Cooperative motherhood and democratic civic culture in postwar suburbia, 1940-1965

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2004 by Robyn Muncy

On the evening of November 20, 1939, 18 mothers convened in Kensington, Maryland to finalize plans for a play group designed to enrich the lives of their preschoolers. The mothers had hired a teacher, rented a space, and agreed to study childhood education as well as to take turns assisting the teacher. After one successful year, the group named itself the Kensington Cooperative Nursery School, and thus became an early participant in what would soon emerge as a nationwide movement among suburban mothers: the cooperative nursery school movement. (1)

As the Kensington story suggests, co-op nursery schools were neighborhood preschools, owned and operated by mothers of the children who attended them. In addition to running the school, each mother regularly assisted the teacher in the classroom and committed herself to a parent education program. Like other nursery schools, co-ops offered stimulating social, physical, and intellectual experiences as well as maximum creative freedom to young children. They also meant to enrich the lives of mothers. These neighborhood enterprises reached the peak of their popularity in the immediate postwar period and so illuminate the lives of an important cohort of postwar suburban women.

Although this essay contributes to several streams in recent scholarship, my greatest interest in cooperative nursery schools centers on the meaning of civic association in the postwar suburbs. Scholars have been debating the meaning of suburban organizations since William Leavitt first broke ground on Long Island. While some observers extolled suburbanites for their avid participation in local associations, others saw suburban civic life as frivolous. (2) David Riesman, famously representing the latter position, could find little value in suburbanites' local associations. He worried that suburbanites had "retreated from the great problems of the metropolis, and perhaps the nation" to waste their considerable energies on issues "excessively trivial and small-scale," like zoning laws and elementary education. (3) He insisted that "suburban politics would seem to be child's play, enjoyable as recreation but hardly a challenge or a source of significant political experience." (4)

Distinguishing between suburbanites' frequent local gatherings and a meaningful democratic politics engaged the interest of many postwar thinkers, including so eminent a scholar as Jurgen Habermas. Habermas saw among postwar suburban dwellers a "fetishism of community involvement" that to his mind ironically prevented the creation of a genuine public sphere. For Habermas, rational-critical debate about issues of common interest constituted a public sphere, and he argued that postwar participation in the community discouraged this frank and contentious discussion. (5) Like Riesman, Habermas imagined suburban civic association as a form of socializing that featured competition for congeniality prizes rather than competition over ideas. (6)

These dark judgments of postwar public life reverberated for decades, and in some measure remain firmly entrenched in scholarly understandings of the period. (7) Nevertheless, counter arguments began to gain ground in the 1990s. (8) Political scientist Robert Putnam produced the most comprehensive of these revisions, arguing that the suburban kaffee-klatsch and PTA, far from distracting Americans from meaningful public life, actually sustained the country's most vital democratic engagement in the twentieth century. Drawing on substantial survey data, Putnam argued that Americans who were involved in local associations were more likely to vote, educate themselves on political issues, sign petitions, and write their representatives than were those who avoided organized groups. In his view, local organizations underwrote meaningful democratic politics. (9)

These contrasting perspectives raise fascinating questions about the meaning of postwar, suburban associations. (10) Did they represent an apolitical form of socializing? If and when politics came up, did local groups engage only local issues? Did such groups welcome or avoid contentious debates? More fundamentally, by what processes did suburbanites come to be politically engaged; what relationship might have existed between local association and democracy itself. Indeed, what sort of democracy could be said to exist in postwar suburban America, if any at all?

Suburban cooperative nursery schools provide one case for studying these issues. I chose them for two reasons. First, they represented a routine form of local organization in postwar suburbs. In the sprawling and fast-growing area around the Kensington Cooperative Nursery School, for instance, cooperative enterprises sprouted up continually from the 1930s through the 1950s. New residents created not only cooperative nursery schools but also cooperative book stores, grocery stores, gas stations, and drug stores. In fact, consumer co-ops were so prevalent in the area that they formed regional associations. Some residents, furthermore, joined and served as officers of a regional health care co-op. Residents formed cooperative housing units as well as co-ops to teach art, dance, and gymnastics to children. (11) Given how widespread the cooperative form was in this area, a case study of one strand of that cooperative movement will tell us about a broader set of suburban organizations than the nursery schools themselves. But the nursery schools were especially appealing to me for a second reason: they seemed likely to embody the expectations of the most pessimistic commentators on suburban associations. Each school served a very small group, literally focused on child's play, and would seem to have left little time for other civic or political activities. If ever an association were situated to match David Riesman's most condescending proclamations, it would seem to have been neighborhood nursery schools.