Garage Sales and Suburban Subversiveness
Garage Sales and Suburban Subversiveness
This chapter focuses on the origins and rise of another new form of secondhand exchange: the garage sales. Hosted and attended mostly by women, garage sales emerged in 1950s suburbs as tactics for newly isolated housewives to earn intermittent income, participate in politics, and build community networks. From huge Barry Goldwater campaign fundraisers to small family sales to raise "pin money," these intimate events both adapted to and defied the spatial limitations of suburban domesticity and postwar gender expectations. Moreover, garage sales introduced a new, larger-than-ever generation of middle-class youth to secondhand goods and clothing—providing provocative glimpses of the tools that could be used in a partly generational rejection of class status, sexual normativity, and political consensus.
Keywords: Garage sales, Suburbs, Housewives, Politics, Postwar gender expectations, fundraisers
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