Our home had a single black-and-white TV which got a whole three channels from an antenna. Again, that was what everybody had. We had a portable typewriter, many homes did not. Our telephone was a party line until I was in high school, standard for our pleasant neighborhood.
Many of the women in our neighborhood did home canning, my mother included. Eating evening meals at restaurants wasn't common. Gas stations were called "service stations" and actually did minor repairs. A vacation was mostly a camping trip or a visit to relatives.
The idea that normal people might have wireless (cell) phones, or computers in their homes, or color TVs was pretty much science fiction. Ditto the Internet, cheap long-distance calls, or real people taking passenger flights or cruises - all fantasy. Many intact two adult households got by with one earner.
That was then. Today even the poor have color TV and cell phones. Nobody builds two bedroom, one bath houses; McMansions are common. Computers are so commonplace that your new car probably has at least two and so cheap that less than two weeks of work at the federal minimum wage will buy you one.
Many new households don't even bother with landline telephones but nearly everybody gets Internet and either cable or satellite TV with many channels. Any household in which a non-elderly adult doesn't work is considered odd, potentially a problem.
My point: our standards of what constitutes a good middle-class life have changed dramatically. We want (and expect) a lot more out of life than our parents did. This article by Jonah Goldberg, writing for RealClearPolitics, makes some of the same points.
