AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY ★^701The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remarkably
similar battles within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents
and their self- consciously “free” children, especially daughters. Contemporar-
ies, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of fashion”
appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on
clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered
parents who tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone
to dances or movies as old- fashioned and not sufficiently “American.” Immi-
grant parents found it very difficult to adapt to what one Mexican mother
called “this terrible freedom in this United States.” “The Mexican girls,” she told
a sociologist studying immigrant life in Los Angeles, “seeing American girls
with freedom, they want it too.”
The Rise of Fordism
If any individual exemplified the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. The
son of an immigrant Irish farmer, Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michi-
gan machine shops and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Com-
pany. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of
production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Amer-
icans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small
automobile manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later,
Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?The assembly line at the Ford Motor Company factory in Highland Park, Michigan, around
1914.