The Vanishing Living Room and Other Phenomena
Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Goodstein of Scottsdale confess that they never use their living room—in fact, hardly ever go into it. It exists, large as life, down a short flight of steps, and it is prettily and expensively, if a little stiffly, decorated. Decoration, indeed, has become the room’s sole function. It has no other. It is a room to be viewed and admired, but not entered. This, of course, is not a new phenomenon in America, where, as early as Victorian times, the formal “parlor” existed mainly for show. Though it was dusted daily, and was often the largest room in the house, the parlor was not for family use, but remained as forbiddingly untouchable as the folded monogrammed linen guest towels in the bathroom.
In today’s suburbs, however, in comfortable houses like the Goodsteins’ across the country, the role—or nonrole—of the living room is a little different. The Victorian parlor was at least put to occasional use—for weddings, funerals, or important entertaining. But today’s suburban living rooms offer only perpetually dead space. The living room today has little more than symbolic value, as an advertisement for a family’s success. In it are placed the best pieces of furniture, the most valuable paintings, the most expensive rugs—all of which give it a roped-off look. In the rest of the house, meanwhile, can be seen what suburbia is really all about, which is essentially women and children.
It was women and children who invented the suburbs, who first saw them as a necessity, and it is they who continue to rule them. The cities, to which the men commute, are masculine; the suburbs feminine. For suburban women and children, contemporary architects of suburban houses have, to replace the living room, come up with that room called “the family room.” The family room was a post–World War II invention, and today virtually no suburban house of consequence is built without one. Furthermore, it has come to serve a purpose that is perhaps unique in the history of human habitation. The family room is located hard by the kitchen, where the meals are prepared, and it inevitably contains a stereo, a radio, and a television. It is here—not in the dining room—that the family eats its meals, on trays in front of the set. Usually, the family room contains a bar too—one concession to male needs—and it is here that the cocktail hour is spent. The family room is for lounging and for napping, and for horsing around. It is also for entertaining, and it is here—not in the living room—that guests gather for parties when it is too chilly to be outside on the terrace by the pool. It is, in other words, an all-purpose living space where there are no real rules and where every domestic activity, including sleeping, can take place. The personality of the family room makes the living room, by contrast, all the more chilly and aloof, more ornamental and museum-like, a place one passes on one’s way somewhere else. The family room is, as its name implies, a nest—a place where the woman of the house goes to relax and be comfortable, with her children and husband, her brood, nestled around her. Now that kitchens have become streamlined and impersonal, the family room is the heart of the house.
This nest is sometimes rather a messy one. If the living room is pristine and sterilized, the family room is cluttered and drink-stained. The rules of the family room permit that this be so. This makes a family room an easy room for a housewife to take care of, since it requires no care—nor does the living room, since how much care is required of a room that is never entered? Surveys have shown that women are, by nature, less tidy souls than men—or, rather, that most men think that women are untidy and disorganized. In a recent study, one hundred fifty recently divorced men were asked what they considered the primary reasons for the divorce. The responses followed a predictable pattern: “Our backgrounds were different”; “Our religions were different”; “Her mother was the domineering type”; “She was immature”; “We were incompatible”; “She and her psychiatrist ganged up against me.” But 80 percent of those interviewed included, as at least one important reason: “She was a lousy housekeeper,” or “The house was always a mess.” The family room, perhaps, solves that problem. Also, since the Women’s Movement has thrown terms such as “housewife” and “homemaker” into disrepute, the family room has conveniently provided a place where housekeeping and homemaking do not apply. The family room is for family, and family means kids, and kids mean kicked furniture and finger-spotted woodwork. As Jeanette Goodstein says proudly of her typically battered family room, “This is the room where we do our real living.”
The family room is where the kids park their bicycles and skateboards, their surfboards and skis. It is okay, in the family room, to find a sneaker on the coffee table, a fielder’s mitt on top of the television set, and a partly eaten apple wedged between the sofa cushions. All these details provide, after all, living proof of “living.” And yet it is possible that the permissive ambience of the family room—a phenomenon that did not exist a generation ago—has prompted many families, and many men in particular, to sour on the suburbs, which have disappointed them in other ways that they would not have dreamed possible, such as rising crime rates and traffic problems, reminiscent of the city they left behind.
Perhaps, in the long run, the family room has been an unhealthy development. It has been popular, in recent years, to speak of urban communities as manifestations of a “sick society.” And yet there is very recent evidence that this may not be the case at all. Dr. Leo Srole, a psychiatric sociologist at Columbia University and a director of the Midtown Manhattan Study, has come up with new findings which indicate that, if the cities are sick, the suburbs and rural areas of America are even sicker. In a 1977 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto, Dr. Srole reported that his researches indicated that, in general, mental health was better in the cities than in the suburbs. “At minimum,” he said, “the data stand in total refutation of the prejudgment continually pressed since the eighteenth century that urban mental health is on a one-way slide downward.”
Dr. Srole referred to the anti-urban bias of many social commentators, politicians, and writers such as Erich Fromm as part of an “undocumented indictment”—or conspiracy—against the big cities, adding that cities may offer a far healthier accommodation to the human condition and spirit than small towns do. “We’ve got to realize that urban life does an awful lot of good through the cultural and other resources that it provides and that many people thrive on,” says Dr. Srole.
To support his thesis, Dr. Srole produced a number of pieces of evidence, including an unpublished study conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, a federal agency. The survey, involving 6,700 subjects across the country, was designed to uncover signs of stress and other difficulties—such as trouble sleeping, feelings that “everyone is against me,” that a nervous breakdown was imminent, and that “worries get me down physically.” It was found that people who lived in rural areas and in towns of under 50,000 population had “symptom scores” nearly 20 percent higher than those who lived in cities of 50,000 or more. Another bit of interesting evidence came from a comparison of people living in midtown Manhattan with those in remote Stirling County, Nova Scotia, where the population density per square mile is twenty persons, compared with mid-Manhattan’s 75,000. After drawing subsamples from each group that matched demographically, Dr. Srole compared the mental health scores and found that the mid-Manhattanites were far better off. The scores, says Dr. Srole, “offer no support whatsoever to the antique presupposition of the superiority of rural mental health. On the contrary, Stirling County’s mental-morbidity rate is higher than midtown Manhattan’s by a wide and highly significant statistical margin.”
Furthermore, Dr. Srole concludes that mental health in the cities has improved markedly over the years. Going back to a research project that was conducted in Manhattan in 1954, Srole reinterviewed as many of the original sample of 1,660 New Yorkers as he could find twenty years later—695 of the original group. Of these, 44 percent still lived in Manhattan, 17 percent had migrated to one of New York’s four other boroughs, and another 26 percent resided within the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area, figures that indicate a certain loyalty among New Yorkers to their city and to city living. Comparing the mental-health ratings of people who are in their forties today with those who were in their forties twenty years ago, Dr. Srole found that the proportion of those in need of psychiatric help had dropped by 50 percent. A similar decline was measured when people in their fifties today were compared with those in their fifties twenty years ago.
Of course, other factors than “quality of life” in New York City must be taken into account when examining these rosy figures—such as a general improvement in social and economic conditions, parental influences, and the social forces that shaped the parents themselves in the era in which they grew up. Still, Dr. Srole’s findings are encouraging. It is currently quite the fashion among New Yorkers to deplore their city and the life it provides, and at Manhattan cocktail parties there is always a certain amount of agonized talk about rapes, muggings, and burglaries, from people who, it usually turns out, have never actually experienced any of these discomfitures. It may be that New Yorkers, like everyone else, enjoy acting out dramatic fantasies and are helping to feed a myth of New York as a dark and dangerous place—while in reality New York’s crime rate is lower than that of Cleveland, Houston, or Washington, D.C. New Yorkers, figuratively speaking, may be complaining happily all the way to the bank.*
True, United States Census figures do show that urban areas have a higher divorce rate than suburban or rural areas. But since one out of five American marriages now ends in divorce, sociologists like Dr. Srole would probably not claim any connection between divorce and mental illness. In fact, he might conclude that divorce was a sign of mental health—our ability to make difficult decisions and to move away from unpleasant situations. What the lower suburban divorce rate may indicate, as we have noted, is that many unhappy suburban marriages are being held together merely by the weight of children, jointly owned property, and co-signed mortgages.
At least one Scarsdale man, recently divorced, says that it was the physical fact of the big suburban house which kept his marriage together longer than was good for either his former wife or himself—the house, the lawn, the garden, the swimming pool. “Owning a house means endless expenditures of time and money,” he says. “For years, while the marriage was going sourer and sourer, we could occupy ourselves—and keep our minds off the situation—with the house, with things that had to be done. The new roof, getting the place painted, keeping the hedges clipped, and getting rid of the crab grass.” Finally, he decided to divest himself of all this, and as usually happens, his former wife got the house. Also, as usually happens, he plans to move back to the city, where he feels life for a bachelor will be more congenial. “There’s an elegance to New York City social life that was always missing in the suburbs,” he says. “There’s a European quality, a ‘salon’ feeling that you get in cities like Paris and Rome and London and Madrid, when people uncertain. A salon in the suburbs is ridiculous on the face of it. But in a city, it is possible.”
It is interesting that he should talk fondly of a “salon.” A salon is perhaps the direct antithesis to a family room—a room that city apartment dwellers are happy to live without.
*It is curious, in New York, how stories circulate and how, if the story is good enough, it is repeated again and again, with each person who tells it prepared to swear that it happened to her or to him. There is the Bloomingdale’s ladies’ room handbag story, for example. It goes like this. The person telling the story went into the ladies’ room at Bloomingdale’s and, inside a booth, hung her handbag on a hook that projected from inside the door. After seating herself, she suddenly saw a hand reach over the door, remove her bag, and depart with it. She reported the incident to the store’s security department. A day or so later, she received a telephone call from a person who identified himself as a Bloomingdale’s detective. Her bag had been found. She must collect it at the store at a certain hour. When she arrived at the store, however, the security staff had no information on her bag and no idea who might have called her. Returning to her apartment after this fruitless trip, she found it had been burglarized. This author, being male, has never visited the ladies’ room at Bloomingdale’s to see whether the doors on the booths have inside hooks or apertures at the top through which a bag could be snatched. But having heard the tale from so many New York women who insisted that they had been victimized in this identical fashion, he did check with the security department of Bloomingdale’s. The store has no record of any such incident.