During the middle years of the twentieth century, the "American Dream" for many people became a dream of suburbia. This consisted of many components, including safe tree-lined streets filled with privately-owned single family homes, often surrounded by white picket fences. This area retained enough characteristics of the countryside to allow children to roam freely in constructive and healthy play. Convenient transportation took Dad to work, while Mom stayed home and baked cookies. The dream had a strong materialistic component. Maintenance of the ideal was expensive and required cars, swimming pools, and a wide range of household and garden machinery, such as the frost-free refrigerator of "Reactionary Essay." McGinley was, in many ways, an advocate of the suburban lifestyle, defending it in prose and poetry, as well as in her own personal life.

The idea of the suburb, a community centered around an urban center, was certainly...