Postwar mortgage debt was reframed from emasculating dependency into masculine adult agency.

Evidence

Similarly, in the global North, we might imagine that, since the early 1980s, the working class embraced everyday financialization as a form of resistance to neoliberalism and capitalist culture. In the post-war period, home ownership became the key means to social mobility in “the good society.” The embrace of mortgages in North America and Western Europe was a significant departure from a pre-war wariness of debt and credit (Hyman 2011; Langley 2008, 43–63). … Importantly, the owned patriarchal home was held up as a shared signpost, a “dream image” or myth within Western national imaginaries (Buck-Morss 2000, 190–207). A bank mortgage and other forms of “good debt” became seen less as a form of emasculating dependency and more as the marker of full adult, masculinized agency and subjectivity (Hyman 2011). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 517

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts ‘good debt’ vs prewar wariness, defining the cultural valence shift of household debt.
• XREF: Connects to deWaard’s argument that debt/securitization colonized domestic life; also the gendered framing echoes the moral-panic literature on dress/class identity in ‘Complaints About Immodesty.’ — connects to: Debt has shifted from moral stigma to a compulsory first adult economic experience — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 196