4
5
ly rendering women as expert consumers.
1. The genre itself can be traced back to 346 BC with Xenophon’s socratic dialogue, Oeconomicus. The term comes from the Ancient greek words oikos for home and neimen for management, which literally translates to “household management.” 2. Christine W. Sizemore, “Early Seventeenth-Century Advice Books: The Female Viewpoint,” South Atlantic Bulletin 41, no.1 (Jan 1976): 41-48 3. Lee Ustick, “Advice to a Son: Type of Seventeenth-Century Conduct Book,” Studies in Philology, (1932): 440 4. The rise of capitalism between the 15th and 18th centuries accelerated the dispossession of millions of people who therefore lost their means of sustenance and were gradually forced into wage labour. 5. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2014), 17 6. Ibid, 69 7. For example, Henry Roberts publishes in 1850, The Dwellings of the Labouring Classes, in which he claims that private family cottages and controlled lodging houses would liberate the labouring class from “the temptations to vice and immorality.” Henry Roberts, The Dwellings of the Labouring Classes, Their Arrangement and Construction. 1850 (London: Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes), 22-23 8. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, Raising the Dust, The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 104-105
tion into housewives dependent on the income of the husband”— a phenomenon she calls housewifization— became the model for the sexual division of labour under capitalism.
One will come to realise that this literature was at the origin of extremely important shifts in domestic history. Both in its terminology and design proposals, the origins of functionalism will be uncovered; a term often related to modern— predominately male— masters of architecture. The most apparent example being Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, “The house is a machine for living in,” already present in women’s advice literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The research of women’s advice literature is eventually rendered into a quasi-genealogy of modern domestic architecture.
Ideologically, the dissociation between the women’s place of work— the home— and that of their husbands— in businesses and factories— became a prominent literary concept: the ideology of “separate spheres.” It codified the distinctions between private and public, accentuating the home as a “sanctuary” and the public sphere as “vain and immoral”. The concept dominated nineteenth century discourse and was at the basis of important domestic reforms in both Europe and America. Housework, the physical labour that it demanded, was what preoccupied most middle-class women of the nineteenth century. Advice literature became a necessary means amongst themselves, when servants and domestic aid was no longer and affordable option. Indeed, it is important to note that this is a middle-class project; in its ideology, form its creators to its readers. The use of advice manuals and popular literature propelled the middle-class private sphere into the public eye and thereafter it eventually trickled down and impacted the working-class too.
Popular literature has often been used as a primary source when researching women’s history, and indeed to find the writings of women themselves. An essential area of popular literature in the English Renaissance was the growing body of courtesy literature, one of who’s primary genres was the advice book1. The few examples remaining of this era show that women’s writing was rare, often with an apology in the introduction.2 As Lee Ustick pointed out, an emphasis on religion was the predominant characteristic of all bourgeois advice books, whether male of female.3 Although the object of this research is set in a more contemporary era— the nineteenth and twentieth centuries— it is important to note that the morality surrounding one’s habits, in and out of the home, has always been central to this sort of literature. Written on the basis of experience, often revolving around ones interpretation and practice of religion; advice literature existed for future generations, impacting domestic traditions at large.
MAINTAINING STANDARDS OF HEALTHY ARCHITECTURE : THE SANITARY INSPECTOR
As the house increasingly reflected bourgeois dwelling norms, which were no longer directly linked to pure necessities, but aesthetic style and trends; women relentlessly consulted advice literature and were guided in how to manage their homes. The importance given to the physical condition of the home was amplified, and in a way legitimised as a necessity, when order and cleanliness— good hygiene— was proven to prevent disease and infection within the home. Cleanliness, which had been once considered as a luxury, was now deemed necessary for survival.
Housewifization
During the nineteenth century, as women’s advice literature prospered, it also took on a much more practical aspect, distancing itself from sheer religious practice. The central theme shifted away from individual womanhood, and towards the physical and moral maintenance of the home. This was undoubtedly caused by the gradual secularisation of society, although, there were specific and fundamental economical and ideological shifts which prompted this transformation. Firstly, and somewhat paradoxically, the home became a piece of labour-intensive infrastructure for women when work was ejected from the house.4 As men were gradually forced into wage labour, women were expected to spontaneously take care of the household. The economy was thus divided in ‘visible’ and ‘invisible sectors.’5 Women’s domestic “labour of love” became a necessary aspect in a cyclic work chain and therefore in overall capitalist accumulation. Maria Mies argues that “the domestication of bourgeois women and their transforma-
Esther Brizard
9. For example, Chadwick indicated the location of four common illnesses in Bethnal Green in London, by placing a brown “mist” of ink on an ordinary map. As a result of his findings, Parliament passed the first Public Health Act in 1848.
Interest in sanitation began in the 1840s with men like Edwin Chadwick in England and Lemuel Shattuck in the United States. Their findings and recommendations inspired a series of important health measures, including the building of sewers and public water supplies, and efforts to replace urban slums with sanitary housing. Privatising kitchens and water closets, and therefore proposing single-family dwellings, was in direct response to the discoveries of the Sanitation Movement.9 Gradually, the single-family dwelling gained momentum, as did the explicit role of the housewife within it. Knowledge in household hygiene and sanitation was disseminated in magazines, newspapers and in major exhibitions. The Home as a Machine