Little Boxes

Nancy Reynolds, her daughter, explained that her mother wrote the song after seeing the housing developments around Daly City, California, built in the post-war era by Henry Doelger, particularly the neighborhoods of Southern Hills on San Bruno Mountain:[5] My mother and father were driving South from San Francisco through Daly City when my mom got the idea for the song.

When Time magazine (I think, maybe Newsweek) wanted a photo of her pointing to the very place, she couldn't find those houses because so many more had been built around them that the hillsides were totally covered.Reynolds later released her version on her 1967 Columbia Records album Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth,[6] and it can also be found on the Smithsonian Folkways Records 2000 CD re-issue of Ear to the Ground.

The effectiveness of the satire was attested to by a university professor quoted in 1964 in Time magazine as saying, "I've been lecturing my classes about middle-class conformity for a whole semester.

[9] Historian Nell Irvin Painter points out that the conformity described in "Little Boxes" was not entirely a bad thing, indicative as it was of "a process of going to university to be doctors and lawyers and business executives" who "came out all the same" and then lived in "nice, new neighborhoods with good new schools.

Perhaps one of the most well-known covers is by The Womenfolk, whose 1964 version of the song was (until 2016[11]) the shortest single to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, at 1 minute 2 seconds, peaking at No.