Dream City: The Wife’s Role in Columbia

The ad was published in the Baltimore Sun on Nov. 19, 1967, for a city known for its innovative, ahead-of-its-time thinking.

“In Columbia, your wife has time to be her other self,” the ad copy reads. “That’s because Columbia is designed so she won’t have to spend 18 hours a week playing chauffeur.

“At Wilde Lake Village Green, for instance, she’ll find just that: A village shopping cluster where everything’s right next to everything else. ...Your wife’s time is more her own: to put her artist's hand to canvas, sign her pen name to a short story or learn a Spanish gazpacho soup recipe.”

Manager Barbara Kellner points out how the early thinkers seemed to miss one element when they designed the new city, dubbed by some at the time as the “Next America.”

Women were trickling into the workforce at the time of the promotional campaign, and that trickle would soon become a flood.

Columbia, designed around the concept of a village center—a retail hub—and neighborhood center, which revolved around the school, has different demographics to contend with today than when it was founded in 1967, Kellner says.

In the early days, when a homogenous bloc of young families moved to Columbia, the theory was that after a mother dropped off her child at school, she would go to a convenience store in her village center and have a coffee, Kellner said.

Today, with the variety of ages and backgrounds of residents, gathering places are different.

“You might not identify as quickly or as clearly with your geographical neighborhood, but you’ll identify with some other group,” she explains. “It will be mommy and me, a Meetup group, the Senior Art League, or it might be soccer.”

“So then the idea is where do those groups go? And congregate?” she said.

Two women that I spoke to recently in Columbia said they connect with other mothers here through events at the , a support group for moms through the Howard County General Hospital, a yoga class for moms , and Internet groups such as Meetup.com.

“I live in an apartment,” said Mirian Berg, of Ellicott City, who said she knew a woman who had a lot of neighborhood interaction in Crofton, a planned community in Anne Arundel County. “All the moms had babies around the same time. They gathered at each other’s houses. I wish we had something like that.”

About this series: Associate Local editor Lisa Rossi, with the help of Columbia Archives Manager Barbara Kellner, is writing a series of short posts about how early ideas about Columbia’s past can spur conversations today about its future. Do you have an idea for a historical post on Columbia? Email Lisa at lisa.rossi@patch.com

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