Dollhouse:Ranch House

Toy manufacturer Louis Marx & Company made this modern ranch house in the mid-1950s, and its owner promptly put it to good use to reenact the day's activities in the privacy of her room. Made of lithographed tin, the dollhouse features all the attributes of the modern middle-class American home. Marketed for young girls, this house follows a long tradition of dollhouses designed to teach children about the adult world, except that Marx patterned this version after the new ranch-style house that typified middle-class life in postwar America. Centered on a spacious living room, the house opens onto a brick patio stocked with the latest wheeled patio furniture and a miniature lawnmower. At a time when the nation's suburbs were expanding at unprecedented rates, ranch houses much like this one cropped up all over the country. Reflecting the success of Long Island's Levittown (begun in 1947, just after the war), rows of virtually identical houses stretched across America's once-rural landscape, making the owner-occupied, single-family home the norm in middle-class America.