Public Displays and Private Tasks: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Utilization and Social Relationships at the Morris-Butler House, Indianapolis, Indiana

Abstract

AbstractThe Morris-Butler House (12MA768) in Indianapolis was constructed during the mid-nineteenth century, by which time the ideals of the cult of domesticity had been firmly codified. Decades before, beginning in the 1820s, domesticity emerged as a powerful ideological force in eastern North America. Largely a phenomenon of the white urban middle class, this ideal sanctioned the separation of public and private spaces within homes and yards, which were also defined as masculine and feminine, respectively. As the urban dwelling of a white middle class family, it was expected that spaces within the house and yard at the Morris-Butler house would express these idealized dichotomies. The architectural, documentary, archaeological, and oral history data from the site, however, illustrate that public and private spaces were not solely masculine and feminine. Rather, the landscape was a dynamic entity shaped not only by gender, but also class and ethnicity; varying according to the type of social interaction ...