Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Feminism by Polly Wynn Allen

Abstract

308 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE editing. There are a great many typographical errors, occasionally accompanied by sloppy punctuation and grammar. The book is also almost totally descriptive and chronological. One is left wondering whether bricks can be used to answer deeper questions about the society that made them. In summary, Gurcke’s work makes a useful contribution to the study of brick technology, and it presents much site-specific informa­ tion on the Pacific Northwest. However, its excessively provincial focus makes it of dubious use to scholars who happen to work outside that region. David R. Starbuck Dr. S i arbi ck is editor oi IA: The journal oj the Society for Industrial Archeology. Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Femi­ nism. By Polly Wynn Allen. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Pp. x+ 195; illustrations, notes, index. $25.00 (cloth); $11.95 (paper). Building Domestic Liberty belongs to a growing literature on the history of the American home and the housewife, a literature prompted in part, no doubt, by the dramatic changes in those institutions in the past few decades. (The housewife is rapidly vanishing: 70 percent of married women with school-age children are now in the labor force—compared with 30 percent in 1960—along with 56 percent of married women with children under six— compared with 18 percent in 1960.) This literature can be divided into studies of the home itself (Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Susan Strasser, Glenna Matthews) and studies of critics of the home (Dolores Hay­ den). Polly Allen’s book falls into the latter category. Perhaps the harshest critic of the 19th-century American home and housewife was Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), who believed the traditional home harmed the entire society since it trapped its members in an atavistic individualism, retarding the inevitable evolu­ tion to socialism. The principal culprit/victim was the ignorant, inefficient housewife, stunted by her domestic servitude yet powerful in her ability to distort relationships by her service, to destroy health by unscientific cooking, and to spoil her children by indulgence. The cure, Gilman believed, would be to eliminate the housewife: send adult women out to work alongside their husbands, where they would be liberated from parasitic dependence and become productive citizens. Gilman argued that professional experts working for profit would provide better child care, food, and cleaning service than the amateur TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 309 housewife. Kitchens, nurseries, and laundry facilities should be removed from the home and commercialized: the essential home was to be a place for leisure and rest. (It is not clear what arrangement she intended for the infant and preschool child, since both tend to disturb their parents’ rest.) Gilman stressed the importance of building structures to support the housewifeless home, especially kitchenless apartments in apartment hotels with in-house food and child-care services or kitchenless houses in neighborhoods with contiguous household services. Gilman’s attack on the traditional home was hrst published in book-length form in Women and Economics (1898, reprinted 1966), long considered her most important work. More recently her views were discussed in Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution (1980), in which Gilman is presented as an important popularizer of views developed earlier by other “material feminists.” Building Domestic Liberty supplements Hayden’s book by expanding on Gilman’s views from a broad range of sources: nonfiction books and articles, utopian fantasies, and realistic fiction. Allen’s thesis is that Gilman’s critique of the home is her most significant contribution to social theory—a thesis that is convincing, though not especially controversial. Although neither Hayden nor Allen seriously questions Gilman’s evaluation of the traditional home, other historians have done so, either explicitly or implicitly. Cowan, Strasser, and Matthews reject the notion that women should be housewives, yet they value the house­ wife’s traditional products, such as home-cooked food, home-reared children, and personalized comfort. As many of these become scarce, it is well to ponder whether Gilman was right to condemn them or whether they should instead be encouraged, if not by a “mommy track,” then hy a policy that invests in them, perhaps a “mommy-anddaddy track.” Allen criticizes...