During the fifties, the pastoral image of suburbs was applied to all kinds of bedroom communities. Popular magazines featured wives tending their gardens, husbands grilling at their barbecues. This was a fanciful recasting of the Jeffersonian ideal: suburbanites were the new, let us say, “backyard yeomanry.” To add to the Jeffersonian call for exurban procreative strength, the new suburbs acquired unsubtle nicknames like “Fertile Acres,” owing to the high birthrates in young families.
