Domestic Ideals and Lived Realities: Gendered Social Relations at the Moors House, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1848–1882

Abstract

Two families—the Moors and the Balls—occupied a 19th-century house on the main street of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Archaeological assemblages associated with each of the households showed disconnects between gender ideals (notably the cult of domesticity for which the architectural style of the house itself is iconic) and the realities of poverty, raising children, and life cycle. In this article, I explore how variations in the materiality and spatiality of gender ideologies were more than simply deviations from middle-class cultural norms. Rather, they represented active negotiation of dominant ideals and the construction of alternate meaningful gender relations and forms of domesticity.