Park Forest Peggy
| 👩 | |
| Era | The Fifties |
|---|---|
| Age | 21-26 |
| Home | Levittown, NY |
| Demographic | young suburban homemaker, white |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
Peggy is a homemaker in her early twenties with two small children in a Levittown tract house on Long Island, and she married straight out of school. Her vote as a young suburban mother follows whatever keeps her household safe and prices low.
Who they stand for
The building firm Levitt and Sons built more than seventeen thousand houses on former Long Island potato fields between 1947 and 1951. The houses were sold on VA and FHA mortgage terms that let a veteran move in with almost nothing down, but the deeds carried covenants that refused sale to Black families. The buyers were couples who married young, since the median age of first marriage for American women in 1950 was about twenty, and they produced the baby boom that peaked in 1957. Their politics were domestic rather than ideological. Polio, the price of groceries, the new elementary school, and the threat of another war weighed on them more than any party label did. In 1952 and 1956, women in these households voted for Eisenhower at a higher rate than men did, drawn by his promise to end the Korean War and by his general reluctance to pick fights. Peggy is a younger and more anxious version of Suburban Sue. Sue chooses between the two parties, while Peggy chooses between calm and alarm.
Playing to them
Peggy rewards a President who lowers the tension in the country. She responds to an end to the fighting in Korea, a grocery bill that stops rising, a polio vaccine that reaches her children, and a new school built before the classrooms overflow. She punishes alarm. A war scare, a sudden rise in prices, or a strike that empties the shelves counts against whoever holds office, and a President who sounds angry on the radio has already lost ground with her. She is anti-Communist in the ordinary way her neighbours are, so she will not object to government loyalty programmes, but she has no taste for the anti-Communist crusade itself and loses interest when it dominates the news, which is where a President keeps the support of Minute Women Vivian and War Widow Bridget instead of hers. Price controls win her support and lose the support of Texas Oil Tex and Banker Prescott. A federal push to desegregate her street wins the support of South Side Marcus and frightens Peggy, because fear of change is the one thing that decides her vote.
Where they live
The five states where Park Forest Peggy makes up the largest share of the electorate in the fifties:
- Utah
- Idaho
- Vermont
- North Dakota
- Wyoming