In California in the fifties there was a certain desperate need to conform. My sisters who were in high school then (about 40 miles south of Daly City, in a very wealthy community) wanted nothing more than the matching pastel twinsets and ankle socks that all their friends wore -- but of course, the friends all had more money than we did. The individuality "forced" on my sisters by our relative lack of prosperity included Mexican peasant blouses, homemade skirts, Latin American shawls -- things that, growing up ten years later, I would have reveled in precisely because they would have allowed me to demonstrate my difference from that crowd.

I think that what Malvina Reynolds was commenting on was aspiring to lose oneself in the crowd, surrendering one's personal likes and tastes in a frenzied effort to look, sound and quite possibly think just like everybody else. It had little to do with architecture and profession, and everything to do with conformity.

My tuppence.

C