Brizzard, Esther, Dennis Sharp, 2021

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Esther Brizard

The Home as a Machine Women’s advice literature as a genealogy of modern domestic architecture

The rapid pace at which industrialisation happened in the nineteenth century accelerated the separation of spheres by gender. Where industrialisation and commerce prevailed, society of the time described a decline in morality. However, the home, sheltered from the materialism of the public arena, could preserve virtue; and women would remain in the private sphere and protect it. Gradually, housewives began to voice the oppressive state they found themselves in. Blaming capitalism and patriarchy, female activists proposed collective options of childcare, housework, cooking, and other traditionally female domestic jobs, relieving them from this burden and releasing them from the traditional private sphere. However, for most members of the middle-class, this radical vision of a restructured family and society was too threatening. Indeed, although the radicals’ arguments about decreasing the drudgery of housework had great appeal, too often they were combined with ideas about disassembling the traditional family home; and this was for so many women, the core of their identity; something they could not let go of.

In response, groups of women— who are at the heart of this essay—, attempted to relieve themselves from the burden of housework, but in another manner; through its optimisation. They presented the house as a pure infrastructural problem to be solved. A machine to be taken care of, a machine which assured the well-being of their families. The house was thus being factorised, it was no longer the untouchable pastoral dream it once was. Housework was a form of labour to be optimised in the same way as the work of men in the factories. In terms of radical feminism, this was not revolutionary, these women fully assumed their role in the private family sphere. However, they made this role visible to the public. The labour and the tools recommended for its optimal functioning were propagated into the public sphere in the form of pamphlets, manuals for running households, cookbooks, and women’s magazines. Written by women for women, this literature was extremely precise, balanced between design and housekeeping, with a clear aim: efficiency. The authors used plans and architectural images in which they inserted labour-saving devices, eventualThe Home as a Machine

1. Le Corbusier, Le Modulor, 1945 and Paulette Bernège, Champ Idéal du Travail, 1933

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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.

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10. Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way, Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1879-1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 13 11. Ibid, 7 12. T. Pridgin Teale was a surgeon in Leeds, part of the “building doctors” of the Domestic Sanitation Movement. He expanded his medical practice to include the assessment of his patients houses. These investigations of unhealthy architecture were illustrated in his book Dangers to Health, published in 1878, in which he presented to the public what he believed to be the typical sanitary flaws the construction of ordinary English Houses 4.1

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13. Adams, Architecture in the Family Way, Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1879-1900, 26 14. Ibid, 30 15. These modifications nevertheless fit the bourgeois dwelling norms which Henry Roberts had introduced to both middle and working-class dwellings when researching the minimum provision, presented to the public in the Great Exhibition of 1851: a clear definition of entrance hall, a resting-room, a back kitchen; and a clear separation between parents and children and the division of children by sex.

Esther Brizard

Health Exhibitions were intended to celebrated international progress in the scientific study of health. “Sanitary science” was not common knowledge in the early nineteenth century, however, by the 1880s it had become a fairly autonomous discipline,10 as illustrated by events such as the International Health Exhibition held in London in 1884. The fair revealed basic assumptions made by Victorians about health and urbanism. Public space was presented as “cured” as sewage systems and water purification technologies were showcased. However the fair displayed domestic space as poisonous, dangerous and in urgent need of medical attention.11 And therefore, domestic space became the principal display at the exhibition, in exhibits such as: The Sanitary and Insanitary Dwellings, inspired by T. Pidgin Teale’s sectional drawings published in 1876.12 (figure 4.1 & 4.2) These two sectional models, representing an “ordinary” (insanitary) and an “improved” (sanitary) house, demonstrated common errors in building construction, compared with the apparently correct way to build. Unlike the other displays at the fair, the message was not based on a comparison of objects that dated from before and after the rise of the health movement. Rather, it represented real and ideal contemporary middle-class housing, both in regard to design and materials used.13 The Insanitary Dwelling was modelled to create a feeling of fear, as its resemblance to the Sanitary Dwelling model was striking.

From the 1870s onwards British sanitarians prioritised “convincing educated middle-class householders to regulate their own physical health through the sanitary regulations of their houses rather than imposing urban improvements from above through municipal control.”14 Indeed, sanitation was directly put into the hands of the people and was seen as a way to self-improve. Although public health improved in the second hall of the century, cholera, typhus, typhoid, and a host of other debilitating illnesses continued to spread— essentially questioning the effect of isolation and separation. Victorian physicians who believed they understood the disease, were helpless to stop the spread of infection, and eventually came to blame Victorian architecture and architects. The houses at the International Health Exhibition illustrated this frustration in the blame that physicians directed at architects, plumbers, and builders. Therefore, from the outset of the sanitary movement, even before the advent of the germ theory, the emphasis was not merely on removing dirt but on selecting, redesigning, and building sanitary living conditions.15 Until a cure was discovered (antibiotics), the best way to save lives from disease was prevention in the home.

As architecture and sanitary science confronted each-other, women’s responsibilities for home design expanded. The woman homemaker claimed an authority of her own, as sort of independent contractor, drawing on the expertise of each professional. The domestic sanitarians expected middle-class women to be amateur inspectors of their houses, maintaining minimal standards of healthy

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4.1 House with every sanitation arrangement faulty (T. Pridgin Teale, Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Sanitary Defects (London: Churchill, 1881 [1878]), plate I. 4.2 House with all faulty arrangements avoided (Ibid, plate V).

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architecture by detecting architectural defects.

Harreitte Plunkett: The House as Hazardous Organism

To illustrate her idea of women’s place in sanitary reform, Harriette Plunkett,16 American author of Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or Household Sanitation, (figure 4.3) included in her book a sectional drawing of a standard middle-class house, labelled “A properly plumbed house - Woman’s Sphere.”17 (figure 4.4) Drawn in the manner of Teale and the other house-doctors, it showed the exterior pipes of a building to the municipal sewer system, as well as its ventilation and water supply. Woman’s sphere “begins where the service-pipe for water and the house-drain enter the street-mains,” she explained, “and, as far as sanitary plumbing goes, it ends at the top of the highest ventilating-pipe above the roof.”18 Clearly, adhering to the ideology of separate spheres, Plunkett deemed it necessary to have a thorough understanding of sanitation science in order to keep her family safe: To the woman, whose destiny it is to remain a large share of the time at home, whose divinely appointed mission it is “ to guide the house,” a new sphere of usefulness and efficiency opens with the knowledge that in sanitary matters an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.19

16. Harriette Plunkett, university-educated woman from Appleton, was married to Thomas F. Plunkett who had shares in the rising Massachusetts State Board of Health. This relationship is certainly what introduced her to the sanitation movement.

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17. Plunkett, Harriette. M. Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or, Household Sanitation (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 112 18. Plunkett, Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or, Household Sanitation, 4 19. Ibid, 10 4.5

20. “Domestic Economy,” Englishwoman’s Review, 15 Aug. 1877, 350.

21. Adams, Architecture in the Family Way, Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1879-1900, 81

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Plunkett presented more than a mere “innate interest in health,”20 she covered in detail, by chapter, advice on drainage, ventilation, lighting, furnishing, and the arrangement of rooms, covering the architecture of the house thoroughly for her female readership. At no moment did Plunkett propose one specific architectural arrangement, rather, she gave the reader knowledge on specific materials, which rooms needed to be orientated south, circulation patterns allowing a family to host a sick member without contaminating the entire household.

She encouraged her readers to question their homes. Indeed, what dominated the book was the description of inspection methods, usually conducted in a series of tests, which were spelled out in detail and illustrated.21 (figure 4.5) This included checking the connection of the house to the municipal sewer system, the orientation of the building, and the materials used in the walls, inspecting water purity and measuring dampness and air movement in the interior of the house. This new field of endeavour for women— domestic science— focused on the house as a subject of study, debate, and reform. It illustrates perfectly the ambiguity present in much of feminist history, where these women were confidently stepping out of the private domestic sphere, however adhering to the role of homemaker when doing so. Plunkett’s literature was one of advice, she translated the information of Sanitation Engineers like Teale for the good of her women readers. Plunkett was proposing a pedagogical project where she

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4.3 Cover Page (Plunkett, Harriette. M. Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or, Household Sanitation (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), title page) 4.4 A properly plumbed house - Woman’s Sphere (Ibid,112) 4.5 How to detect a putty joint (Ibid, 127)

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gave women the tools to independently question the safety of their home, the application of her methods were in no means sentimental, the house was looked at as hazardous organism needing continuous maintenance.

Helen Dodd: The House as a Workshop

Helen Dodd, “an average American farmer’s wife”22 as she described herself, published The Healthful Farmhouse in 1906 in which she too, problematised the home. She concretely applied what she may have learnt from advice books like that of Harriette Plunkett. Employing terms like “alteration,” “organisation” and “arrangement,” rather than “architecture” or “design,” Dodd altered her home according to sanitation principles. By no means, was she attempting to replace the architect. Rather, she chose “softer” terms, clearly in line with the role she believed she had, a loving housewife and mother.23

22. Helen Dodd, The Healthful Farmhouse by a Farmer’s Wife (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1906) 1 23. “The woman is not supposed to know anything about construction or about drains or paints or machines. There are unreasonable and ignorant women on the farm as well as in the city, but that is no reason why this generation should continue in blind adherence to tradition. The world moves; some things are found out; and there is a possibility of an interested spirit in the housewife and mother, even though her work is never done.” (Dodd, The Healthful Farmhouse by a Farmer’s Wife, 3) 24. Ibid.

25. Ibid, 33

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26. Ibid, 4 27. Ibid, 10

Esther Brizard

Dodd firmly believed that the woman was capable of understanding and repairing the technical aspects of the home: “any strong woman can remove entirely old wall paper, old paint, and dirt, and replace with new paper, clean paste, new paint, or kalsomine.”24 As sunlight and air ventilation were primordial in a healthy home, when comparing the before and after plans (figure 4.6) of her home, one will notice the dramatic increase in size of the living room and decrease in size of the kitchen. The openings were enlarged and cross-ventilation was made possible. In her chapter on ventilation, Dodd provided descriptions on the necessary openings of specific rooms. For example, in the kitchen there should be a small hatch at the top of a door which “will make an outlet for the heated air without any drought,” furthermore an opening on the roof and a wall would make stronger draught when “a quick change of air is needed.”25 Dodd began her book in the kitchen by stating: “when we talk of the kitchen we mean the woman’s workshop,”26 Commencing with the central element of the workshop, the stove, Dodd used this opportunity to encourage women to invest in high quality utensils as they will “save her time and energy in the future”— something which she deemed priceless. Dodd stated that “the kitchen should have as little moveable furniture as possible”27 as this could look messy and makes sweeping a nightmare. And so the kitchen table must be small and placed near the sink for stacking and draining dishes. The shelving system was organised in relation to use— she proposed to not have closed shelves but rather fixed open shelves concentrated around the stove and kitchen table with clear fittings for specific utensils — as this would encourage the homemaker to keep things in order. The materiality of the floor was also discussed, Dodd stated that the best floor surface was “undoubtedly” linoleum, and only when the kitchen was small and compact could one afford this sort of material. By halving the

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4.6 Plan of how others used the house (Helen Dodd, The Healthful Farmhouse by a Farmer’s Wife and Plan of house rearranged without touching outside walls or windows (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1906) 4-5

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size of the kitchen, Dodd explained to her readers that she would be able to prepare meals quicker and maintain cleanliness with less effort. The collapse of the kitchen size was something that would often be done by women efficiency experts of the twentieth century. It was the most common of typological transformation of the home; it initiated by housewives and disseminated in their advice books and magazines.

ing to entirely free themselves from the labour of the home by dismantling the traditional bourgeois dwelling and proposing communal kitchens and shared child-care.32 By doing so, women would be able to work and participate in the public sphere, and therefore become economically independent. The materialist feminists— as so clearly described in Dolores Hayden’s Grand Domestic Revolution— advocated alternatives to the isolated, single-family home. And although their writings were translated in dozens of languages and read around the world, only a handful of architects materialised their propositions.33 Indeed, the ideology of separate spheres, had impacted greatly on women’s experience, on their identity. And therefore, restructuring the home and its traditional gendered roles, was deemed too radical to be persuasive.34 Women by the 1900s had been reading and educating themselves on domestic science for decades. Each had transformed their home into their own personal workshop. In general, women’s advice literature played a decisive role in society’s reluctance towards domestic transformation. Instead this type of literature, in the most moderate of ways, reinforced ideas of “independence” for individual family members: “balancing their position between the radical critique of domestic life as a straitjacket and the conservative insistence that family life was chaotic and lacked control,”35 they helped create a moderate ideal of the middle-class family life that seemed both ordered and open.

The application of sanitation science increased dramatically the amount of housework and led women to question the usefulness of traditional household objects and the arrangement of her home in terms of efficiency: “Any tool or appliance that saves a woman daily annoyance or makes the work easier for mind or back is worth all it costs. Increased efficiency is looked for in every bit of farm machinery, why not in the kitchen?”28 These women were rendering the home safer and at the same time, laying the groundwork for homes to become more efficient. Furthermore, as is so clearly stated by Dodd when she said, “every bit of furniture in a farmhouse should be simple strong, restful to look at and easy to clean,”29 one understands that women as early as the 1880s, were striving towards simplified architecture and furnishings: “the less that is hung in windows the better,”30— not at all the image of the plush and textured feminine interior so clearly condemned by modern architects twenty years later. On the contrary, women were distorting the image of the home as a pastoral dream, and placing it at the same level as factories and men’s workshops, who were—in parallel— undergoing major transformations for the sake of efficiency.

Prior the twentieth century, women offered advice when choosing a home, or advice on how to alter the home themselves, but never did they call directly for a dramatic reform in the manner in which homes are built and arranged. Following the Sanitation Movement, women gradually took on the role of experts of the domestic sphere, calling out the “blind adherence to tradition.”31 Their conscious capacity shifted from humble alteration, to a formal struggle towards healthy and efficient domestic architecture. This shift was concrete, as women actively abstracted the home, removing not only unnecessary ornamentation but entire rooms and subdivisions, allowing light and air to flow— something which is often attributed to male-dominated sphere of modern architecture.

TOWARD AN EFFICIENCY : THE HOME ECONOMICS MOVEMENT 28. Ibid, 5 29. Ibid, 44 30. Ibid, 46

What is addressed here, is by no means revolutionary in regard to the history of feminism at large. Indeed, at the same time in America, women were attempt-

31. Ibid, ii

Esther Brizard

Catharine Beecher: The House as a Pedagogy 32. For the work of materialist feminists refer to: Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press) 33. For example Gilman’s work inspired the builder Otto Fick to constructed the first “service house” in Copenhagen in 1903 (Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life, 89).

34. Clifford E. Clark Jr., The American Family Home, 18001960 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 113 35. Ibid.

36. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, & Co, 1841), 157

She who is the mother and housekeeper in a large family is the sovereign of an empire, demanding more varies cares, and evolving more difficult duties, than are really exacted of her who wears a crown and professedly regulates the interests of the greatest nation on earth.36

It was an undeniable reality shared amongst housewives and homeworkers of all classes and origins, that housework was a drudgery and it was never-ending.

This overall dissatisfaction was at the basis of Catharine Beecher’s career in home economics. She, and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, fully acknowledged that women were unequal to men— not because they were confined to the home but because they did not receive an education about the home. Therefore their work is inefficient and never ending. Here again the author’s argument reveals a deep rooted ambiguity: the Beecher sisters’ ultimate goal was to free the woman from the drudgery of housework, however this was done so in complete adherence to her role in the home. In 1841, Beecher professed that if all women have access to home economics training, “every woman will be so profitably and so honourably employed in the appropriate duties of her peculiar profession,

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that the folly of enticing her into masculine employments will be deemed ridiculous.”37 For Catharine Beecher, women were to liberate themselves, within the home and solely in the domestic profession, as it was there where her expertise lays.38 She concretely transformed household work into a pedagogy of its owns when, after gaining experience in establishing the Hartford Female Seminary in Connecticut, she devoted her life to a nation-wide program for the education of home economics for women. To implement the program she evolved a plan for the organisation of a home economics department in a permanently endowed institution of higher learning for girls: The Milwaukee Normal Institute, incorporated in 1851. The plan placed home economics as a separate department and would include spaces for class-room instruction and a “family building” which would be a model dwelling. In this department, her curriculum would be applied by the principal and professional staff. The curriculum was based on her book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, published in 1841. Recognising the increasing financial difficulties and therefore the decrease of domestic aid, Beecher included plans for small houses in which the housewife could do all the work alone39 37. Catharine Beecher, The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Woman; with a History of an Enterprise Having That for its Object (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, Co., 1841), 139 38. Sklar, Beecher’s biographer, expresses the contrasts between her life and the ideology she espoused : “her life was a bundle of contradictions. She was an expert on domestic economy, but had no home of her own; she was a writer of moral education of children, but had no children herself; she was a competent religious writer, but had never experienced conversion; and she argued women to become teachers, but herself not wiling to teach.” (Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 186) 4.7

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39. The plans that Beecher includes are not her own. To see the plans she makes reference to, refer to “Chapter XXIV: On the Construction of Houses” of A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, 259-279 40. Catharine Beecher & Hariet Beecher-Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (New York: J. B.1869), 25-37 41. Beecher, The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Woman, 338

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She waited over twenty years, until 1869, to provide a plan of her own design, which she publishes in The American Woman’s Home.40 She advocated for simplicity, as she had previously stated: “as the science of domestic economy improves in this Country, much less money will be laid out in parlors, verandas, porticos, and entries; and the money this saved, be employed in increasing the conveniences of the kitchen, and the healthfulness and comfort of this parts of the house most used by the family.”41 Indeed, her own plans present a kitchen which has been streamlined with a single-surface workspace and placed in the core of the house. The core becomes the house’s mechanical heart as it contains all water closets, heating and ventilation equipment. Therefore the floor plan is cleared and flexible thanks to moveable screens which conceal extra bedding.

Catharine Beecher’s design was extremely influential, the way in which she questioned every aspect of the housewife’s routine meant that her design response was rational and reduced to the strict necessary. (figure 4.7 & 4.8) Although Beecher clearly idealised the Christian single-family way of life when she proposed to punctuate the home with small niches for the display of religious artefacts; she counter-balanced religious aura by inserting technology into the home. The formality of her educational proposal placed housework at the same level as other university subjects, but most importantly she made it clear that housework was not innate, it had to be learnt: and one needed equipment and structure to do so. Domestic labour was no longer an atmospheric concept which appeared naturally but rather, a legitimate job that took place in house resembling an organised workshop. The work of Beecher, and the women (and men) she went on to inspire, laid the groundwork for the design in the minimum dwelling, and moreover, her proposal dismantled the bourgeois reThe Home as a Machine

4.7 Ground floor Plan : Showing organisation of spaces aaccording to use and mechanical equipment for cooking (and laundry at the base ment) concentrated in the core (Catharine Beecher & Hariet Beecher-Stowe, Treatise on Domestic Economy, The American Woman’s Home, 1869), 26 4.8 Kitchen Plan (Ibid, 33)

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spectability of the house as an idle, untouchable, picturesque interior. Something which has often been overlooked by many protagonists of modern architecture, who consistently linked decoration and superfluity to women.

Christine Frederick: The House as a Factory

Catharine Beecher’s ideal for women began to fade in the 1900s with the appearance of major feminist movements and the visible frustration within women’s spheres. In 1912, Chicago educators Marion Talbot and Sophonisba Breckinridge wrote that the household no longer had “social value” as centre of production, but was the “centre of consumption.”42 The role of the housewife was to administer incomes and consume efficiently. And although some home economists were therefore proposing to exchange outdated tasks, that could now be done by industry, for municipal housekeeping and care-taking; the majority of the movement encouraged newly liberated women to remain in their homes.

As Beecher had professed: domestic sphere was the woman’s primary sphere of influence. One could say that American efficiency expert, Christine MacGaffey Frederick, embodied this majority. While she embraced modernisation; she clearly defined the limits in which women could profit from it. Indeed, Christine Frederick dedicated her career to its implementation in the home, and not the contrary; the ideal woman was the efficient housewife.

Her work, it must be said, spoke on behalf and was aimed towards whitemiddle-class women. Only briefly did she mention early twentieth century working-class women. Christine Frederick’s rhetorical techniques were clear, she advised women who lived like her, as this was what she knew and understood. It is true that the working-class women of her time— many of whom were immigrants— were often hired domestic aids, and not full-time housewives.43 42. Marion Talbot and Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, The Modern Household (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1912), 4-5, 21-24

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43. In the 1920s Frederick’s designs and her fight for the implementation of labour-saving devices in the home, was also seen as a solution for working-class women who were “working two jobs”: at home and at the factory.

44. Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Page and Company, 1913), 11-12

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The home problem for the woman of wealth is simple: it is solved. Money, enough of it, will always buy service, just as it can procure the best in any other regard. The home problem for the women of the very poor is also fairly simple.

The women of the poor themselves come from the class of servants. […] Organized philanthropy is by every means teaching the women of the poor how to keep house in the most scientific, efficient manner. […] The problem, the real issue, confronts the middle-class woman of slight strength and still slighter means, and of whom society expects so much.44 All along her career, Christine Frederick campaigned for the awareness and application of scientific management, technology, and consumer awareness to homemaking. From 1912, when she began her career in home economics as a household editor for Ladies Home Journal, to 1920, when she opened Applec-

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4.9 Christine Frederick peels vegetables at her vegetable peeling table and Christine Frederick applies scientific management methods to her own kitchen. (Janice Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick and The Rise of Household Efficiency, 122)

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roft Experimentation Lab in her home in Greenlawn, New York, to the thirties when her career took her to Europe and Asia.45 (figure 4.9) By becoming a expert house wife and professional consumer, housekeeping would become “a fine antidote against the unnatural craving for ‘careers’”46. Indeed her career illustrates the dilemmas facing educated middle-class women of the early twentieth century: whether to seek professional gratification on the one hand or to adhere to the nineteenth-century ideal.47 Frederick resolved her personal conflict by designing herself a career that encouraged other women to remain homemakers.48 Her legacy cannot be looked at one who liberated women from the domestic sphere but rather, as one which elevated what had been drudgery into a modern, satisfying occupation.” This endeavour radically impacted domestic design and women’s roles as consumers in a mass-production economy.

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45. “Applecroft” was the name Frederick gave her house in Greenlawn, it was in her home kitchen that she tested products and conducted time and motion studies, which she then coined Applecroft Experiment Station.

46. Frederick, The New Housekeeping, 233 47. For dilemma facing women in the early twentieth century, see :Janice Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick and The Rise of Household Efficiency (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003) 3

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48. For more on the contradictions in Frederick’s career, see: Rutherford, “A World Wide Lecturer,” Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick and The Rise of Household Efficiency, 96-107 49. Frederick, The New Housekeeping, 10 50. Ibid, 25 51. Ibid, 26

Esther Brizard

In her book The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, published in 1913, Frederick introduces the term efficiency as a term she overheard in a conversation her husband was having. She is so intrigued that she goes on to recount how she questioned her husband’s colleague on the concept and then says to her husband: “George, that efficiency gospel is going to mean a great deal to modern housekeeping, in spite of some doubts I have. Do you know that I am going to work out those principles here in our home! I won’t have you men doing all the great and noble things ! I’m going to find out how these experts conduct investigations, and all about it, and then apply it to my factory, my business, my home.”49 And she did exactly that, Christine Frederick guided the housewife to become both boss and worker in a kitchen resembling an assembly line which would be rationally planned, and industrially produced for proper, popular consumption.

Frederick, began by presenting her time and motion studies which she had applied to most household tasks. For example, after studying all movements she would normally perform when washing the eighty dishes used in a meal, she came to the conclusion that her and many others’ sink was too low: “out of sixty house apartments examines […] two-thirds measured only from 22 to 30 inches from the floor.”50 She then proposed a ratio that could be applied to a variety of heights when building a kitchen: “for every five inches difference in the woman’s height there is a corresponding change of two inches and a half in the proper height of sink, table, or ironing-board.”51 (figure 4.10) Frederick went on to order the actions performed when washing dishes: scraping and stacking, washing, drying and laying away. After identifying the specify task, washing: she divided it in smaller actions and spatially arranged it accordingly. (figure 4.11) Therefore on a flat surface, at a specific height, the sink was positioned between two drains, and close to the china cabinet. Step by step, action by action, Frederick rearranged the home according to her time and motion studies, and especially the kitchen; “since much inefficiency and waste

The Home as a Machine

4.10 Proper level for your work surface depending on your height (Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, 1913) 26-27 4.11 Dividing one task into different actions (Ibid, 46) 4.12 Rearranged kitchen plan and steps saved exampe of when making an omelette (Ibid, 53)

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motion is due to poor arrangement of the kitchen and its fittings.”

52. “The first step toward the efficiency of any kitchen is to have the kitchen small, compact, and without long narrow pantries and closets.” (Frederick, The New Housekeeping, 47-48) 53. Ibid, 50 54. Ibid, 56 55. American manufacturers eventually grasped the importance of consumer testing and opened in-house laboratories.

56. “Speaking now not as an individual but as spokesman for Mrs. Consumer” (Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs Consumer (New York: The Business Bourse, 1929), 3)

4.13

57. Frederick, The New Housekeeping, 256 58. See, for example: Christine Frederick ”A Woman’s Advice on How to Sell Kitchen Utensils,” Hardware Age, 1 April 1920, 93-96; Christine Frederick, Woman As Bait in Advertising (New York; League of Advertising Women, 1921), 7, 17, file folder 12, Frederick Papers.

Esther Brizard

Gradually the Home Economics Movement was becoming pro-active, proposing methods and “rules” for housing in general. Indeed, Frederic devoted an entire chapter to “Standardized Conditions” in kitchen arrangement. This began by recommending a small and compact kitchen, 10 x 12 feet, a near square is in her opinion ideal.52 After dividing kitchen actions in two categories: preparing and clearing away, she arranged the kitchen accordingly (and was so precise as to remind that the arrangement was for a right handed housewife): “first, at the south, an icebox, then a kitchen cabinet, then the stove, and last a small serving table. At the other side of the room come, first to left, china shelves, then sink, and last at right, sink table.”53 The chapter continued by offering detail on light and ventilation arrangements. She believed, that at the time, windows were being placed at random, “as a joke.” Frederick avised that the window, as well as artificial lighting, be placed to the side of the work surface, as “there is nothing more distressing than to cook in one’s own shadow.”54 These design propositions reduced the total amount of steps and arm motions traditionally taken during the preparation of a meal, which she presented to the readers in the form of a diagram. (figure 4.12) As Dodd had called for previously, Frederick stressed the importance of cross-ventilation, something which was evidently still not being applied to the middle-class dwellings she investigated. Overall the publication was a tremendous success, and allowed her to push further her experimentation in testing laboratories.

Frederick’s testing station— but also those that consequently opened in the country and abroad— tested thousands of labour-saving devices sent to her by manufacturers.55 As she described herself as the “average Mrs. Consumer” she allowed herself to speak on behalf of all women, who were in her eyes, and at the time, underrepresented in the mass-production market.56 In this way, she served not only the consumer as she understood what she wanted, but the manufacturer as well: “Manufacturers, too, often care to have a practical test of their devices before they are put on the market; already, several have received helpful criticism of their products.”57 Thereafter, and during all the 1920s, Frederick published hundreds of articles in which she would report her experiments and reviews.58 This eventually culminated in a book, Selling Mrs Consumer, published in 1929, where she gathered her knowledge and advice for advertisers and manufacturers on how to appeal to women— who she was, in parallel, training to become expert consumers. (figure 4.13) Christine Frederick’s interest in radio transported her scope of influence and reputation across borders. From 1927 to 1929 she received invitations to speak in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. She toured Great Britain in 1927 where she lectured in major universities, explaining to British housewives how Americans had solved “the

The Home as a Machine

4.13 Selling Mrs. Consumer cover page (Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs Consumer, 1929) 2

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servant problem” by simplifying housekeeping through labour-saving devices and rearrangement of the kitchen. Her reputation preceded her to France, where a young home-expert named Paulette Bernège, was promoting “Taylorisme.”

Bernège was introduced to Frederick’s work from her 1915 article in the Revue de Métallurgie,59 and later again when The New Housekeeping was translated and published in France in 1920. The two became quite close friends and collaborated on numerous occasions.60 4.14

4.15

Paulette Bernège: The House as a Machine

It seems that the mechanisation and rationalisation of domestic tasks can serve as an example for the entire world economy in disarray, because, alone, they represent an effective liberation, an absolute gain in human effort, woman, in her household, trying much less to get richer than to live better. On the contrary, in the male world of industry, commerce and finance, the mechanisation and rationalisation of labor have had the dominant and often exclusive aim of increasing productivity and pecuniary wealth, without human compensation of happiness and leisure.61

59. Christine Frederick, “La tenue scientifique de la maison” Revue de métallurgie 12 (April), 348-82.

60. “In France a small but brave attempt is being made by my brilliant, self-sacrificing friend, Mlle. Paulette Bernège, who has sponsored and directs that unique home-management periodical, Mon-Chez-Moi which more than perhaps any other in Europe is attempting to educate the woman in modern scientific housekeeping.” (C. Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 284-285)

4.16

61. Paulette Bernège, De la Méthode Ménagère (Paris: Dunod, 1928), 159 62. Ibid, 49

Esther Brizard

Paulette Bernège was at the head of a monthly revue named Mon Chez Moi (My Home), published by L’Institut d’Organisation Ménagère, The League for Household Organisation, which she founded in 1925. The organisation’s program largely covered that of domestic scientific management, as formulated by Christine Frederick. In essence, one could consider Paulette Bernège to be the American version of Christine Frederick, especially when observing the similitudes in language and visual representation. (figure 4.14) Indeed, in De La Méthode Ménagère, published in 1928, Bernège, like her American counter-part, described in detail the list of household actions, abstracting them to a series of movements. Using the example of dishwashing, she described a similar linear arrangement to Frederick’s, with the sink at the centre of two flat surfaces positioned at the perfect height for the woman to work. (figure 4.15 & 16) Bernège added to this rational solution a series of evocative calculations in which she counted the total amount of hours saved when applying her method.

She included the possibility of paid labour in her equation;— punctual domestic aid was still regarded common even in middle-class family homes in France— “you can easily gain twenty-five minutes per day when washing the dishes of five people. In one year : 25 x 365 = 9125 minutes, or 152 hours. At the minimum wage of a cleaning lady in Paris (3 francs an hour) this will allow you to save 456 francs a year.”62 Illustrating rational propositions with provocative numbers and phrases was a literary technique which Bernège used throughout

The Home as a Machine

4.14 Efficiently planned laundry, using similar visual language as Frederick (Paulette Bernège, De la Méthode Ménagère, 1928) 63 4.15 & 16 Application of Bernège Method to her Parisian Flat (Ibid)

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the entire book, and all her career for that matter. For example, as she studied the position of thresholds in the home, she compared separate rooms to the organs of the body. She questioned what would happen if the mouth, oesophagus, stomach and intestine were not connected, and came to the conclusion that if these were so closely arranged in the body it was for food to travel the least distance possible. Therefore, energy was saved. The same, she said, must be applied to the home. Every room must be compartmentalised and have a function of its own, and be positioned in a way to communicate easily with rooms of the same category (bathroom and bedroom, kitchen and dining room for example).

This organisation was applied in plan, in which the kitchen and the dining room communicate directly, the bathroom is at an equal distance to all bedrooms and moreover the house is divided by a door into two: the social and the private. This clear but minimal separation was necessary for the specific functions of each room to remain clear and well arranged. (figure 4.17)

4.17

Bernège distinguished her organisation ménagère from the domestic science taught by her predecessors, the Home Economics Movement in America, by detaching herself from individual household chores, from pure Taylorism.

Bernège— a philosophy and literature graduate before home economist— designed her lessons so that the reader would learn how to rationalise her own work, referencing Xenophon, René Descartes, Claude Bernard and eventually Henri Fayol.63 The importance she gave to philosophy and education was a dominant aspect of her work.

63. Ibid, 18-27 64. Paulette Bernège’s proposition of the housewife’s office precedes the publication of Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in September 1929.

4.18

65. Bernège, De la Méthode Ménagère, 87-88

Esther Brizard

What Bernège invented was a new model for the housewife-manager. (figure 4.18) Drawing from Henri Fayol’s doctrine of management, she sought to establish norms for the middle-class home without full-time servants. As domestic aid was nevertheless present in the French middle-class, the housewife with means was to direct and manage her staff, and if she did not she was to direct and manage, in the same manner, herself and her material surroundings.

Bernège centred her argument around the body and mind of the housewife, and less directly on the specificities of labour-saving devices. For this, the housewife was entitled to have an office of her own,64 as “when one in charge, one needs a material organ, the office.” The office “will be exclusively intended for her, where she will store her papers, her documentation, her accounts, her tables, where she can sit down to think, write, draw plans, where she can prepare and organise her work […] As long as she does not have an office for the execution of her management, she will be neglected and the housewife will remain a mechanical worker who executes. To not have an office from which to manage, is like telling our body to eat while removing our stomach.”65 Bernège adopted the organicist language of much early management theory to express the hierarchy between the woman who merely performed a series of chores and the woman who ran a scientifically organised home: in the first model, she stated, “the housewife is like an earthworm”; in the second, she was a “complex organism The Home as a Machine

4.17 Bernège studies the size and disposition of thresholds (Paulette Bernège, De la Méthode Ménagère, 1928) 64 4.18 The Housewife as Manager (Ibid,11 &13)

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that had evolved to a higher level.”66 In this way, the application of scientific management to the home positioned housework as a suitable preoccupation for middle-class women, for whom it might otherwise have been regarded as menial or socially demeaning. The housewife could be a manager even if she had no staff to manage but herself. Paulette Bernège, ultimately, redesigned the manner in which housewives perceived their work.

Paulette Bernège, as will be addressed hereafter, believed the woman was legitimate— because of her experience— when participating in the mass-reconstruction of housing, within the male dominated sphere of architecture.

HOME ECONOMICS MOVEMENT AND MODERN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE : THE ARCHITECT’S CONSULTANT

Fifteen years prior, Christine Frederick, in The New Housekeeping, had solved the servant problem by predominately integrating labour-saving devices in the home. These solutions, as seen previously, directly applied Taylorist methods, eventually modifying the house-plan, transforming the mere housewife into an expert buyer: Mrs. Consumer. Undeniably, women were uplifted into the public sphere, into the capitalist society of the 1920s; she too, like her male counterparts, was a “cog in the system”.

With the quickening of the advance of industry in the middle of the nienteenth century there becomes evident a feeling on the part of the architect that his privileged position is menaced and the traditions of his art outmoded. That anxiety grew in intensity with the progress of industrialisation.71

Bernège, on the other hand, criticised the male capitalist society of her time and the modes of production that they employed. Although capitalist methods, like Taylorism, were to use for her, the goal was not productivity and profit, but relief for the housewife. In effect she employed dehumanising methods to enhance the housewife’s human experience. As so clearly stated in the introduction of De La Méthode Ménagère, in which she described her book as one of “reflexion and work,” and one in which “numerous masculine cooperations will certainly find new outlooks : organisers, engineers, furniture and appliance manufacturers, architects, installer to only cite a few,”67 she sought to impact society at large.

66. Paulette Bernège, Si Les Femmes Faisaient Des Maisons, (Paris : “Mon chez moi,” 1928) 67. Bernège, De la Méthode Ménagère, 3 68. Ibid, 156 69. It is interesting to note that Bernège’s illustration always portrays the housewife with the iconic New Woman haircut.

70. Ibid, 156

Bernège’s publication was indeed fine-tuned to the liberated women of postwar France. She was writing at time where the New Woman was more than an ideological concept, and she knew that the manual labour surrounding housework was in no way attractive. Bernège was aware of the positive impact that the war had on French women. She was appreciative of the twentieth century as it had “opened the doors for young women in a myriad of professions,”68 and by-and-large opened their minds. Although, she was realistic in stating that most women remained housewives, and therefore her work was necessary.69 She was adamant when she stated: “We often hear that to be a good housekeeper, a woman mustn’t be intelligent nor educated; this is gross mistake, this is the fundamental error that has, for centuries, prevented household work from abandoning its ancestral routines to follow the law of progress.”70 The goal of the Home Economics movement gained in authority as they condemned the past and embraced the potentials offered to them by industrialisation and the war. Indeed, it is important to consider Bernège’s career as the head of a movement, a struggle; her aim being to transform the way women reflect on their surroundings. She strived to legitimise women’s opinion in all topics relating the domestic. Whereas, for Christine Frederick this idea was limited to her role as expert-consumer,

Esther Brizard

All of these [feminist] trends—professional opportunities for women, the suffrage movement, feminism, and suggestions for cooperative living—fueled the fear that had surfaced in the late nineteenth century that the home was threatened. By 1910, many social observers believed that in the wake of full industrialization, the home had lost its primary purpose.72

71. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), 212 72. Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick and The Rise of Household Efficiency, 33 73. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: John Rodker, 1931) originally Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture (Paris: Flammarion, 1995 [1923]) 74. Ibid, 103

Sigfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, dedicated an entire chapter on the growing anxiety architects had around the industrialisation and engineering of their profession. As Giedion guides the reader through a century of demands for a New Architecture he finally culminated with a citation of Le Corbusier: “The century of the machine awakened the architect. New tasks and new possibilities produced him. He is at work now everywhere,”73 and stated that this opinion was shared by the whole generation of architects to which Le Corbusier belongs. Equally, the Home Economics Movement can be considered as a crisis of legitimacy. The role of the housewife was clearly threatened by industrialisation and it was deemed necessary to create a pedagogical project in which she would learn to stay relevant. If the home was modernised and the movement’s role in mass-production industry solidified, housewives would be able to participate both in the public sphere while also work in their ultra-efficient homes: they too, would be at work everywhere.

And so, what would become The Modern Movement and home economists disseminated their ideals, their recommendations with one common aim: progression, modernisation and to stop adhering blindly to outdated traditions. A functionalist approach to domestic architecture rendered the “home as a machine for living in”74 by the Le Corbusier. On the other hand, the Home Economics Movement rendered the home as… a machine for living in.

As both movements so clearly strived for the same thing, what was The Home as a Machine

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75. Often cited as the “first,” although this is evidently false.

76. Dolores Hayden, “Grand Domestic Revolution: Recovering the Forgotten History of Feminism and Housing Design.”

Lecture at New Women’s History Museum’s Woodrow Wilson Center (Pennsylvania: 15 Feb. 2012), https://youtu.be/39xNeMVDfDA

4.19

4.20

77. “Encouraged by the combined wisdom of the periodicals which have set up high standards of advertising acceptance, and given ever more benefits through the enlightened efforts of highclass manufacturers, she has developed a ‘consumer acceptance’ spirit, -a readiness to follow where she is led, that has had an immense bearing upon American industrial prosperity and standards of living.” (Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 334) 78. Jacquie Clarke, France, in the Age of Organization. Technicians, Culture and Politics from the 1920s to Vichy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011) 71 79. French chemists and engineer, Henry Le Chatelier introduced Taylorisme to the French public.

80. Christine Frederick, “La tenue scientifique de la maison” Revue de Métallurgie 12 (April) 348-82

Esther Brizard

their relationship? Architecture schools do not place both movements side by side when teaching the principals and origins of functionalism in modern architecture. Architecture students, may come across the example of the well-known Frankfurt Kitchen, “first Taylorised kitchen”, designed by the first certified woman architect in Austria, Grete Schütte-Lihotzky.75 (figure 4.19 & 20) However, the work of the female architect is too often looked at as unique— as an exception. Although Schütte Lihotzky was a communist party member, and later worked in the Soviet Union, she was not receptive to any of the ideas of Lenin and Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai— who called for a house of the new way of life, with child care centres and dining halls, and was the subject of quite a few experiments in multi-family housing constructions with these facilities in the USSR in the 1920s. Instead, this architect preferred Christine Frederick.76 Indeed, as women architects were called upon to design efficient kitchens in mass housing— the Home Economics movement was an undeniable reference point. However, it seems that this relationship has only been uncovered because the architect in question was a woman. It is important to enlighten the more global relationship between the Home-Economics Movement and the— predominantly male— sphere of modern architecture.

Christine Frederick: Selling Mrs Consumer.

Housing designed by post-war modern architects attempted to integrate topological norms of dwelling so that the house could be easily mass-produced.

Christine Frederick, underlined this importance during the entirety of her career.

As she deemed labour-saving appliances necessary in all homes, their production must therefore be in line with the needs and desires of housewives. She therefore presented her work as a necessary reference to the mass-production industry.77 Although it is today reductive to vision the ideal woman as a housewife, her vision was not contemplative, she was thorough when she analysed the American society, and her propositions did reflect a majority of American households of the time. Domestic organisation remained a secondary concern for many industrial organisers, who were more focused on factories and offices, it did come to occupy an institutional space within the movement.78 Indeed, Christine Frederick’s work had been introduced to the French audience in 1915 by none other than Henry Le Chatelier,79 who prefaced a section of her writings in the journal, the Revue de Métallurgie.80 This publication was clearly aimed at an audience of industrial professionals and Le Chatelier used Christine Frederick’s work as an example to demonstrate the universality of the principles of scientific organisation. By standardising the way women were to move around the kitchen, Christine Frederick was in effect standardising the home, and a standardised home was a necessary element when designing and building The Home as a Machine

4.19 Plan of Frankfurt Kitchen (“Counter Space,” MoMA Museum of Modern Art, https:// www.moma.org/ Sep 2011) 4.20 The Frankfurt Kitchen, view toward window (Ibid)

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mass-housing. The relationship between the two movements, when it took place for example in Schütte Lihotzky’s case, elevated women’s role in the public sphere as they were recognised as legitimate experts in domestic life, all whilst reinforcing her destiny: to be housekeeper.

4.21

Phyllis Lee: A House for All Housewives

4.22

81. D.G. Tanner, ‘The House That Jill Built’, in Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue 1930 (London: Associated Newspapers, 1930), 117 82. Ibid, 117

Esther Brizard

As industrialised methods of construction were presented in major exhibitions, one will find dozens of newspaper advertisements calling for the participation of women for competitions in designing the ideal home. As so clearly visible in popular literature of the time—both in America and in Europe— the ideal home was written about extensively by women themselves. By the turn of the century, numerous books on “home architecture” argued, like E. C. Gardiner The House That Jill Built, after Jack’s had Proved a Failure, that because women spent their days in the house, they were better qualified than men to design convenient kitchens, comfortable bedrooms, fireplaces with chimneys the “draw” properly, bathrooms with up-to-date sanitary drains. (figure 4.21) It was a clever way to claim an equality (or superiority) based on difference. This book inspired the “House That Jill Built” competition “to discover the requirements of the intelligent woman in connection with modern homes”81 at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1929. (figure 4.22) The winning entry was designed by housewife Phyllis Lee and realised by architect Douglas Tanner. In an interview with Modern Home magazine, Lee complained about the poor design of the interiors of speculatively built houses: “I think it was because I rebelled so much against the inconvenience, the pokiness and the lack of space in the average small house in the endless rows of suburban houses that I planned my dream house.” As one compares the article that the architect, Tanner, published on the matter and the interview of Lee, the ends to which the same design proposal were conceived for, are completely different. Tanner praised Lee’s work for “its plainness and simplicity” and approvingly noted that “women are no longer satisfied with the pretty, but inconvenient, house so dear to the heart of the speculative builder, but are beginning to appreciate the beauty and dignity of design which is devoid of superfluous ornamentation.”82 Lee’s proposal adhered to the modernist principle of functionality as rooms were used for purpose and none were left in the superfluous realm of “special occasions.” However, as Tanner fetishised Lee’s proposal by pointing out the similarities of her design with that of the uprising Modern Movement; Lee, on the other hand, explained functionalism by means of experience and justified every design choice as a feature to ease the burden of the housewife. So, for example, Tanner might have approved of the openplan design of the house for aesthetic reasons, Lee arrived at her arrangement of a large living room with windows at each end, and a kitchen with a meals The Home as a Machine

4.21 Jill’s plan in which she proposed to minimise thresholds and remove ornamentation (E. C. Gardiner, The House That Jill Built, after Jack’s had Proved a Failure, 1896.)

235 4.22 Phyllis Lee and her wiining entry (“The House That Jill Built Competition”, in Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue, 1929)

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alcove (rather than the usual arrangement of a dining room with two small living rooms), because it meant that only one fire was needed. This solution meant that the separate parlour was, in effect, redundant, thus removed. The meals alcove was lined with a narrow bench under the window and another against the wall, thus rendering chairs, and all the clutter they create, redundant. This was the process that Lee used, she questioned utility. The table was long and narrow to take up as little space as possible. There was a lot of built-in storage space; for example, there were lockers under the window seats. There were also plenty of wardrobes, cupboards and kitchen fittings. She did not believe that families should part with every sentimental object, but offered an abundance of storage space so that they wouldn’t be deemed as clutter. Lee addressed the home to the very detail in terms of labour-saving, she recommended washable paints in plain colours, unpainted doors with no mouldings. The kitchen and bathroom were tiled in cream and black to a height of four feet, which aided hygiene. Lee took much care to ensure that the design of the house would not tire women, and she arranged the kitchen as “a really efficient workshop.”83 Her proposal utilised a specific language which was a direct response to her experience as housewife, and not as an ultimate rational aesthetic. The physical alterations of the home stood in line with the way she, and many other housewives lived, and was not a tool to manipulate the way she inhabited space. Competitions like these officially recognised women’s expertise in domestic architecture, although, when reflected upon by men, were often described using modernist discourse, disregarding the originality and authorship of the women who were designing.

ly, as was mentioned earlier, the literature moved from a discussion of cleaning to an attempt to redesign the interior of a house. For example, in an 1899 article, “Household Art and the Microbe,” Helen Campbell suggested that the elaborate furnishing of Victorian homes provided an ideal refuge for millions of microbes and germs. She then insisted that the lessons of the hospital and the sanitarium— their smooth surfaces which could be easily disinfected— should be transformed into principles of home design. The crusade that was the Home Economics Movement coalesced with Progressive reformers who developed a cogent vision of the ideal house, and therefore of the ideal family. The new ideal for middle-class single family housing, as Gwendolyn Wright has suggested, represented a dramatic change from the Victorian Standard. In place of earlier romantic theories of design, it put forward a powerful minimal aesthetic, most fully expressed in the new bungalow design that pushed for simplicity of form and compactness of layout.

This interrelationship between architectural minimalism and the Home Economics Movement was indeed present as early as the 1840s, and pushed forward by women, because of their experience in the home. By problematising the home, clearly identifying what does not function, how certain arrangements waste time or are unsafe for themselves and their families, domestic architecture collapsed in size, and was simplified. The literary processes that these women called upon was of extreme clarity. The problem was identified, the people that were affected stated, references evoked— often machinery and factory settings for their extreme efficiency— and a solutions found. As so clearly shown in the previous example, when Campell utilised the sanitarium to propose an alteration in the surfaces of her home’s kitchen.

Helen Campbell: A House with Bare Surfaces

83. Ibid, 101

Tradition of consulting women when designing the home can be traced back to much earlier times. The responsibility for creating healthy living spaces had been claimed by women as early as Catharine Beecher’s highly influential 1841 advice book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy. The crusade for public sanitation took, as has been addressed previously, a myriad of forms however, the most effective pressure came from magazine publishers, the Home Economics Movement, and the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. Magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Outlook, Cosmopolitan, House Beautiful, and Craftsman were joined by more specialised journals such as Mother’s Friend, Today’s Housewife, Hearth and Homes, and American Kitchen Magazine in urging that the house be made more healthful. Articles on “The Bacteriology of Household Preserving,” “How And Woman Can Become a Sanitarian,” “Science in the Model Kitchen,” and “The Bedroom: Health and Economy in Anti-Microbe Sleeping Room Which May Serve as a Home Hospital” continually reinforced the need to rethink the design and use of kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms. Very quickEsther Brizard

Not much more must be said for one to see the similarities with modern architectural discourse— especially that of Le Corbusier and The Modern Movement. And although it is in no way a reason to discredit his extremely powerful train of thought. It is important to reveal a substantive interrelation between his methods and those of the Home Economists. Something which does not come naturally when reading his work exclusively. Indeed, Le Corbusier claimed so clearly in Toward An Architecture, published in 1923: The problem of the house has not yet been stated.

Nevertheless there do exist standards for the dwelling-house.

Machinery contains in itself the factor of economy, which makes for selection.

The house is a machine for living in.84

84. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 114

Previous to this, Le Corbusier took the example of the airplane, describing it as “the product of close selection,” he then says, “the lesson of the airplane lies

The Home as a Machine

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in the logic which governed the statement of the problem and its realisation.”85 What Corbusier advanced is that if the house had been clearly problematised, questioned, it would have— because of all the economical, technological and industrial means of the time— found a solution. One does not know how home economists reacted to this statement, to see that their work, the rigorous research of the home, was invisible to the architects who were in charge of their conception.

Paulette Bernège: If Women Made Houses

85. Ibid.

86. For Bernège, the threshold was necessary so that every room had its proper function but must be minimised to have a fluid circulation route within the apartment.

87. Bernège addresses the material structure of the flat building.

Encouraging architects to thicken walls to economise heating and cooling methods, and for better acoustic comfort.

Esther Brizard

Nevertheless, following the publication of Toward an Architecture, home economists pursued their work, actively calling architects and urbanists to revise their way of designing. If the world of scientific management and Taylorism immediately made way for efficiency experts like Christine Frederick and Paulette Bernège in important conferences and publications, architects seemed to have been much more hesitant. To the point where Paulette Bernège published the provoking pamphlet, Si Les Femmes Faisient Les Maisons (If Women Made Homes) in 1928— however most of the points addressed had been published as early as September 1923 in an edition of her review Mon Chez Moi. The author’s already well-established theses were summed up in a few shocking sentences, a few telling diagrams, a few particularly striking figures, intended to alert the public and the authorities, at the time when the country was embarking on the most ambitious housing construction campaign ever envisaged: 250,000 housing units to be built in five years in the hope of overcoming a housing crisis which had only worsened since the war. Speaking on behalf of the French housewife whom she believed she represented, addressing the minister, Louis Loucheur, Paulette Bernège demanded that this ambition be concretely translated into an effort to modernise homes that would benefit women and put an end to the centuries-old waste of time, energy and money. No more “vampire distances” between kitchen and dining room or between bedroom and bathroom, but intelligent plans reducing the routes;86 no longer “sabotage stairs” but elevators everywhere and for everyone; no more light constructions allowing noise to pass from one dwelling to another;87 no more “exhausting materials” such as copper that must be polished, no more glazing windows which increase the time needed to clean the tiles, waxed floors, scouring metals, but washable materials, susceptible to easy and fast maintenance; no more cornices, mouldings and other decorations to dust, but simple shapes and without unnecessary decoration. Above all, she asked that the essential skills of French housewives be called upon to ensure that the houses being built were designed according to the home-maker’s needs. (figures 4.23 - 26) In 1925, in an article aimed at her female readership and entitled “Household architects,” she had indeed suggested that girls move towards this new profesThe Home as a Machine

(from top left to bottom right) 4.23 No more sabotage stairs (Paulette Bernège, Si Les Femmes Faisaient Des Maisons, “Mon chez moi,” 1928) 7 4.24 No more vampire distances (Ibid, 11) 4.25 No more light constructions allowing noise to pass from one dwelling to another (Ibid, 22) 4.26 No more energy exhausting materials and thicknesses (Ibid, 31)

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sion, presenting both the attraction of creation and the certainty of usefulness, a service to society that would span several generations.88 Bernège did not seem to be aware of actual female architects of her time and so she proposed that professional home economists collaborate with her male “colleagues” to bring them their specific expertise. Indeed Bernège acquainted architects all along her career. The third publication of her review Mon Chez Moi had as cover article by the urbanist Alfred Agache, “Est-ce La Faute des Architectes,” (Is it the Fault of The Architects) on the responsibility of architects for recognised defects in housing; an article in which, after placing the responsibility in the hands of the proprietors, he actually admits that architects would gain from studying the question of household work.89 Later on, after visiting Corbusier’s Cité Frugès, she wrote a glorifying article on these new “machines for living”90 which were so well aligned with her own ideas and whose avant-garde appearance seduced her. (figure 4.27) She had obviously read Le Corbusier’s manifesto, which she often quoted in her review, and it is likely that it was she who, in 1929, asked the architect to participate in the Fourth Congress of the Scientific Organisation of Labor for the section she chaired.91 The common accord between the modern functionalist approach and the requests of so many housewives bluntly flips the gender perspective on the aesthetics of the house. Indeed, the works presented in this research may seem repetitive, these women may seem to propose the same things again and again since the appearance of the Sanitation movement in the 1840s, but does this not reinforce the idea that they were pushed aside and only ever partly consulted ?

Bruno Taut: Die Neue Wohnung. Die Frau als Schöpferin

88. Paulette Bernège, “Architectes ménagères,” Mon Chez Moi, May 15, 1925, 61 89. Alfred Agache, “Est-ce La Faute des Architectes,” Mon Chez Moi, Sep. 1, 1923, 1 90. Paulette Bernège, “La machine à habiter,” Mon Chez Moi, Nov. 15, 1926, 23 4.27

91. Le Corbusier, “Économie domestique et construction économique,” 4e Congrès de l’organisation scientifique du travail, 19-23 juin 1929. (not able to access but aware of existence)

Esther Brizard

As one reads the title of Bruno Taut’s 1928 pamphlet: Die Neue Wohnung.

Die Frau als Schöpferin (The New Apartment. The Woman as Creator) one expects the reciprocity between the two movements, the experience of women who put forward rationalised house plans, to be given recognition. One is then greatly disappointed.

Similarly to much of women’s advice literature, Taut addressed the “house problem,” by rationalising the household through architecture. One could present in detail Taut’s architectural proposition for the New Apartment however it will be much more efficient to state the major design alteration of his proposal and for the reader to reference independently the work of the Home Economics Movement to understand why these moves were made. Essentially, Taut sought to rationalise the apartment plan by minimising thresholds, he proposed niches for bedding and seating to maximise space and to instal fitted storage around, he collapsed the parlour to have the living room communicate with the rationally

The Home as a Machine

4.27 Paulette Bernège, “La machine à habiter,” Mon Chez Moi, Nov. 15, 1926, 23

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planned kitchen. Furniture was simplified and mass-produced, and labour-saving devices inserted in the home. Overall, the German architect abstracted the apartment, smoothed surfaces and collapsed distances between rooms that he arranged according to function. (figures 4.28 & 4.29)

4.28

92. Bruno Taut, “Chapter V” in Die neue Wohnung. Die Frau als Schöpferin (The New Dwelling.

The Woman as Creator), Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925 (1924) 93. Ibid, 10 94. Ibid 95. Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris: Flammarion, 1995 [1923]) 196 96. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in M.W. Jennings (ed.), Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 209 97. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), in M.W. Jennings (ed.), Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 734

4.29

98. Taut, Die neue Wohnung.

Die Frau als Schöpferin, 60

Esther Brizard

Taut’s justification for rationalising the home was the need to “eliminate atavisms” (Beseitigung der Atavismen)92 He believed that only once these atavisms, along with all superfluous elements of the home were removed, can the modern way of life take place. He, like many other modern architects, placed the nineteenth century phenomenon of “cosiness” as the core problem of the house. And then only, does one understand the pretext for his title. Indeed, Taut did not address architects, but wrote to both middle and working-class German housewives on the supposition that “Der Architekt denkt, die Hausfrau lenkt”93 (The architect thinks, the housewife directs). For Taut, the unquestionable role of women in the home— to be a housewife— rendered her responsible for the house-problem. Indeed, Taut described the phenomenon of cosiness as a “primitive neurotic ritual,” an urge enforced by women: “[s]he wants to create a cosy, agreeable (gemütlich) atmosphere for herself and her husband and she does this out of habit with all kinds of paintings, mirrors, coverings, curtains over curtains, cushions on cushions, carpets, clocks, the display of pictures and souvenirs, knick-knacks, and so on.”94 He was not alone in using terms employed by Freud to describe women suffering form mental illnesses: Le Corbusier calls cosiness “sentimental hysteria.”95 Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, does not describe women in such terms but associates the house made of glass—material celebrated for its modernity and seen as the anti-theses of cosiness— with clear masculine undertones: “To live in a glass house,” Benjamin stated, is not only a “revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.” It is prefigured by “the men who have adopted the cause of the absolutely new and have founded it on insight and renunciation.”97 This is to say that men were capable beings of abstraction and self-control.

Taut evidently had difficulty placing women in his rational plan for domestic space, although stating that it was for her. Sometimes describing her as a leader, sometimes as a mere nuisance to he’s project. Indeed, he repeatedly reduced housewives to impulsive homemakers that could not be persuaded to free themselves from the “so-called beauty of the fully covered, cladded walls;” insisting that they “spin themselves in their own house like the butterfly spins itself in its cocoon.”98 For Taut’s vision and way of life to prevail, women had to teach themselves how to live in the most unsentimental manner, within the purist environment built for her and not by her. His argument used the syntax of a solution— as if none had ever been expressed before— when he stated that only then will she be relieved from the drudgery of housework. Capitalist societies had nevertheless

The Home as a Machine

4.28 Usual Apartment Buildings (Bruno Taut, Die Neue Wohnung. Die Frau als Schöpferin, 1928) 72 4.29 Improved dwellings: collapsing thresholds and assembly line layout, using Frederick-like representation (Ibid, 73)

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designed the economy around the housewife for centuries, she was to be the love-giver; her role had been clearly described as sentimental. And many women had cherished this role, put all their energy in it, questioned it and proposed alternatives. The Home Economics movement had gradually relieved women from the sentimental burden of the home and proposed a model of abstraction: one where the home was their workshop, a cherished machine. However this was done so by means of experience, from within. Women were accompanied into this transition with the gradual transformation of their surroundings— all changes were articulated as a response to a problem clearly posed. It was a pedagogical project with functionalist ends. Solutions were continuously proposed, and the home was gradually transformed.

Although it seems arbitrary to do so after the construction of a building, modern architects of the time— proclaimed functionalists— eventually gave substantial thought to the messy domestic life that happened within their architecture. By overcoming the contemplative vision they originally had, they identified a problem; that, to employ the terms used by home economists, of clutter. Taut stated that, “when they [the architects] saw people move in with their masses of furniture, with the endless knick-knacks and junk, they had to give up and finally be content with the fact that their buildings and settlements had a good face, at least on the outside.” Family clutter and cosiness were thereafter violently condemned. Nevertheless, the movement of architects from which Bruno Taut was part of, continued to draw the home in the form of a traditional bourgeois dwelling. The form from which this clutter was born out of ! And therefore, as no attempt was made to address the problem from within, apart from perhaps Bruno Taut’s publication, written in the most condescending of manners, their sleek proposition become one of discipline and restraint and not of consciousness and experience. This can be considered somewhat problematic as, “architects deliberately depart from the field of architecture: intruding and intervening in the practices of inhabitation. In their urge to control even the most uncontrollable aspects of inhabitation, they ultimately do away with the idea of the home as the personal atmosphere of the inhabitant.”99 (figure 4.30)

4.30

99. Gilsum Baydar. Negotiating Domesticity, Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture (London: Routledge, 2005), 139

Esther Brizard

The work of the Home Economics Movement, of women, can be looked at as somewhat necessary for modernist principles, especially functionalism, to have been accepted and for the architecture to have been inhabited in a coherent manner. As without a pedagogical project the architecture became fetishised and contemplative. One must only glimpse at Le Corbusier’s vignettes of domestic life to understand the simplistic vision he had. The work of the Home Economics was profound, it dived into the details of domestic life, never acting as mere contemplation, and in the most radical of ways— because of their very position as housewives, positioned within—, demystified the domestic aura, the pastoralism of domesticity: the ultimate goal of The Modern Movement.

The Home as a Machine

4.30 A family flat in La Cité Radieuse in Marseille. One can see the family’s personal furniture and few scattered toys in the background. Precisely the “knick-knack” Taut refers to. (“Corbu! Range ta chambre!” ”http://archipostalecarte.blogspot. com, Oct 2018)

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CONCLUSION

Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty – their outer poverty, and ultimately also their inner poverty – that it will lead to something respectable.100

100. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 735

4.31

Esther Brizard

The New Dwelling was supposed to be a middle ground, something so bare that it would represent society as a whole, something neutral. However, what many protagonists of modern architecture actually put forward was not the pure abstraction it proclaimed to be, since it clearly objectified the notion of identity into a generalised vision which was itself closer to themselves: white male architects. Indeed, the dwelling was “revised,” but retained the layout of a traditional bourgeois home and all the gender roles such a space produced. One where women were housewives, where men worked and where children needed to be taken care of. Their use of radical architectural discourse, was then perhaps somewhat inadequate. Especially as one realises that it was also directly applied to the modern minimal-dwellings of the working-class. A class where women were often simultaneously wage workers and housewives. This contradiction in discourse and form is not present in the Home Economics movement, as indeed they are so adamant about the role of women in the home— as a housewife— and want society to retain this form; there is no hypocrisy in their proposals. The contradictions exist only on a personal level, on behalf of the writers themselves who often had international careers, while encouraging their readers to suppress their cravings for professional endeavours, all for the greater good of their families. However outdated their vision may seem today, what they strived towards, and how they got there, was of extreme rationality, and responded to in the most sober and realistic of manners. Walter Benjamin in “Poverty and Experience” refers to modern architecture when describing the destruction of “experience;” the removal of sentimentality in the home. However, by retaining the layout of the bourgeois dwelling, the abstraction offered by modern architects of the time— necessary if form was to follow function— was in itself superfluous: it was ornamentation to the traditional bourgeois home. Indeed, unaccompanied by a clear pedagogical project, awareness and a new experience were seldom achieved. Doesn’t Benjamin’s description better suit the work of the Home Economics Movement? A movement who so clearly reduced the home to series of movements and actions in the name of health and efficiency— and did so through physical and introspective means—to allow women to rediscover the joys of housework? Is that not pure application of abstraction, an abstraction which leads to a rediscovery?

The Home as a Machine

4.31 Reform of a bourgeois living room. The caption provided by Taut reads: “Upper part of the sideboard with the outfit of the daughter at the bottom! Window and library “undressed.”

Partition of the ceiling as solution for the wires.

Still too much furniture, but the housewife thinks it is indispensable” (Bruno Taut, Die Neue Wohnung.

Die Frau als Schöpferin, 1928) 56