Articles

"Modern Space and Domesticity"
The continual investigation of the idea of space is a driving force in the history of early modern architecture. But theories of space are abstract and even philosophical constructs whose actual construction and inhabitation could be problematic (i.e., the De Stijl axonometric). On the other hand, the upper-middle-class house has also preoccupied modern architects in two regards: first, these were the most sympathetic patrons for modern architecture in Western Europe and America and these houses served as a testing ground for architectural ideas and innovations. Second, the construction of a new model for bourgeois domesticity was an inaugural part of the social project of modernism on a larger scale. How did these parallel projects, modern space-conception and (upper middle-class) domesticity, intersect?

Architectural space is a continually developing series of intellectual abstractions
The models of domesticity provided by specific modern houses must be questioned as psychological and social constructions of a particular kind of family and class life (family relations and the construction of social boundaries,social relations within and without the house)

"Reflections on Domesticity" by Boudon Chavez
"Now, however ÑÊnow that I am thirty, and married, and separated, and not so sure I believe in fate ÑÊit's not dread so much as a sort of loneliness I feel, or anticipate, will be the inevitable consequence of an acceptance on my part that this may be who I am: a woman without a husband; a woman who, given my ambitions, and the way I relate (or refuse to relate) to men may never 'have' a family, like my mother 'had'. It makes me afraid, when I consider this. Without a king in my narrative, I don't know how to proceed; don't know how or what kind of home/kingdom I'm to help build, or why. And frankly, I don't want the entire responsibility. When you're as poor as I am, it's not a pretty prospect: what amount of metaphorical dick-sucking it will take to get from here to there; from a position of powerlessness to a position of power in a world owned by men who, in some way or another, necessarily want to own me. "

"By the time I was born, then, my mother had reason to feel that she had, in effect, not only wasted her entire adult life but done damage by it. Did she ever contemplate re-entering the "workforce"? I don't know. I think, based on things my mother, who is, in a word, acute, has said in the past couple of years, that the thought of entering a workforce filled with mostly younger, better educated women (My mother was forty-six, remember, when she had me.); women whom she imagined had a good reason to believe despised everything she represented ÑÊwhether they had a right to or not ÑÊscared her. Whatever the reason, my mother chose to remain a homemaker to the end; and, I'd say understandably, wanted to believe in the validity of such a choice. "

"My sister Betsy says she remembers a Thanksgiving dinner one year at which my mother threw a baked potato in anger, at someone across the kitchen. At which point, says my sister, she and her husband at the time, Ken, who had just arrived at the party, turned around and fled."

"The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood"
Between 1820 and the Civil War, the growth of new industries, businesses, and professions helped to create in America a new middle class. Although the new middle-class family had its roots in preindustrial society, it differed from the preindustrial family in three major ways: I) A nineteenth-century middle-class family did not have to make what it needed in order to survive. Men could work in jobs that produced goods or services while their wives and children stayed at home. 2) When husbands went off to work, they helped create the view that men alone should support the family. This belief held that the world of work, the public sphere, was a rough world, where a man did what he had to in order to succeed, that it was full of temptations, violence, and trouble. A woman who ventured out into such a world could easily fall prey to it, for women were weak and delicate creatures. A woman's place was therefore in the private sphere, in the home, where she took charge of all that went on. 3) The middle-class family came to look at itself, and at the nuclear family in general, as the backbone of society. Kin and community remained important, but not nearly so much as they had once been. A new ideal of womanhood and a new ideology about the home arose out of the new attitudes about work and family. Called the "cult of domesticity," it is found in women's magazines, advice books, religious journals, newspapers, fiction--everywhere in popular culture. This new ideal provided a new view of women's duty and role while cataloging the cardinal virtues of true womanhood for a new age.

"Domesticity: A Domestic Feminist Stays Home" by Holly Teichholtz
"Although it's not as if the feminist in me up and moved to Timbuktu, leaving a simpering domestic servant in her place, there's a difference between a woman's taking on the majority of the housework (even if she doesn't work) and a man's doing the same. Men don't carry in their blood and their bones the collective memory of thousands of years trapped in the home as domestic servants to their spouses and families. For men, the joy of taking on a household role can be equal to or greater than that of working outside the home -- not because domestic work is easier or more pleasant than work outside the home, but because when a man does it, it carries a symbolic weight of change and non-conformity. Being a stay-at-home man can be an affirming statement of polite disagreement with history, a symbol of the determination to live life as one sees fit, regardless of society's ideas. Being a stay-at-home girlfriend didn't strike me as offering the same kind of affirmative reinforcement, and it had never been high on my list of life goals."

"Domination, Desire & Domesticity"
Domestic environments, whether today or in the past, evoke multiple associations, from the dread of a decline in status to a longing for familial intimacy. Experiences and symbols intertwine with formal rules and tastes.

(future) Bibliography

• Aungles, Ann. The Prison and the Home: A Study of the Relationship Between Domesticity and Penality (The Institute of Criminology Monograph, No. 5). Sydney: University of Sydney Warren Center, 1994.

• Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: Orion Press, 1964.

• Poster, Mark. Critical Theory of the Family. New York : Seabury Press, 1978.

• Visser, Margaret. Much Depends on Dinner : The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal. New York: Grove Press, 1987.

• Visser, Margaret. The Rituals of Dinner : The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners.New York: Penguin USA, 1991.

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