Standardizing Childrearing through Housing

Abstract

Drawing on oral histories and archival data, we demonstrate how both childrearing and housing practices were directly and indirectly organized around a standardized and codified textual discourse early in the twentieth century in the United States. Using institutional ethnography (IE), we begin with selected experiences of our research participants when they were girls and mothers and explicate these experiences by discovering the social relations that regulate them translocally. We show how the concerted ideological practices of the Children’s Bureau, the Own Your Own Home campaign, and the Better Homes in America movement linked proper childrearing practices with a suitable home environment and connected parents with the marketplace for obtaining housing, household goods, and services. We also examine the textual discourse that established the “Standard American Home (SAH)” as the appropriate form of dwelling for infants and children. Keywords: childrearing, housing, institutional ethnography, textually-mediated discourse, Progressive Era. “Normal family life can not exist apart from a normal home,” the noted housing reformer Edith Elmer Wood proclaimed (1931:7). Later she added, “American authorities agree with the British and a majority of Continentals that a single-family detached house with a garden all around it forms the ideal setting for the life of growing children, . . . [T]he only excuse for apartments is for celibates, childless couples, and elderly people whose children have grown up and scattered. Newly married couples, especially where the husband and wife are both working, will naturally turn to them. And herein lies the danger, if they stay on after children are born” (1931:41). At the time of her writing, these ideas were becoming commonplace and formed the basis for much criticism of housing in the United States. In this paper we demonstrate that the standard of the proper home environment for raising children, alluded to above, was articulated by the concerted efforts of three state-affiliated organizations: the Children’s Bureau, the Own Your Home campaign, and the Better Homes in America movement. The work processes of these organizations—research projects, the production and distribution of pamphlets, articles, and newspaper advertisements, demonstration projects, and other discursive practices— connected anxious parents to the newly professionalized child welfare experts (Levine and Levine 1970), an emerging market of consumer goods and services for the home (Bronner 1989), and to the depressed consumer market for housing (Luken and Vaughan 2005). In doing so they authorized these agents to be the holders of child welfare solutions. A number of sociologists and historians have examined the “child saving campaigns” during the Progressive Era in the United States, particularly with regard to the discovery of child neglect and abuse (Nelson 1984; Pfohl 1977), the creation of juvenile justice systems This research was partially supported by grants from the Scholarly Research and Creative Activities Program, Arizona State University West. The authors would like to thank the women who graciously participated in this study. They also thank James Holstein and the many anonymous reviewers for their comments on prior versions of this paper. Authors’ names are listed in alphabetical order. The contents of this article represent a cooperative effort. Direct correspondence to: