5 - This man-made world

Summary

The passion for injecting science into housework which gripped Europe, America and many other countries in the period between 1880 and 1940 didn't confine itself to recipes for cabbage soup, the persecution of dust and other microbial enemies of human health, and how to cook cheaply for the poor. Housework happens in people's homes and these – the way they’re designed, manufactured and furnished – shape the extent to which housework can be converted into a scientific discipline. Thus, the making of homes needs to be as much a subject of discussion as the doing of housework.

The American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a book called The Man- made World in 1911. Gilman is most famous for her terrifying fable, ‘The yellow wallpaper’, which is about the creation and treatment of depression in women. She is less well- known for what she was, the leading feminist intellectual of her day, and a prominent social theorist in the emerging discipline of sociology. In her autobiography Gilman described herself as ‘a philosophic steam- engine’, and she certainly propelled herself with enormous zest through most of the debates that raged in her lifetime about women, households, gender and social policy. She was the greatniece of Catharine Beecher whose 1841 text on domestic economy took the first sustained scientific interest in housework. Although this may have helped to fuel Gilman's own interest in the home as a place of labour for women, she didn't see the relationship between women and housework in at all the same way as her great- aunt. Indeed, Gilman devoted much energy to undoing Catharine Beecher's ideology of the home as women's natural domain. Between 1898 and 1911 she wrote books about the home, women and economics, human work, children, and The Man- made World, whose subject is the effect on human life of ‘the unbridled dominance of one sex’. In this ‘androcentric’ culture, as she termed it, men have made homes essentially places for women and children, but without considering their needs.

This chapter ties together various themes about house design, efficiency and economics in a story about how the domestic science movement developed in the period from around 1910 to the 1930s.