PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR RIGHT SPACE
Célia Berdy - 13063820 - Issues in Theory and History of Architecture, under Nick Beech 1
PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR RIGHT SPACE An historical analysis of the relationship between the design of the house and the role of women in society
CĂŠlia Berdy - 13063820 - Issues in Theory and History of Architecture, under Nick Beech 2
Louise Bourgeois, Maison-Femme 1947
Introduction
The woman has belonged to the private space of the house for centuries. Today, still, the house, as a piece of architecture, does not sound at all masculine ; it evokes an imaginary based on the safe haven, the family nest, the warm and cosy personal room, in its best representation. If the woman is private, it is also because the man is public, as it works like « an oppositional and an hierarchical system consisting of a dominant public male realm of production (the city) and a subordinate private female one of reproduction (the home).» (Jane Rendell) Since Ancient Greece, the notion of Okios relates the house as the women’s space. “This space has been marked by nurturing connotations inscribed with love and care. Therefore, it is not only the body of women that is associated with the house but the house itself is inscribed with maternal feminine qualifications” (Grulsum Baylar, Figures of a wo/man in contemporary architectural discourse). On a practical level, the house is delimited by its wall and roof. In plan and in section, the architecture house controls the behaviour of its inhabitants. But as the architecture itself is the well considered product of a designer, there is a correlation between the types of behaviour expected to happen in the house and the building itself. As Robin Evans points out, «if anything is described by an architecture plan, it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace it records - walls, doors, windows and stairs - are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space». Each wall is an opaque surface controlling the view and the movement of the users. Each window implies a right to witness an action. Each door creates an opportunity to access a place. There is thus no innocence in the creation of a house, although architects denied the program as a relevant challenge until the 18th century. The relationships between the members of the household can still be read through the plan of their house. The social hierarchy is almost obvious and explicit in the arrangement 3
of the rooms, in plan, for instance. The challenge for this essay is to critically analyse the characteristics of the house which are often innocently overlooked or not even considered. There is an intelligent mind behind each house. There is a prejudice or a constraint set in each room. The status of women in a social context has hugely evolved from the 19th century to the mid-20th century amongst all the political change that occurred in the Western world. The essay aims to look at how the architecture of the house both evidences this evolution and has participated into holding back from greater changes, or, on the other hand, into making a change for women over time. The kitchen is regularly taken as the one room which illustrates the changes through time, as it has greatly changed in the period of time considered. ***
Before considering how architecture takes part in the social status of women in the 19th century, it is important to have a view on the social expectations themselves. In Mid-Victorian society beliefs about the role of women were firmly fixed. A woman was considered to be very much inferior to the male and was looked upon as his ‘property’. The husband was the head of the household and had the final control over most aspects of life. In a middle-class household the wife was seen as a child-bearer and it was not considered proper for her to let alone a career. She spent her day in genteel pursuits, and household chores would be carried out by servants. At that time, women had hardly any legal rights. Women did not have any financial indepedence as all money they could own became the possesion of their husband upon marriage. The situation within the working-class families was harder for women. They were still expected to bear children and take control of their uprising but also had to go out to work and earn a living. The working-class wife had no more rights than her middle-class counterpart. 4
Although some women could work, as lawers or nurses, they did not have a voice in the public life. The definition of the English woman during the 19th century was based on the following statement ‘married life is the woman’s profession’ (Saturday Review, quoted in J.A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England ( Liverpool : Liverpool University PRess, 1965). There is a great pressure upon women to find their place in society, thanks to the success of their marriage, and the quality of their household. The women were then expected to «charm and please (their husband) like an agreeable animal to which (they) might become quite attached.» (Saturday Review quoted in Robert Baldick, ed, and trans., PAges from the Goncourt Journal (New York : Pinguin Books, 1984). In Spaces of Domination, THE OTHER describes the vicious circle that bond women to the house. “ Once enclosed in the interior the woman made a place for herself. Men then associated this space with feminitiy. Women had no choice but to accept this role. It is a definition that men and women struggle to get rid of. «. Many people still believe that women should stay at home to take care of the children, while men should engage with the productive (re)building of the outside world. We see the world of objects, surfaces, and beauty as the realm of women, while the nakedly abstract city is the place for men and power.” Until the complete rise of the industrial revolution, the women of middle and upper classes were not to take care of the domestic tasks themselves. They were the managers of the household, and had to control the activities and work of the domestics. «The role of a woman was only to manage her domestic help in order to maintain an ideal home environment.» (Dana Moody and Michelle L. Vineyard, Evolution of domestic kitchen design : influence of disease theory and the changing role of women). The architecture of the house was based on the presence of the domestic help.(Massey, J.C., Maxwell, S. (1996) House styles in America : the old house journal guide to the architecture of American homes. New York : Penguin Studio). The architectural design of the house in the 19th century brought in the social hierarchy as a physical reality written in the plan. On the plan of Amesbury House, 5
Wilthshire, quoted by Robin Evans, the stair case is doubled to make sure the family does not cross the domestic while circulating in the house. Evans refers to Sir Roger Pratt and his views on the need to have passages, corridors in the house of a gentleman for the reader to have a global view on the ideas of a good house in the 19th century. According to Sir Roger Pratt, the passages, corridors, «were for servants» : «to keep them out of each other’s way, and, more important still, to keep them out of the way of gentlemen and ladies. There was nothing new in this fastidiousness, the novelty was in the conscious employment of architecture to dispel it». p 71. In the case of the spatial control of the domestic help, Evans points out that «the introduction of the through-passage into a domestic architecture first inscribed a deeper division between the upper and the lower ranks of society by maintaining direct sequential access for the privileged family circle while consigning servants to a limited territory always adjacent to, but never within the house proper ; where they were always on hand, but never present unless required.» The architecture physically carries the - initially - theoretical social relationships between the users of the house. The more conscious of the power of architecture over the behaviours and rights of the person in the house, the more dedicated the work in using architecture to regulate social behaviour has been. The question that this essays raises is the co-influence of architecture of the house over women. In the previous example, the conclusion that one can draw is straightforward : the architecture deeply affects the behaviour of its users and a social reality can be shaped by architecture. However, architecture may not evolve as fast as the society, and create clashes in the daily routine of the family life. During the 19th century, the industrial revolution has created havoc for the entire social and economic system in place. The new role of industry and the also rising job offers massively affected the socio-professional categories pattern. «At the end of the nineteenth century the employment options for girls widened. Domestic service, once the most respectable job for a working-class girl, became the least desirable, compared to the fixed working hours in offices and factories.» (Irene Cieraad, «Out of my Kitchen»). This socio-economic change created a shortage of domestic help. The amount of tasks normally achieved 6
by servants were to be left undone. But «In this society (where) a woman was measured by the state of her home (…) middle class women (have had to) return to their kitchens and engaged with the routine chores that before would have been completed by servants» ( Dana Moody and Michelle L. Vineyard, Evolution of domestic kitchen design : influence of disease theory and the changing role of women).
In short, the industrial revolution has influenced the architecture and status of the house for two main reasons. The first reason is the shortage of domestic help it created by attracting the working class towards the more stable wage jobs of the factories. The second is the withdrawal of the work such as preparing food, clothing and medication (Ruth Schwartz Cowan). According to Shwartz, the postindustrial age role of women is still to feed, clothe and nurse their family, but with no assistance from their relatives, by «cooking, cleaning, shopping and driving». The definition of the house has shifted to become exclusively the place for eating, sleeping, raising children and enjoying leisure. (Forty, A, 1986, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750, Thames and Hudson, London). This new definition of the house has great implication on the design needs for the women to complete the task they are assigned to. The kitchen is a paradigmatic room that helps understand the evolution of the women’s role based on their role in the house. In this case, anew, the architecture is a fair indicator of the social reality. Architecture is evolves based on the social rules. The kitchen before the industrial age, in the houses of middle-class and upper-class families is a large room. «The primary work surface was in the center of the kitchen — usually a large, heavy and sturdy table. The perimeter of the room held storage furniture, the cooking stove and the sink. A wide work aisle allowed access to the central work table from all sides. The chief advantage of this type of arrangement was that multiple cooks could work at the same time without getting in each other’s way. The Victorian kitchen was almost inevitably a multi-cook kitchen. In a Victorian kitchen cabinets were furniture, free-standing and movable. Work surfaces and storage were usually separate. Work surfaces 7
were tables. Storage was in large cupboards supplemented with open shelves and hooks on walls and sometimes ceiling for pots and pans as needed.» (http://starcraftcustombuilders.com/Architectural. Styles.VictorianKitchen.htm). The kitchen was accessible by the domestic help thanks to a independent staircase that joined to the servant areas. The modern post-industrial kitchen was designed for women that were taking care of the meals on their own. There has been a «professionalisation» of the women’s cooking skills and tasks.
In her article «Out of my kitchen», Irene Cieraad shows the relationship between the work of Charlotte Gilman and the turn-of-the-century Dutch kitchen design. Charlotte Gilman was an American feminist and designer. She designed ‘apartment hotels’ which combined apartments with different types of facilities, such as a kitchen where a professional cook took care of preparing the meals that were served in the apartment block’s. Gilman wanted the women to take advantage of the servants shortage to start a ‘grand domestic revolution’. Gilman fearing that the amount of task that women were assigned to by the lack of domestic help would greatly excluded women from the public sphere by a lack of time to spend on it. Her architectural and political solution was radical yet simple : «no private kitchens or private domestic servants anymore». The Dutch feminism took the idea at Gilman’s word. In Amsterdam, initially to help the working-class women, Dutch designers created district kitchens, from 1903. Some Dutch journalists of the time feared the death of the bond in the nuclear family though. It is thanks to architects such as Willem Verschoor that the concept of kitchen-less apartment kept afloat with the ‘Boschzicht’. Irene Cieraad reminds the reader that the project did not match enough with the family needs to be popular enough and become a new architecture genre. However, she underlines a link between this ‘domestic revolution» and a precise design work to achieve an new ‘household efficiency’ through scientific analysis of the needs for a housewife in the kitchen. Thanks a partnership between the Dutch Association of Housewives (NVvH) and the architect J.W. Janzen, the 1920’s a new kitchen design saw the light of day in the Netherlands too. The design is here again controlled by the 8
users of the house. Women took part in the reflection upon their space. Although one can see a loss in the lack of development of the hotel apartments, it is still the evidence of an incredible power of the women over their own social status. The power of architecture was then fully perceived and has been put into practice in a radical version of the understanding of the risk for women to remain only housewife. In the previous examples given, the influence mainly comes from the society itself, whereas the architecture works as a physical translation of the main social rules and their implication on the role of women, in their use of the house. However, the Dutch example has proved the power carried by architecture to contribute to the social changes society may need at certain periods of time. Alice T. Friedman has made a thorough analysis of the role of women in the design of masterworks by the main architects of the 20th century. The clients of all the houses she analyses are single, independent women. From a social aspect, nevertheless, as Friedman points out, quoting the journal Americans views Their Mental Health, «»The unmarried woman was seen as a ‘frustrated old maid’ who had ‘failed so seriously in her understanding of a woman’s role that she hadn’t even established the marriage prerequisite of having a home.» As such, she forfeited her place, both physical and symbolic, within American society.»(Alice T. Friedman, Women and the making of the modern house, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers 1998 People who live in Glass Houses; Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson). A. T. Friedman decided to analyse the houses design by reputable architects especially for single women. There is a great originality, from the early 20th century in the character of financially independent single women, which has considerable consequences on the design : “ The female client and the female head of household represent, de facto, unconventional and atypical programming challenges because of the dominance of patriarchal models in design typology. The unconventional demands of these clients as a group stimulate innovative planning and design, both for new types in planning and new forms in design.” The concept that matters the most within this quote lies in the two words «stimulate innovative». Despite the potential conflicts between the 9
architect and the client, Friedman shows that there is a place for change in the opinion society has of the role of women, in the practice of a progressive architecture. For instance, Friedman analysed in detail both the relationship and the resulting architecture of the work of Richard Neutra for Constance Perkins. «For her studio was the core of the house, and she challenged Neutra to think of her home in an unconventional way, as a domestic environment in which individual creativity and work, rather than family and leisure activities, were central to the concept.» The bedroom that was finally designed also included her desk and drawing table. The guest room had been added only for promoters to support financially the project . The house Neutra designed for Constance Perkins is extremely promising for the view society has of women. It is an example which proves that architecture can promote, by transcribing social progress in the materiality of walls, and thus making room for a new way of living, new social values.
The hope, nevertheless lies in the fact that this architecture would go from margin to main stream. All the houses Alice T. Friedman describes are masterpieces from some of the greatest architects of the 20th century. There is always a tendency of inertia before big changes occur in the social sphere. After the two World Wars of the 20th century, the rapidly changing social values wreaked havoc on the traditional place of women in the home and in society. In the 1950’s, however, the house became the refuge for the breadwinner. As H. Heynen explains in Negociating domesticity, “Gradually, the home became the hallowed sphere of wife and children, which coincided with a growing cult of motherhood and an increasing focus on the child as the centre of family life”. The post-war status of women as housewives was in total contradiction with the tasks accomplished by them during the war, but was able to guarantee the right balance between the men that just came back home, that had to find their right place in society again. «Women were indeed encouraged to reassume the role of wife and mother with the new fervour and enthusiasm as part of their patriotic duty in the ‘battle of peace’. There was an important difference between the status of women as housewife in the 1950’s compared to which 10
of the 1930’s for instance. «Running a home and rearing children was to be a scientific operation, which would supposedly give the housewife new status and importance» ( The Designer Housewife in the 1950s, Angela Partington, in A view from the interior, Women and Design, Judy and Pat Kirkham editors, 1995). To return to the design of the kitchen, as an example, it was altered in the 1950s thanks to a scientific analysis of the movement women had to accomplish to prepare a meal. The first works on the subjects started in the 1920’s, but the technological progress and the economical situation only pushed the households into becoming an efficient but hallowed sphere of wife and children, which coincided with a growing cult of motherhood and an increasing focus on the child as the centre of family life. (Heynen, H and Baydar, G (ed.), 2005. ‘Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture) The open-plan kitchen was the ultimate version of creating a space for the family based on the activity women were achieving. For the women to be able to look after the children, and to be part of the family life while being a ‘good’ housewife, the kitchen has been merged with the dining room in the 1950’s. The house was the women’s space, as «the notions of home, kitchen and women were in a circular relationship and tied closely to multiple levels, from the planning and representations of the kitchen to the activities of daily life.» (Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 161–172, April 2006 Displays of the Everyday. Relations between gender and the visibility of domestic work in the modern kitchen from the 1930s to the 1950s KIRSI SAARIKANGAS), but the open space was designed to gather the family together. The trick in this situation is again, as K. Saarikangas says that «The kitchen–living room continuum emerged as a hub of the dwelling both spatially and in the daily routine of living together. This emphasised the idea of the home as a feminised space with the active mother as its core.» The output of the change in the kitchen design almost goes against the initial concept put in it. The paradoxical consequence of a change in the kitchen design could thus help to open one’s eyes on the place architecture has in society. Indeed, as 11
long as the social changes are not yet in place, as it has been the case until recently with the strong bond between the house and women, the architecture will mainly support the main stream system. Architecture can make changes, as Alice Friedman proved it in her work Women and the Making of the Modern House. But the architecture mainly transcribes social patterns in place, as these patterns are the one expected by society to be the ‘good’ house designs for a ‘good’ life style.
*** Conclusion The woman’s space “ was the space of reproduction and education, as opposed to the male place of production and action, and it was the place of consumption, as opposed to production. It was a space of stasis, as opposed to the male world of continual movement and change. It was the place of the mirror, not the window, the place where a head-won culture could define and live itself out.“ ( Aaron Betsky, Building Sex), it was the house. The household has been socially related to the role of women in society since the early stage of the creation of a balance between men and women and their role in society. By assuming such a role, the design of the home has been biaised and controlled by the imaginary and the social values attributed to a ‘good’ woman, which mainly has to take care of their family. Architecture is one of the most powerful tool that society posseses to transcribe social rules into the physical world. For this reason the architectural design of the house has participated in reproducing the physical world in which women would accomplish the tasks expected from them. This essay attempted to thus illustrate how the evolution in the social sphere has been diffused through society thanks to Architecture, and how Architecture also bore the prejudice society imposed on women. There is, nevertheless, always room for change in society, and social values keep varying through time. 12
But just by looking at the design of kitchens, one can preceive that architecture, as the transcription of the social relationships in the materiality of walls and windows, reinforces the feeling of a truth in a social rule. When major social changes occur and that architecture is part of the definition of a new paradigm, it opens one’s eye on the lack of obviousness one type of behaviour embodies. When the Dutch designer J.W. Janzen took away the kitchen from the house, he was pointing out that there is no such arbitrary fact as the necessity for a woman to stay at home to cook for the family. Society is influenced by traditions, which create a range of social knowledge and rules for each individual to find his and her right place. Architecture is the product of that society and, often, it simply puts walls on a social reality. But as women have been highly prejudiced by a limited recognition of knowledge and skills, the bond between domesticity and femininity has been challenged in the architectural pratice to illustrate that other options existed. There is no such thing as an innocent architecture. Each house carries the values of its time, or challenges them. However, even if architecture seems to be the initiator of social change form the example given by Alice T. Friedman about the Modern House, there are hints which prove that architecture almost always is the consequence of a social situation. As today the house is the family space in a broader view, that men do seem to be playing a more active role in chlidrearing and increasingly can be seen cooking and shopping (Ruth Madigan and Moira Munro), the house design which might not be changing can hold in it a wide range of relationships between the members of an household. To let the rights of women evolve towards a greater equality in their choice of being housewives, but mostly to be able share the work load in the house with the rest of the family, is taking place at the moment. And therefore, a new architectural type might raise from the current social r-evolution in the definition of genders.
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References
Betky A. Spaces of Domination, Tricks of Domesticity in Building SEX, men, women, Architecture, and the Construction of Sexuality, HarperCollins Canada (1995) Cieraad I., «Out of my Kitchen», Architecture, gender and domestic efficiency Published online: 08 Dec 2010. Evans R., Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays The MIT Press; 1 edition (June 6, 1997) Friedman T. A. , Women and the making of the modern house, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers 1998 Forty, A, 1986, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750, Thames and Hudson, London Gulsum Baydar, Figures of a woman in contemporary architectural discourse in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture edited by Heynen, Baydar
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