A home of one's own: Women and domesticity in England 1918–1950

Abstract

This article investigates working-class women's consciousness of their domestic role at a specific moment in England when that role was in the process of reformulation. Working-class women defined themselves not only in terms of their gender but also in terms of their difference from and antagonism to other social classes. The social relations between women were to a considerable extent constructed and manifested in the system of domestic service; hence, the changing nature and eventual demise of domestic service in the period 1918–1950 were to have far-reaching implications for women's understanding of themselves in relation both to the class system and to women's domestic role. Parallel with the changes in domestic service were growth in home ownership and occupation and the development of a consumer market offering a range of products targeted at the housewife. It was only in the first half of the 20th century that the term ‘housewife’ came to signify an apparently homogenous group of women who could be addressed as having common interests by the media, by politicians, and by the designers and producers of domestic technology, and it is the purpose of this project to explore the ways in which women experienced, adapted, and appropriated the category ‘housewife’ as a means of defining identity in terms of both class and gender in the context of such changes. In the 1920s and 1930s the idea of the housewife was offered as a highly valued and ‘modern’ role for women albeit a conservative one, focusing as it did on women's traditional functions in the family and thereby reproducing the limitations of a single role and self-identity. Yet, as the author argues, such conservatism, reformulated as ‘modern’, offered working-class women possibilities for self-definition which were potentially empowering and democratic in terms of class, if not gender. How far these possibilities could be realised is one of the questions the article attempts to answer.