Icons of Daily Life in the 1950s

The ever-greater array of new consumer products that became part of daily life during the 1950s supported claims about a growing affluence and the benefits of a free society. The frost-free refrigerator and the family television set were just two of the decade’s many icons of affluence.

The double-door, frost-free refrigerator offered consumers an elegant, in-home repository for the new prepackaged and frozen food products that became available during the 1950s. Advertisements suggested that a refrigerator could serve as visual display case that confirmed to neighbors, and to families themselves, that Americans had become “people of plenty.”

Like the frost-free refrigerator, the television set, which came into most living rooms during the 1950s, also symbolized more than a new technology. By bringing visual images into homes and apartments, television helped to make the process of looking—and wanting to be looked at—a central cultural preoccupation. It made the art of visual display, highlighting anything from the stylish fins on an automobile to a dour politician’s five o’clock shadow, more important than ever before. Looking at life through a television set became an important ritual of daily life during an era in which family-oriented entertainment, such as Leave It to Beaver, dominated network programming.

photo of family watching TV in 1950s