Few, if any, of the steps that produced the isolated 1950s suburban housewife had been intended to have anything to do with domestic life at all. At the start of the nineteenth century, Napoleon had offered prize money for the invention of a method of longterm food preservation, to feed his armies on campaign. Sealed tin casings, it was discovered, could be heated sufficiently to, as later was understood, destroy the bacteria that cause putrefaction. The original food tins weighed over 3 kilograms and could be opened only with a hammer and chisel, hardly a housewife’s dream. Production of tinned food in the USA was initially geared to supply Civil War soldiers, but with the end of the war, the new industry merely adapted its products for home consumption. By the 1870s the Chicago meat-packing industry was established, and by 1892 even such exotic items as Hawaiian pineapples were available in tins. The invention of the rotary tin-opener came in 1890, and soon tinned food was an everyday household item. Tinned food, in turn, led both to fewer outings to shops, and to fewer tradesmen making daily or weekly visits to the house. At the same time, while the technology of ice-chests had long been known, by the end of the century mass production brought them within reach of many of the middle classes, which in turn reinforced the shifts in household buying-patterns precipitated by tinned foods, even before the arrival of electric refrigerators just as World War I was ending. That meat, fruit and vegetables could be bought in quantity and kept over a long period of time further decreased women’s contact with the outside world.
As with ice-chests, so with oscillating washing machines, which washed clothes at the turn of a crank, and which arrived in the 1880s and 1890s. Weekly laundry for a family of four took a hired washerwoman two days, for which she charged 16s. A machine cost £8, ten weeks’ worth of a laundress’s wages, and reduced the time spent on laundry by half, enabling the housewife to tackle it herself, or with the help she already had in the house.* It is unsurprising, therefore, that there were nearly a thousand dealers selling these machines in Britain by 1892, and the USA had many more. As electricity reached more households, the market expanded and prices continued to drop. In 1926, nearly 1 million machines were sold, at about $150 each; less than a decade later the price was $60, or, in Britain, £25, and nearly half as many again were being sold annually.
The mechanization of these tasks, decreasing as it did the need for hired help, was the continuation of a long progression whereby technology was harnessed to increase the privacy of householders. In 1663, Pepys had installed a bell outside his bedchamber to summon a servant. The distance the sound carried was not great (and, failing to wake their servant, he resolved to ‘get a bigger bell’). Nonetheless, it was further than a human voice travelled, enabling, for the first time, family spaces to be separate from servants’ spaces. When bells were connected by wires, in Britain from the 1770s, in Germany from the 1830s, a still greater distance between family and servants could be established. Germany and Scandinavia led the use and technological development of porcelain stoves that heated rooms better than open fires did, and could be re-fuelled from passageways outside the room they were heating: the family remained warm without their activities being interrupted by servants coming and going. The British, unwilling to give up their fireplaces even for increased privacy, had buckets of coal set by the fire, which enabled several hours of privacy before the bucket had to be replenished by a servant. In dining rooms, too, the installation of dumbwaiters, which delivered food without servants being present, increased separation between servants and the family; for the less well-off, chafing-dishes performed the same function.*
Central heating and lighting technologies increased privacy too. The cost and labour-intensive nature of fires meant that the family, and often their servants, routinely gathered in the one room that had a fire. Gas lighting and oil lamps also promoted the group nature of activities, keeping the family around a central table that was used for sewing, reading and writing. Central heating, when it arrived, however, heated an entire house, or at least an entire floor, and there was no reason now for different, sometimes conflicting, tasks to be performed in the same space. Electricity meant that lamps could either be placed in different areas of one room, or they could be in separate rooms. Now the residents could occupy the entire house comfortably, each of them warm and well lit in their own room, at little extra expense.
Single items of technology followed a similar pattern. When telephones were first installed in private houses, it was generally in the most public space in the house, often the hall. They then migrated from public to private rooms, first to a living room or kitchen, and then to bedrooms. Radio migrated from being the centre of the living room, the surrogate hearth around which families gathered in newly centrally heated, fireless rooms, to being a transistor that was carried from room to room, then to a Walkman and finally an iPod or an app on a mobile phone, the private possession of a single person. Television initially took over radio’s hearth-substitute position, before it too moved to kitchens and bedrooms, and, with iPads and tablets, also became something that was tied to an individual, turning what had been a communal family activity into an entirely private one.
In the twenty-first century, technology has created the possibility of many private entertainments occurring in each family member’s private space. But one of the most important pieces of privacy-creating technology was a twentieth-century one, one that returned the house as a whole to a state of isolation from its neighbours: the car. In the American Midwest, as early as the 1920s, residents had already noticed a change. By 1923, two out of every three families in the town of Muncie, in Indiana, had a car, and yet many mourned the vanished summer evenings and Sundays spent sitting on front porches ‘visiting’ with neighbours in these outdoor rooms as the world walked past. Now people went out for a drive, whizzing past those on porches without stopping to talk. By World War II front porches on existing buildings were often used as little more than covered entranceways, while new houses more commonly had their porches situated at the rear, away from exhaust fumes and noise. Horses and buggies had been noisy, and smelly too, but their relatively low speed and the accessibility of the passengers meant they also fostered sociability. There was no longer any point to front porches, and the house increasingly turned in on itself.
In Britain, likewise, by the end of the nineteenth century, the little street-facing balconies of the Regency period were no longer in fashion, replaced instead by railings that kept house-fronts at a distance from passers-by, which became the default design for middle- and upper-class urban housing, while their raised ground floors lifted the life of the interior above the life of the street and out of sight. Where gardens fronted houses, hedges were planted to add a further barrier between passers-by and home-owners. Hedgerows had originally been planted on the borders of grazing and agricultural land to stop animals from straying; as the familiar suburban privet hedge they were repurposed, now designed to stop neighbours’ eyes from straying. (Front gardens continue to be found in many of Britain’s residential areas today, but they are barely, if ever, used by adults as an extension to the house, a place to be sociable: if people sat in their front gardens, they would be considered decidedly odd.)
Yet even as the house, and the housewife, became increasingly isolated, housework became increasingly subject to scrutiny from outside. While domestic manuals, the nineteenth-century descendant of the earlier conduct manuals, had been popular for the previous half-century, they had been written by, and for, supposed amateurs. The start of the twentieth century saw housework take on many of the aspects of a profession. In factories, a new type of manager, the efficiency expert, was being employed to advise on layout and design to maximize output and therefore profits. The American efficiency expert and writer Christine Frederick, who was married to another of these experts, extrapolated her husband’s experience to what she bluntly referred to as ‘my factory’, her house, to enormous success. In The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (1912–13), she
positioned the housewife in the consumer economy, instructing her on how to purchase mass-produced goods efficiently and how to install and utilize new technology for her household’s benefit. For Frederick and her many readers, the output that in a factory was measured in profit was at home measured by the comfort and professional advancement of her family.
If housework had come to be written of as a profession, then how was it that the house, and its housewife, continued to be considered part of the private sphere? Mrs Beeton, in 1860, had compared the housewife to the commander of an army, or ‘the leader of any enterprise’, both openly and publicly male roles, but if anyone at all noticed it, and there is little indication that they did, it was no doubt considered to be nothing more than a rhetorical device. But she, like Christine Frederick after her, was also unusually frank about the commercial and public aspects of women’s work. More common were the experts who cloaked the new field of scientific and industrial management in the language of stereotypical femininity. Frederick W. Taylor, one of the founders of the profession of scientific management and industrial efficiency, wrote the introduction to Mary Pattison’s The Principles of Domestic Engineering (1915). Both title and subtitle – an attempt to evolve a solution of the domestic ‘labor and capital’ problem – to standardize and professionalize housework – to reorganize the home upon ‘scientific management’ principles – and to point out the importance of the public and personal element therein as well as the practical – stated baldly that this was a book about business. But from then on, while implicitly the text made clear that the author fully understood that the private sphere she was describing was an integrated part of public life, both she and Taylor did their level best to disguise the fact. Taylor assured her readers that applying his business model to the house would not make women neglect the ‘aesthetic’ element of home-making, and added comfortingly that Pattison was ‘always … well and artistically dressed’. And Pattison’s frontispiece echoed his aside, being a photograph of the indeed well-dressed author, with a caption reading ‘An Attempt’. Not only is the author disguising her labour, but the humility of the caption further downplays her achievement.
While the ambiguous nature of the housewife’s job was thus contested – was it a job, or an offshoot of gender? – the language of the home straightforwardly acknowledged the porous nature of both public and private spheres. The Dutch word gezellig, most commonly translated as simply ‘cosy’, means far more to the Dutch, both physically and emotionally. An etiquette book from 1938 outlines the duties that help create feelings of gezelligheid entirely in terms of a housewife’s role: the housewife must ensure that the room’s furniture is comfortable and elegant; further, she must ensure the room is clean and tidy, with pretty flowers well arranged; and then she must provide delicious refreshments. But in daily usage it is clear that gezelligheid was, and is, as much something that is experienced in public, communal spaces as in private ones. Eating out can be gezellig; some cafés, restaurants, bars or parties can be gezellig. This epitome of home words in reality clearly describes something that is felt as much in public as in private.
In the nineteenth century, magazines and newspapers frequently used the words ‘family’, ‘home’ and ‘household’ in their titles, to emphasize that these were publications to be read at home, that although they were the products of commercial enterprise, they were to be consumed as part of the private world. There was The Family Herald, The Christian Family Advocate, The Illustrated Family Budget of News, The Family Guardian, The Home News, The Christian Tomes and Home Journal, The Bristol Household News and many more. The British Library catalogue lists sixty-four newspapers published between 1800 and 1900 that incorporate the world ‘family’ in their titles, but only fifteen dating from 1900 to 2000. This doesn’t mean that the notion of family became less enticing. It just migrated. No longer as frequently attached to commercial items that were brought into the home, from the twentieth century the words ‘family’ and ‘home’ were repeatedly attached to commercial industries outside the home, to suggest subliminally to customers that these businesses were their intimates: family restaurants, family holidays, leisure parks that are ‘fun for all the family’, hotels that are ‘a home from home’, ‘homemade’ supermarket food and more.
In the twentieth century, the commercial utilization of the idea of home merely made explicit what had long been an unspoken reality: there might be no place like home, but most of its component parts could be purchased.
4
Home Furnishings
In 1785, the poet William Cowper wrote a verse paean to domesticity, the first section of which is entitled ‘The Sofa’. Then, to evoke ‘The Winter Evening’, another section begins with a postman making his rounds before the action swiftly moves from the dark outdoors to draw a picture of the comforts to be found inside:
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome the peaceful evening in.
By the late eighteenth century, even a modest household, here represented by its symbolic focus, the fireplace, was deemed worthy of an English poem. So too were the new luxury commodities that these households routinely possessed – curtains, a sofa, china, implicitly tea.*
Previously, the architects of houses of the great had used furniture as part of their overall design schemes, the location of each individual piece carefully chosen to counterpoint an architectural element. The room’s aesthetics, rather than the behaviour or needs of the people in the room, were the guiding factor: the space and its fittings were one. So tables were placed between windows, commodes beside doorways, chairs against walls, all to complement the structure’s proportions. In the post-Renaissance world, the ornamental furniture of the great was an expression of its owners, and their household, objects of display, not of utility.
But apart from such display pieces, even the very rich otherwise expected their houses to be filled with purely utilitarian, multipurpose items of furniture, to suit their multi-purpose rooms. The word ‘furniture’ in English derives, via French, from Old High German, ultimately from the verbs to supply or to provide; most other European languages, however, make clear furniture’s mobile history. French meubles, Italian mobili, Portuguese mobiliário, Spanish meubles, German Möbel, Dutch meubilair, Norwegian and Danish møbler, Swedish möbler, Polish meble, Russian мебеΔь: all clearly derive from the same root that gives English the word ‘mobile’. And true to this etymology, furniture for use, rather than for display, which included all furniture for everyone but the very wealthiest, was historically almost perpetually on the move.
In part, furniture was mobile because there was very little of it, and what there was necessarily moved around to fulfil many and different needs. Until well into the late seventeenth century the household furnishings of the modestly prosperous were so scanty that it is possible to itemize them almost entirely in a few sentences. In England the main room in such houses had a table, benches, a chair, a cupboard; those with more money or land would have had another chair or table, and perhaps a decorative element, possibly a painted wall-cloth, or cushions or a bench cloth. The fireplace had its own furnishings: a gridiron, a flat rack to stand pans on; cob-irons, or bars for the fire that had hooks to hold meat-spits; the spits themselves; and pothooks, from which a stewpan hung. Less well-equipped houses might not even contain a gridiron or pothooks. Kitchens, where they existed, held the pots and pans, kettles, plates or trenchers that were in most houses more commonly kept in the hall. In wealthy households, kitchens were also the location for equipment for activities such as preserving, dairying, brewing or baking. But these kitchens were for storage and food preparation, not cooking, and they never had any furniture: nothing to sit on, not even a table. Lower down the scale,
the entire household goods and furnishings of one late-seventeenth-century labourer consisted of a tabletop without legs (buckets or barrels probably substituted), a cupboard, two chairs, a bench, a tub, two buckets, four pewter dishes, ‘a flagon and a tancard’, three kettles and a pot; a bed with two blankets and three pairs of sheets; a trunk, two boxes, a barrel and a coffer, a drainer, and assorted ‘lumber and trash and things forgot’.
This man was by no means impoverished. His three sets of sheets marked him as a man of some substance, and, even more, so did the bed, for beds were far from common. Until the fifteenth century, most Europeans slept on sacks stuffed with straw or dried grass, which were nightly placed on boards, benches or chests, or directly on the floor, in the main, or only, room. In the colonies, in Maryland and Virginia, up to 80 per cent of lower middle-class households had no beds at this date. Many slaves slept in barracks, or in basements or attics, kitchens or stables, or in more makeshift fashion on stair-landings and in corridors, and while they might have bedding (although they might not), there were rarely any beds. Even in the eighteenth century, when purpose-built slave quarters had begun to be built, the low level of personal possessions – a few stools, tables, chairs or benches – meant that at most the fortunate had a low-level bedframe topped with, perhaps, a straw-filled mattress and a blanket for sleeping. A person who slept on a bed, or even sat on it in the daytime, was like the person who had the chair – the chair-man – the head of the household, and of a household that had some cash to spare. In the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, a plain bedstead cost up to 25 guilders, or five weeks’ income for a labourer; a four-poster was 100 guilders or more, depending on its decorative elements. In some regions of Italy as late as the eighteenth century, it might take six years for a labourer to save enough to buy a bed and bedding.
The Making of Home Page 12
