25. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, CA, 1996).
26. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994), 49. By 1900, according to Lears, alternative ways of thinking ‘had lost nearly all intellectual legitimacy’ and were limited to a few ‘idiosyncratic writers and artists’, 19.
27. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2003).
28. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London, 1908).
29. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (London, 1897/1987), 30.
30. James, Spoils of Poynton, 43.
31. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890/1950), Vol. I, 291, emphases in original, and 292–3 for the following. They were not exactly the same, he conceded, but they operated ‘in much the same way for all’. At the end of his life, James speculated whether plants, animals and Earth had their own consciousness: see Bruce Wilshire, ‘The Breathtaking Intimacy of the Material World: Williams James’s Last Thoughts’, in: The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 6. George Herbert Mead would develop some of these ideas further, stressing the ways in which humans and objects sustained each other in co-operative relationships: G. H. Mead, The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago, 1938), ed. Charles Morris; see also the discussion by E. Doyle McCarthy, ‘Toward a Sociology of the Physical World: George Herbert Mead on Physical Objects’, in: Studies in Symbolic Interaction 5, 1984: 105–21.
32. James, Principles of Psychology, I, 125.
33. James, Principles of Psychology, I, 122.
34. Russell’s History of Western Philosophy devotes eight pages to James, zero to Heidegger. In his Wisdom of the West (New York, 1959), Russell allows one note: ‘One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic’, 303.
35. Martin Heidegger, ‘Das Ding’ (1949), in: Gesamtausgabe, Vol. III, 79: Bremer and Freiburger Vorträge (1994), 5–23; in English in: Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, 2001), 161–84.
36. Documentary images can be viewed at /www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqsu72ZlJ2c.
37. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 1927, 69–84.
38. A sentiment that would be given new force by the architect Sigfried Giedion in his Mechanization Takes Command in 1948.
39. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 126–7, my translation. The original is man. This is often translated as ‘they’. ‘People’ captures better the singular, conformist qualities Heidegger is writing about.
40. Fiona C. Ross, ‘Urban Development and Social Contingency: A Case Study of Urban Relocation in the Western Cape’, in: Africa Today 51, no. 4, 2005: 19–31.
41. Godfrey Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia (Rhodes–Livingstone Papers, 1941), 18.
42. Eurostat, Housing Statistics in the European Union 2004, table 3.5, 50.
43. Herbert Hoover, American Individualism (Garden City, NY, 1923), 27, 32, 38. See also: David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York, 1979). For a contemporary paen, see Walter Friar Dexter, Herbert Hoover and American Individualism (New York, 1932).
44. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire.
45. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1996).
46. W. E. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia, 1899), 195f.
47. Hazel Kyrk, Economic Problems of the Family (New York, 1929), 417.
48. Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (Oxford, 2014), 64–84, 94–105.
49. 48%. For numbers, see Heinz Umrath, ‘The Problem of Ownership’, in: International Labor Review, 1955, issue 2, p. 110; Bruno Shiro, ‘Housing Surveys in 75 cities, 1950 and 1952’, in: Monthly Labor Review, 1954, 744–50; and the 1930 census figures cited in Kyrk, Economic Problems of the Family, 416.
50. Quoted in Marina Moskowitz, Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America (Baltimore, 2004), 140; and 163–73 for below.
51. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore, 2000), 176–81.
52. James Hutchisson, The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-30 (University Park, PA, 1996), 88.
53. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (London, 1922), 95–6.
54. Lewis, Bab-bitt, 23–4.
55. Lewis, Babbitt, 103–4, italics in original.
56. M. Mead Smith, ‘Monthly Cost of Owning and Renting New Housing, 1949–50’, in: Monthly Labour Review, Aug. 1954, 852.
57. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 298.
58. Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (London, 1996), 144–50; Peter Scott, ‘Marketing Mass Home Ownership and the Creation of the Modern Working-class Consumer in Interwar Britain’, in: Business History 50, no. 1, 2008: 4–25; and Peter Scott, ‘Did Owner-occupation Lead to Smaller Families for Inter-war Working-class Households’, in: Economic History Review 61, no. 1, 2008: 99–124. For France, see Alexia Yates, ‘Selling la petite propriété: Marketing Home Ownership in Early-twentieth-century Paris’, in Entreprises et histoire 64, no. 3, 2011: 11–40.
59. W. E. Dwight, ‘Housing Conditions and Tenement Laws in Leading European Cities’, in: Robert W. Deforest & Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem (New York City, 1903), 174–84. For the 1920s, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 381–91.
60. See now Peter Scott, The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi and Family Life between the Wars (Oxford, 2013), ch. 2.
61. In Finland, it jumped up from 19% in 1980 to 26% in 2003; in Britain from 16% to over 18%; see National Board of Housing, Sweden et al., Housing Statistics in the European Union (2004), 61. I discuss the effects of housing wealth on consumption on 243–5 below.
62. Quoted from Madeline McKenna, ‘The Development of Suburban Council Housing Estates in Liverpool between the Wars’, PhD thesis, Liverpool University, 1986, Vol II, Mrs F., Settington Road, Norris Green, interview no. 12, 428–9.
63. Bruno Shiro, ‘Housing Surveys in 75 cities, 1950 and 1952’, Monthly Labor Review, 1954, 744–50. Strict rent control and tax rules have had a similar effect in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1960s: with secure tenancies, people invest in modernizing their rented fl ts.
64. European Mortgage Federation, Hypo Stat, 2009.
65. Quoted in Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle-class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), 48.
66. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, 2005), 259–64.
67. One child was to sleep in the living room. Royal Meeker, ‘Relation of the Cost of Living to Public Health’, in: Monthly Labor Review, Jan. 1919, Vol. VIII, no. 1, 5. Meeker was the Commissioner of the Bureau.
68. For example, Beyer, Davis & Thwing, Workingmen’s Standard of Living in Philadelphia, 1.
69. V. Volkov, ‘The Concept of Kul’turnost’, in: Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), 210–30.
70. John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, MD, 2001). See also: Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience.
71. Kyrk, Economic Problems of the Family, 368.
72. White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, The Young Child in the Home: A Survey of Three Thousand American Families (New York, 1936), 274.
73. ‘The Demand for Domestic Appliances’, in: National Institute Economic Review 12, Nov. 1960, tables 2, 5 and 6, 24–44.
74. Robert L. Frost, ‘Machine Libera
tion’: in French Historical Studies, Vol. XVIII, no. 1, spring 1983, 124. See further, Sue Bowden & Avner Offer, ‘Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain since the 1920s’, in: Economic History Review 47, no. 4, 1994: 725–48.
75. ‘The Demand for Domestic Appliances’, 27f.
76. David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 170f.; and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York, 1983), 91.
77. Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York, 1929), quoted at 97–8; see also 175. See also the survey data in: Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Housing Division, Bulletin no. 1: Slums and Blighted Areas in the United States (Washington, DC, 1935).
78. R. Wilkinson & E. Sigsworth, ‘A Survey of Slum Clearance Areas in Leeds’, in: Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, Vol. XV/1, 1963, 25–47; François Caron, Economic History of Modern France (New York, 1979); and Karl Ditt, Zweite Industrialisierung und Konsum: Energieversorgung, Haushaltstechnik und Massenkultur am Beispiel nordenglischer und westfälischer Städte, 1880–1939 (Paderborn, 2011), 452–63.
79. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930.
80. H. Schütze, Elektrizität im Haushalt (Stuttgart, 1928), 22, 59.
81. Energiewirtschaftliche Tagesfragen, Vol. XIV, issue 123 (1964), 155f.
82. Shanghai Municipal Archive (SMA), Shanghai Municipal Council Report for 1923, 5 A, and Report for 1924, 2 A, 6 A.
83. SMA, Municipal Gazette, 30 March 1937, 98–100; and Bureau of Social Affairs, the City Government of Greater Shanghai, Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers (Shanghai, 1934), 135–48.
84. Vereinigung der Elektrizitätswerke, Fortschritte in der Elektrifizierung des Haushalts (Berlin, 1932), 106.
85. The kitchen was exhibited at the V&A’s Modernism exhibit in 2006; see Modernism: Designing a New World, ed. Christopher Wilk (London, 2006), 180; a picture of the original is at: www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1331_modernism/files/94/1926_frankfurt_lihotzky.jpg. See also: Michelle Corrodi, ‘On the Kitchen and Vulgar Odors’, in: Klaus Spechtenhauser, ed., The Kitchen: Life World, Usage, Perspectives (Basel, 2006), 21–42.
86. Nederlandse Vereniging van Huisvrouwen (NVvH), see Onno de Wit, Adri de la Bruheze & Marja Berendsen, ‘Ausgehandelter Konsum: Die Verbreitung der modernen Küche, des Kofferradios und des Snack Food in den Niederlanden’, Technikgeschichte, 68 (2001), 133–55.
87. Shanghai Municipal Council, Annual Report for 1924, illustration facing 7 A; Deborah S. Ryan, Daily Mail – Ideal Home Exhibition: The Ideal Home through the Twentieth Century (London, 1997), 49–55, 93; Robert L. Frost, ‘Machine Liberation: Inventing Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France’, in: French Historical Studies, Vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring, 1993), 127.
88. Energiewirtschaftliche Tagesfragen 13, issue 114/115 (1963), quoted at 247, my translation; Nicholas Bullock, ‘First the Kitchen: Then the Façade’, in: Journal of Design History, Vol. I, no. 3/4 (1988), 188–90. Margaret Tränkle, ‘Neue Wohnhorizonte’, in: Ingeborg Flagge, ed., Geschichte des Wohnens: Von 1945 bis Heute, Vol. V (Stuttgart, 1999), 754–5.
89. Hilla Mann lived in Meyer’s Hof from 1932. The interview is in J. F. Geist K. Kürvers, Das Berliner Mietshaus, 1862–1945, Vol. II (Munich, 1984), 535–6, my translation.
90. Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution (London, 1967/1972), 332.
91. Schler, ‘Bridewealth’, in: Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2003.
92. Ellen Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard (Cape Town, 1948), esp. 10, 28, 31 (budget no. 2), 115. The book was based on her 1935 MA thesis.
93. American Home, 1934, quoted in Arwen P. Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880–1940 (Baltimore, 1999), 259.Turin, 1956, quoted in Enrica Asquer, La rivoluzione candida: Storia sociale della lavatrice in Italia, 1945–70, (Rome, 2007), 71, my translation; and Wolfgang König, Geschichte der Konsumgesellschaft (Stuttgart, 2000), 231–2. Mohun, Steam Laundries, 256; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982), 104–24.
96. Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Post-war Years (Toronto, 1999), ch. 10.
97. Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 141, 181–3.
98. Helen Meintjes, ‘Washing Machines Make Women Lazy: Domestic Appliances and the Negotiation of Women’s Propriety in Soweto’, Journal of Material Culture 6, no. 3, 2001: 345–63.
99. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston, 1973).
100. Henkel Archiv, Düsseldorf, Gesolei Tagesberichte, 1926, unnumbered, Gesundheitspflege, soziale Fürsorge und Leibesübungen (GeSoLei), my translation.
101. Wilfried Feldenkirchen & Susanne Hilger, Menschen und Marken: 125 Jahre Henkel (Düsseldorf, 2001), 75–6.
102. Henkel Archiv, Düsseldorf, Blätter vom Hause, 17. Jhg, 1937, 49, and report in H 482, quoted at 349 (1936). For the above, see also the files H 310: Waschvorführung; H 480, Gesolei; Gesolei Tagesberichte, 1926; Henkel-Bote, 18 Sept. 1937 on infant mortality charts; Blätter vom Hause, 17. Jhg, 1937, 46, 49, 137; 1928, 266; and film: Das Ei des Kolumbus.
103. President’s [Hoover] Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, Household Management and Kitchens (Washington, 1932), Foreword. See also: Margaret Horsfield, Biting the Dust: The Joys of Housework (London, 1998).
104. Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media and Women in Inter-war Japan (Durham, NC, 2003), 102. Compare Joanna Bourke, ‘Housewifery in Britain, 1850–1914’, Past and Present, 143/1 (1994), 167–97.
105. In the words of the top official, Ministerialrat Dr Gertrud Bäumer, president of the 1928 exhibition Heim und Technik: Amtlicher Katalog, Ausstellung München 1928 (1928), 45.
106. Sand, House and Home, 21–94.
107. Quoted in Sand, House and Home, 183; 187 for health and safety, and see Ch. 5 for the above. See also: Sheldon Garon, ‘Luxury is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings and Popularizing Thrift in Wartime Japan’, in: Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 1, 2000: 41–78.
108. Amy Hewes, ‘Electrical Appliances in the Home’, in: Social Forces 2, Dec. 1930: 235–42, quoted at 241.
109. For calculations, see Joel Mokyr, ‘Why “More Work for Mother?” Knowledge and Household Behavior, 1870–1945’, in: Journal of Economic History 60, no. 1, 2000: 1–41.
110. G. Silberzahn-Jandt, Waschmaschine (Marburg, 1991) 74.
111. Cowan, More Work, quoted at 100, and see 159–99.
112. Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman & Gerald Handel, Workingman’s Wife: Her Personality, World and Life Style (New York, 1959), 179.
113. Lynd & Lynd, Middletown, 174; for later data, see Jonathan Gershuny, Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Post-industrial Society (Oxford, 2000), 46–75. Given the different types of datasets, any generalization is fraught with danger. In contrast to Gershuny, the adjusted estimates in Ramey’s article show a rise in ‘home production’ for employed women in the United States across the twentieth century: Valerie A. Ramey, ‘Time Spent in Home Production in the Twentieth-century United States: New Estimates from Old Data’, in: Journal of Economic History 69, no. 1, 2009: 1–47. See also 443–51 below.
114. Ramey, ‘Time Spent’, 26–7.
115. Unni Wikan, Life among the Poor in Cairo (London, 1976/1980), 133–65; Homa Hoodfar, ‘Survival Strategies and the Political Economy of Low-income Households in Cairo’, in: Diane Singerman & Homa Hoodfar, eds., Development, Change and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household (Bloomington, IN, 1996), 1–26.
116. For a more contemporaneous example, see Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Mary’s Room: A Case Study on becoming a Consumer in Francistown, Botswana’, in: Richard Fardon, Wim Van Bimsbergen & Rijk van Dijk (eds.), Modernity on a Shoestring: Di
mensions of Globalization, Consumption and Development in Africa and Beyond (Leiden, 1999), 179–206.
117. Quoted in Steven M. Gelber, ‘Do-it-yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity’, in: American Quarterly 49, no. 1, 1997: 66–112, 86. See also: Gelber, Hobbies.
118. Jardin ouvrier de France, Sept. 1941, quoted in Florence Weber, L’Honneur des jardiniers: Les Potagers dans la France du XXe siècle (Paris, 1998), 197, my translation, and 138–45 for inter-war growth. In Britain, there were 609,352 allotments in 1935, and still half a million in 1990; David Crouch & Colin Ward, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (Nottingham, 1997), 64–81. In Germany in 2009, there were 1 million Kleingärten, according to the Bundesverband Deutscher Gartenfreunde e.V.
119. Michael Prinz, Der Sozialstaat hinter dem Haus: Wirtschaftliche Zukunftserwartungen, Selbstversorgung und regionale Vorbilder; Westfalen und Südwestdeutschland, 1920–1960 (Paderborn, 2012), 95–8, 322–4.
120. W. V. Hole & J. J. Attenburrow, Houses and People: A Review of User Studies at the Building Research Stations (London, 1966), 54–6; a 1960 survey showed that 60% of British households had done some DIY in the previous ten months, 55.
121. ‘Prime-age’ American men spent a mere 3.9 hours on home production in 1900 and 1920, which rose to 9 hours by 1950. This aggregate includes non-employed men. Significantly, employed men shared in the upward trend, up from 3 hours to 8.1 hours; Ramey, ‘Time Spent’, table 7, 29.
122. Reports of the Committees on Household Management, and on Kitchens and other Work Centers; part of the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership (1932), section on Management of Household Operations.
123. Ramey, ‘Time Spent’.
124. Tan Sooi Beng, ‘The 78 RPM Record Industry in Malaya Prior to World War Two’, in: Asian Music 28, no. 1, 1996/97: 1–41; Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph (London, 1956); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, 1986/1999); Mark Hustwitt, ‘ “Caught in a Whirlpool of Aching Sound”: The Production of Dance Music in Britain in the 1920s’, in: Popular Music (1983) 3, 7–31; and James J. Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, 2002).
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