The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities

Abstract

is a book that is full of things I have never seen before, and full of new things to say about things I thought I knew well. It is a book about houses and about culture and about how each affects other, and it must stand as one of major works on history of modern housing. - Paul Goldberger, The New York Times Book Review Long before Betty Friedan wrote about the problem that had no name in The Feminine Mystique, a group of American feminists whose leaders included Melusina Fay Peirce, Mary Livermore, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman campaigned against isolation in home and confinement to domestic life as basic cause of their unequal position in society.The Grand Domestic Revolution reveals innovative plans and visionary strategies of these persistent women, who developed theory and practice of what Hayden calls in pursuit of economic independence and social equality. The material feminists' ambitious goals of socialized housework and child care meant revolutionizing American home and creating community services. They raised fundamental questions about relationship of men, women, and children in industrial society. Hayden analyzes utopian and pragmatic sources of feminists' programs for domestic reorganization and conflicts over class, race, and gender they encountered. This history of a little-known intellectual tradition challenging patriarchal notions of women's place and women's work offers a new interpretation of history of American feminism and a new interpretation of history of American housing and urban design. Hayden shows how material feminists' political ideology led them to design physical space to create housewives' cooperatives, kitchenless houses, day-care centers, public kitchens, and community dining halls. In their insistence that women be paid for domestic labor, material feminists won support of many suffragists and of novelists such as Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells, who helped popularize their cause. Ebenezer Howard, Rudolph Schindler, and Lewis Mumford were among many progressive architects and planners who promoted reorganization of housing and neighborhoods around needs of employed women. In reevaluating these early feminist plans for environmental and economic transformation of American society and in recording vigorous and many-sided arguments that evolved around issues they raised, Hayden brings to light basic economic and spacial contradictions which outdated forms of housing and inadequate community services still create for American women and for their families.