1950s were awash with ads that appropriated science fiction tropes to sell products. Framing them as cutting edge and futuristic, they targeted women by shrouding domestic products in space-age garb, emphasizing “service to the family, the romance of married life in a high-tech era, and the creation of fantastic new worlds at home.” However, Galactic Suburbia writers debunked this techno-optimism, challenging the assumption that consumption can precipitate social change.
In her 2017 essay The Image of Women in Science Fiction, feminist and author Joanna Russ used “Galactic Suburbia'' as a pejorative term to critique not only the values of these authors but also their conceptions of technology. She argued that when positing the future, they merely dressed their present in supernatural garb, reifying the same restrictive gender dynamics and exclusive middle-class aspirations of the suburbs. As she puts it, these narratives were akin to Ladies’ Magazine Fiction “in which the sweet, gentle, intuitive little heroine solves an interstellar crisis by mending her slip or doing something equally domestic after her big, heroic husband has failed.” Underpinning her critique of this movement is a remark on their impotence of technology, which only serves to streamline domestic work rather than alleviate it.
In her book, Yaszek challenged Russ’ account of Galactic Suburbia by not only engaging with these fictions as expressions of dissent but also by citing the writers’ broader contribution as activists, who advanced the role of women in science and campaigned for peace when nuclear fallout felt imminent. However, maybe there is more we can learn in what Galactic Suburbia did not change than what it did. In other words, what made this literature prescient was not its prediction of how gender roles might change but how they might persist in the face of technological advancement.
“[W]hat made this literature prescient was not its prediction of how gender roles might change rather how they might persist in the face of technological advancement.”
As Judith Wacjman shows in her 1991 work Feminism Confronts Technology assumptions about the domestic technology as a “cure-all” still linger within the modern home. Wacjman argues that in many ways domestic tech was designed to fail. This is because it is often produced with conflicting aims in mind: On the one hand, it is meant to “industrialize” the home, but on the other, it is meant to enable a private way of living, completely at odds with the large infrastructural requirements of mechanization. The result is the development of small appliances that are more cumbersome than useful, which suggest that domestic work might be easier had it developed in a more communal way. Over the course of this year, where many women were stuck at home, the shortcomings of these technological developments were as present as ever, manifested in an endless stream of washing, cooking, appliance fixing and cleaning. This might lead you to the question: With all this tech, why are things not easier?
Mirroring Merril, Wacjman also shows how the issues with domestic tech were largely cultural, arguing that “although domestic technology did raise the productivity of house work, it was accompanied by rising expectations of the housewife’s role which generated more domestic work for women.” For example, even though the washing machine makes it easier to clean clothes, it does not ultimately save any time because standards on cleanliness have been raised, necessitating more frequent washes. To add to this, as domestic technology continues to become more sophisticated, it becomes more specialized. In other words, as tech refines—offering new settings and features—it requires a greater investment of the user’s time to understand its various operational quirks. This has an effect of siphoning chores off to the tech literate. In the home, the buck tends to fall on women, who then must carry out domestic tasks not merely because it is expected of them but because they are the only ones with the prerequisite knowledge to do so.
Galactic Suburbia in many ways foresaw the consequences of technological advancement without gender enfranchisement. While accused of techno-idealism, it often delivered the exact opposite, inviting a poignant question: Has domestic technology facilitated the future or has it merely accentuated the past?
Image credit: General Electric Appliances Store, 1964 (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain
