Be a Good Girl and Smile
Selling surburbia
Valley Girl is on hiatus for the US holidays. We will resume with new essays in the New Year. Over the next couple of months, I’ll be sending some digests promoting past Valley Girl newsletters to get you properly prepped for next year’s installments. This week’s digest focuses on the link between the Valley Girl and white suburbia.
From her modern inception in the twentieth century, the Valley Girl1 was engineered to sell a middle-class lifestyle. Circa the 1950s, she was aspirational: a conventionally feminine wife, an attentive, economically-secure mother, a robust consumer of high-quality products. The Valley Girl of this era was often evoked to humanize sales pitches for material things like state-of-the-art homes, furniture, renovation details, and innovative technology like air conditioning. Within these advertorials, it’s the presence of the Valley Girl that elevates mere products into an aspirational way of life—a family you might like to have, a neighborhood you would like to live in, a community you might like to buy your way into.
Being an advertisement leaves little room for humanity or even variance. Dictated by capitalism and classism, this Valley Girl had a very narrow script for performing gender. The Valley Girl was as homogenous as she was superficial; she was defined solely by white, middle-class motherhood, matrimony, and heteronormativity. The regressive gender politics of this era burrowed deep into the all-white suburbia of the San Fernando Valley. And still do.
The Valley’s suburban history and traditional gender dynamics continue to play out on Bravo’s reality series The Valley. In 2025, former hard-partying adults from West Hollywood look to the San Fernando Valley as a place to erect nuclear families, have normative relationships, and obtain a very specific “normal” adulthood. Just like in the 1950s and 1960s, the single-family home is the primary stage for this drama as we are invited into suburban kitchens and remodeled living rooms to hear about marital transgressions, middle-class parenting, pregnancies, and complaints about gender not being performed correctly.
Whether 2025 or 1956, this relentless pursuit of uniformity across family, class, and gender often yields racism on the ground. Loudly and silently, and across every “idyllic” cul-de-sac. These nuclear, white families only want to look across the street and see themselves. Following strategic efforts by some Valley residents to secure housing opportunities for Black families, the KKK responded—asserting a vision of the Valley as solidly white, just as that reality was starting to change.
In today’s cultural moment of tradwives, shiny white families on social media, and Trump 2.0, I find this particular trinity of essays very revealing about where we’ve been, but also where we are going. It’s true what they say: the more things change, the more things stay the same.🌴
Next week: no Valley Girl to accommodate Thanksgiving in the US.
Week after next: white girl problems.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.