Kitchen Tours: Re-Interpreting the History of Gendered Labour and Technologies in the Home Through Four Australian Heritage Houses

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite its material and metaphorical centrality to the home, the kitchen has been viewed as somewhat of a lacuna in architecture and design histories and heritage accounts. This is in part because of its traditionally gendered and class-dictated use, and its heightened exposure to obsolescence, with the result that there is surprisingly little recorded about kitchen and servant life, or remnant, artifactual historical evidence preserved. To address this historical absence, the paper describes a series of visits conducted to historic houses spanning the 1850s–1970s that are heritage protected and open to the public in the cities of Melbourne and Geelong, Australia. With a focus on the kitchens and associated service and servant areas, the author’s observations, interviews, and photographic documentation conducted on these visits is bolstered by archival research and broader scholarship around the historical shifts in the employment of servant and gendered domestic labour, and the technologies and infrastructure that supported them. In light of established feminist framings in historiography and curatorship, and the turn to micro-contextualised social, technical, and material studies since the 1980s, the paper argues that heritage interpretation and management can offer far more to the re-evaluation and evocation of the history of women’s work in the home. And in turn, that these experiences might sharpen our attention to the seemingly mundane, tacit attributes and values of domestic settings, technologies and infrastructures.