Context and Conclusion
The Greenbelt Sink
The "Standard" Equipment
The bathroom and all of the products within were made during the
Depression, at a time when Americans had both a housing shortage and
economic hardship. The bathroom in this exhibit was constructed
to provide a comfortable standard of life for a family selected to live
in the new planned community.
This bathroom may seem small by modern standards. In the times of the
depression, people viewed it quite differently. For a late
twentieth-century American house,
we would find the setup small and restricting. However, by the standards
of other, less developed countries, this is still a large bathroom.
This bathroom was a luxury during the depression, as it was used by one
small family, not multiple families, as was more common in hard times.
It has a large array of consumer goods, also a sign of prosperity in the
middle of the Depression.
The collection of artifacts around this bathroom seem to be very
"standard" items of the household. The people of Greenbelt were selected
from a pool of applicants based on their ability to conform to normal
standards of suburban life, with a small family, a working father, and a
mother who stayed home.
As Mary Clare
England
said, "Greenbelt started out solidly WASP." It was a
"hotbed" of regulation, trying to make everyone a "decent" citizen, and
everyone participated in being cooperatively average.
However, some objects, such as depression glass, could be a source of
individuality and opportunity for the individual. You can see another
exhibit
about this.
These artifacts were standard, average tools of the household, most
of them used to adjust one's appearance, for those who believed in the
success of modern medicine and the beneficial properties of chemicals, a
different mindset than today's. In addition, the artifacts in this
bathroom reveal different standards of appearance (fashions) than we have
today. A person who used hair tonic to make their hair look perpetually
greasy in the 1990s would be viewed as unusual. Modern views of
preferable product content and the nature of medicine have evidently
changed as well.
However, some things
haven't changed at all, such as our culture's use or overuse of aspirin.
The bathroom mirror is just as common and important a household item
today as it was in the 1930s. Every bathroom still has soap at the sink,
even though the ingredients and our view of what ingredients are desirable
may have changed. The uses of petroleum to adjust our hair or soothe the
skin may have changed, but in modern times we have similar counterparts
to the "artifacts" used in this Greenbelt home. Our cultural habits,
rituals, and standards of appearance really haven't changed that much.
That about concludes our trip to the museum's bathroom. Of course, you
can visit other parts of
the museum, or find out a little more about
this particular project.
Go back to the index to Project 4
Neil Zuckerman