Victorian respectability and gendered domestic space

Gender & History, 2009

Formal Methods in Architecture and Urbanism, Volume 2, 2022

Based on Dolores Hayden concept that the house, as a reflection of the collective, mirrors the patriarchal structure of society by creating spaces that reinforce gender roles and stereotypes, we can argue that the service areas of a house is the spatial materialization of life support and family care activities. Considering that men and women should live and work equally, the feminist movement throughout the 20th century asserted that traditional constructions of gender relations should be destroyed and the house should function as a tool for social transformation. Domestic services in collective spaces then arise to enable the large-scale production of modernist housing and to dissociate women from domestic activities. Despite recognising the plurality of genres, this study is limited to the binarism between men and women, and seeks to understand how gender relations are manifested in the domestic space and how spatial relations relate to the construction of gender. Based on Julienne Hanson's spatial syntax methodology the analysis investigates the importance of the implementation of collective domestic service systems during the modern movement as a tool to minimize the inequalities imposed by the sexual division of labor. Specific objectives include: (i) Analyse the spatial structure of three emblematic modernist housing complexes through the analytical variables proposed by Hanson - Narkomfin, in Moscow (Moisei Ginzburg, 1928-1932), Mendes de Moraes complex, known as Pedregulho, in Rio de Janeiro (Afonso Reidy, 1946-1950), and the Unité d’habitacion, in Marseille (Le Corbusier, 1947-1952) - which all contain collective spaces, such as laundries and kitchens; (ii) compare the spatial configuration of modern residences studied by Luiz Amorim and Hanson with these three cases to verify if these structures contribute to the perpetuation of gender roles and the sexual division of labor; and (iii) contextualize the socioeconomic and political scenarios involved in the three cases that might have favoured minimisation of such inequalities within the domestic sphere. The expected contribution is to show, under an analytical approach, aspects related to the influence of the domestic space on the social construction of the role of women and on the sexual division of labor in emblematic social housing complexes, bringing light to the importance of contemplating non-sexist architectural solutions which consider women both as an user of space and a transforming agent.

International journal of social science studies, 2022

As a cultural product, the home and its settings are shaped according to social norms and characteristics. Throughout history, domestic interiors continuously changed as a mirror of Feminine and Male roles in society. This paper focuses on the analysis of domestic interiors from the modern age until present times, describing and depicting cases of spatial segregation and specialization based on the gender of its users or occupants. The historical account that is portrayed revisits the domestic arrangements where genderization was more evident, namely bedrooms, kitchen and, at times, rooms for specific uses or functions. The goal of the study is to understand in which manner gender roles and society"s views of gender character and behaviour have impacted domestic interiors and living modes. The produced scholarship shows that the former have indeed determined the latter and that from the beginning of the modern era until today western society has witnessed a cyclical evolution: from degendered spaces to highly segregated homes, from these to spatial democratizing and, finally, from a democratic home to a return to segregating models. The study concludes that domestic interiors were and somewhat continue to be greatly determined by social concepts of gender attributes, hierarchy and behaviour. Furthermore, although the paper focuses only on western homes, being limited by this context, further research could be developed on the analysis of gendered spaces in other cultures, societies and geographic contexts, to consolidate enlightenment on the subject.

In response to Lytton Strachey’s remark that the history of the Victorian Age would never be written because we know too much about it (9), one can argue that the greater our temporal distance to the Victorians is, the more we appear to be interested in them. As Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich have noted about this persistent preoccupation, “the Victorian age [is] historically central to late-century postmodern consciousness” (Kucich and Sadoff xi). The continuous reiterations of the Victorian in popular neo-Victorian cultural artefacts have contributed to the establishment of the area of neo-Victorian studies, with the publication, in recent decades, of several books focused on millennial and post-millennial literary engagements with the Victorians. Also growing out of this awareness that matrixes of modernity and postmodernity can be found in the Victorian period, an increasing interest in the sphere of domesticity has resulted in the uncovering of neglected archives. From novels to government reports, the Victorians attached unprecedented significance to domesticity. The household was a pivotal institution, and their occupants performed their different roles according to custom and circumstance. Within its sphere, gender, class, economic and political conflicts were played out as the household provided the background for significant social practices ranging from the kitchen to the parlour, from the street to the Houses of Parliament, from the colonial metropole to the British colonial outposts in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific. The discourses of Victorian domesticity have been the subject of quite a few publications over the last decades. These approaches stress the interdisciplinary potential for interpretation of the characteristics of the period and often underline the strands of radical thought which encouraged aspirations for upward social mobility. The inquiry into the performance of domesticity and the management of privacy by, for instance, some of the leading figures of the Victorian period remains still rather an unexplored territory with untapped critical potential. Bringing domesticity into the big picture and foregrounding paradoxes of historical continuity and disruption, the articles in this issue uncover archives hitherto neglected for various circumstances. Either these were until now within the restrictive purview of private collections, or the texts under analysis here had yet to receive significant critical attention (such as the article on the social novel Under the Arch of Life penned by Lady Henry Somerset, regarded by critics as a minor fictional work and hence so far overlooked). Contributors have painstakingly collected, from private archives, images which so far remained inaccessible to the general public, such as pictures of the Collingwood family magazines. Furthermore, the collection reclaims texts that have been interpreted earlier readings structured around the public/private and virtue/vice antinomies or focusing on the “cult of domesticity” in the Victorian period. The collection also brings the Victorians to the present by examining post-Victorian revisitations of earlier texts.

Victorian Periodicals Review, 2018

English Victorian era was a period of a series of values and codes of social strict behavior that regulated in every detail the life and the social ranks. By its organization, its architecture, its administration, its role and its purpose, the Victorian house is a clear and complex example of Victorian mentality. On top, Victorian wives or so-called «Angels of the House» are sharp crests of the status of women in the 19th century England, their existence and their daily responsibilities on life, religion, family, sexuality and distinction of classes. The approach of this book is, therefore, to the portrait of the Victorian middle-class woman, first by the description of her house, then by the analysis of its significant economic and political role and responsibilities, not only at home, in her relationship with her husband, her children and staff, but also on the social scene in industrial cities and changing out of his private domain.

A discussion of contemporary feminist art, specifically Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's "Womanhouse", within the context of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own". I look at the connections and parallels in symbolism and ideologies that culminate in the writes and visual works of the artists.

Interiors: Design, Architecture and Culture, 2014

Macmillan's "Art at Home" series (1876-83) was a collection of domestic advice manuals. Mentioned in every study of the late nineteenth-century domestic interior, they have often been interpreted, alongside contemporary publications such as Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste (1868), as indicators of late 1870s home furnishing styles. Mrs Loftie's The Dining Room-1878-was the series' fifth book and it considers one of the home's principal (and traditionally masculine) domestic spaces. Recent research on middleclass cultural practices surrounding food has placed The Dining Room within the tradition of Mrs Beeton's Household Management (1861); however, it is not a cookery book and hardly mentions dinners. Drawing upon unpublished archival sources, this paper

Exploring Families' Negotiations of Contemporary Domesticity in Commonplace Architecture, 2021

revealing features of the dwelling model inextricably for the reality of domestic practices. Homemaking and exploring change in commonplace Drawing on Bourdieu (1977), contesting existing conceptions about the dwelling through the inhabitants' socio-spatial domestic practices is an opportunity to explore domestic architecture in a situation of socio-cultural change. Accordingly, the homemaking process represented a focal aspect in this investigation that allowed revealing the architectural qualities of a dwelling model inseparably from the reality of homelife practised at a certain time and place. This approach explored the dwelling, as a cultural product, through the transition between a given, pre-designed space and the acted-on space produced and reproduced as part of the everyday socio-spatial homemaking practices. This process was also an outlook that extended the understanding of space beyond the fixed architectural features. Architecture was explored here, as a component of the appropriated space, through its role as an enabler for the inhabitants' idiosyncratic practices, emotions and social interactions 3 4 5. A starting point for theorising features of the dwelling through its presence within this micro-level of social processes were the consideration of emotional and body-space experiences. This study explores the design of the dwelling model through the role of architecture in creating a sense of place that represents the inhabitants' conception of the home 6 , such as the 'sensual home' 7 , the 'livedin' home 8 , or a sense of 'informalization' 9 and representations of the self 10. The materialisation of home also highlights features of the spatial character of the dwelling 11 , as exemplified by the creation of a sense of comfort 12 and freshness 13 .