Modern Domesticity Research Articles

Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea

Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea

South Korean housewives’ emerging economic authority and contestation of domesticity during the Cold War Era

AbstractThis article analyses the impact South Korean housewives exerted on Cold War‐era domesticity. It first traces the trans‐war trajectory of modern domesticity from Meiji Japan and its colonies through its Cold War manifestation, when America exerted hegemonic influence. Thereafter, this article examines the tactics that housewives employed to gain power within the domestic sphere and beyond: earning money, microfinance, labour and side‐line work, and an assertive response to the purse string debate in South Korea. The article also argues that even though prescriptive gender norms continued to inform the everyday lives of these housewives, their increasing bargaining power gave them economic authority to renegotiate and reimagine domesticity during the Cold War.

Advertisements as Cultural Texts: Looking at Homemakers and Mothers in Mandate Palestine

This article examines representations of homemakers and mothers occurring in ads appearing during Mandate Palestine. It is based on comprehensive research of about 150 ads, from dailies, women’s magazines, and manuals published in Hebrew at that time. In all ads, a feminine figure appears as the main character. The ads are analyzed, extracting the meanings inherent in them regarding the role and social status of the Hebrew homemaker, as a key to understanding the worldviews prevalent in the Yishuv. This premise perceives the ads as cultural texts, aiming for an effective communication with their audience. Decoding these ads is done according to theories taken from semiotics and cultural studies in relation to historical knowledge of Hebrew homemakers of the Yishuv. Three dominant ideologies were explored underlying the ads: Hebrew nationalism, modern domesticity, and the ideology of science. The strategies used by advertisers are also discussed, in themselves a significant tool for constructing meaning.

Taming and Training Greek “Peasant Girls” and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s–1960s

Drawing on the voluminous government records as well as selective interviews in a large oral history archive created over several years, this article explores Canada’s recruitment of Greek female domestics in the 1950s and early 1960s within the context of the feminist scholarship on female labour schemes as well as more recent whiteness literature on the in-between racial status of peripheral Europeans. In considering the contradictory features of a large but little-known labour scheme through which more than ten thousand Greek women arrived, many of them before their families, it documents the role of the bureaucrats – who envisioned the domestics’ transformation into models of modern domesticity while portraying them as victims of their patriarchal communities and manipulators of Canadian immigration policy – and that of the women who negotiated various challenges. To account for the scheme’s remarkable longevity, a key argument probes the mix of factors that repositioned a traditionally non-preferred Southern European group of women into a desirable white source of immigrant labour and future Canadian motherhood. Ultimately, Greek women enjoyed a racial privilege and mobility not afforded to later arriving women from the Caribbean and Philippines.

CSH Program o el American way of life. Iconos domésticos californianos de los 50

<p class="Cuerpo">After World War II a new order emerged amongst the ruins, the devastation and the Allied triumph. The United States, more than any other country, emerged as a new world power with an optimism founded on victory as much as on its untouched territory and on its economy boosted by the military industrial complex. Architecture in the 50s could not avoid being part of the American dream. Would it be possible to find an architectural image to embody such an aspiration? In other words, would it be possible to conceive an architectural iconography tuned with technology, progress, freedom, individualism, and the familiar image for domestic architecture capable of assuming the symbolism and the characteristic optimism of the American way of life? That was the goal pursued by John Entenza, editor of the influential Arts & Architecture journal, and advocate of the Case Study House Program. The glazed box could assume much of the imagery associated with a new way of life for various reasons. Indeed, it served as an iconography for the domestic architecture of the period inspired in industrialisation or in the hybridisation of steel and the balloon-frame constructive system as a pretext diversely reinterpreted in the Case Study Houses later to become icons of a Californian modern domesticity.<em></em></p>

Transpacific Aspiration toward Modern Domesticity in Japanese Colonial-Era Korea

Transpacific Aspiration toward Modern Domesticity in Japanese Colonial-Era Korea

Temporary domesticities: The Southeast Asian hotel as (re)presentation of modernity, 1968–1973

This essay examines the building of the Southeast Asian luxury hotel during the 1960s and 1970s as instrumental to the reshaping and consolidation of the global image of modernity for the region. While the war against slums and homelessness was being fought in the new towns, with public and private housing estates and blocks of flats for the working and middle classes, the branding of the modern Asian city was taking place at the waterfront and in the main thoroughfares of these cities. Not only did the luxury hotel present a stark contrast to the crowded, slum-filled imagery of these developing industrialising cities, its proponents— governments, developers and architects—sought to use it to replace ‘Third World’ impressions with ‘First World’ experiences. Driven by economic pragmatism, the proliferation of the slab-tower and podium building, and its interchangeable use as hotel and residential flats in the Southeast Asian city, witnessed a period of regional networking, investments, brand building, knowledge expertise transfers and the rise of a mobile class of international travellers. This essay argues that in response to Cold War political and economic contingencies, these temporary spaces of domesticity and consumption were part of an incipient complex of regional cultural identification in which architecture was paramount. It challenges the reading of the hotel interior as simply an orientalised space of consumption for foreign tourists and, instead, posits that it was complicit in the production of the citizenry as participants in these new public spaces of the emerging economies of Hong Kong and Singapore. Focussing on how such hotels were presented and described in newspapers and specialist trade journals, the essay seeks an alternative way to understand modern domesticity in these cities beyond the centre-periphery schema of one-way transfers of knowledge and expertise.

At the Crossroads of Equality versus Protection: American Occupationnaire Women and Socialist Feminism in US Occupied Japan, 1945–1952

At the Crossroads of Equality versus ProtectionAmerican Occupationnaire Women and Socialist Feminism in US Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 Michiko Takeuchi (bio) On October 11, 1945, a document issued by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) declared the “liberation of Japanese women” to be one aspect of the democratization policies the American occupation would institute in Japan. The policy document proclaimed “the emancipation of the women through their enfranchisement—that, being members of the body politic, they may bring to Japan a new concept of government directly subservient to the well being of the home.”1 This statement about the “well being of the home” suggests SCAP actually undertook to implement American Cold War family ideology under the guise of women’s liberation. This ideology embodied SCAP’s ideal as represented by the middle-class (white) heterosexual nuclear family with rigid gender roles of a male breadwinner and a female homemaker.2 Far from seeing these official statements and efforts as liberating Japanese women, scholars have pointed out the ways American Cold War domesticity complemented Japan’s own modern domesticity ideology of the “good wife and wise mother.”3 Scholars also reject any notion of the male-dominated US military as a force behind women’s liberation in occupied Japan. Such initiatives came from women, particularly highly educated upper-and middle-class American and Japanese women, who together created the occupation’s policies for Japanese women (except suffrage) by forming a de facto women’s policy alliance.4 Members of the alliance were not static or harmonious, but they worked together to formulate “women’s liberation” policies according to their definition, which differed from that of SCAP. However, even when scholars have viewed this collaborative effort as important, they have not considered the complex dynamic that underlay the effort. Internal and external initiatives were at play in the shaping of gender ideology in which tensions and negotiations among American and Japanese women came to the fore. Exploring this complex dynamic reveals that the policy alliance did not just challenge SCAP’s Cold War domesticity ideology but also engaged in the [End Page 114] longstanding “women’s war”; that is, the debates about “equality versus protection.”5 The alliance’s debates about “equality versus protection” show that the alliance’s idea of “women’s liberation” was not invented in the so-called “workshop of democracy” in occupied Japan. Rather, it was built upon American and Japanese women’s decades of activism and their ideological coalition across the Pacific, which predated the occupation. American women occupation members, or “occupationnaires,” played crucial roles in rebuilding this ideological coalition in the postwar period as they pursued women’s liberation in occupied Japan (1945–52). At the heart of these initiatives was an alliance of women for whom the fundamental idea of “women’s liberation” was also highly contested, because it was related to American women’s long-term debates about “equality versus protection,” especially in the area of women’s labor. In fact, in October 1946 Lieutenant Ethel Weed (1906–75), a women’s information officer who played a leading role in the policy alliance, wrote to the historian Mary Beard (1876–1958) in the United States that “the question of equality vs. special privilege and protection has of course come up here [U.S.-occupied Japan] again and again.”6 Arising in the 1920s, the question of equality versus protection was the crux of what became known as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) debate in the United States or what the historian Nancy Cott has called “the dilemma of twentieth-century feminism”—which goes beyond discussion of the proposed constitutional amendment.7 The ERA, stressing the sameness and equality of the sexes, was first introduced in Congress in 1923 by members of the National Women’s Party (NWP), who were middle-class feminists. However, the ERA was fiercely opposed by women labor activists and leftists (later called Old Lefts), such as Mary Anderson (1872–1964), a member of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) and the first director of the Women’s Bureau, on the grounds that the ERA would nullify special legislative protection for women.8 Weed’s letter...

Giedion tropical. La hamaca, Mechanization Takes Command y el diseño para una domesticidad nómade

This paper discusses about the implications that had the introduction of the hammock in the Gideon`s book Mechanization Takes Command , as part of the develop- ment of modern home furnishings. Under the assumption that this tropical artifact was the key not only for Giedion characterization for modern domesticity, but also for the introduction of a lifestyle characterized by flexibility, mobility and life outdoor. Continuities between an ‘anonymous’ object like that, and the sphere of modern design, where also have functioned as a medium through which to restore the unity between thought and feeling, as well as uncertainties that produced the postwar on the role of technique.

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley

Reviewed by: Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley Ulrike Wöhr Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan. By Jan Bardsley. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 224 pages. Hardcover £58.50/$112.00; softcover £24.99/$39.95. This well-written and timely book comes at a moment in history when U.S.-Japan relations, Japan’s postwar democracy, and Japan’s role in the world are at a new stage of social and political contestation, within and beyond Japan. Jan Bardsley provides a fascinating view of cultural politics of the 1950s that shaped the value system and the social order of postwar Japan as well as powerful discourses of national identity. Her analyses of representations of women and, in particular, the postwar ideal of the Japanese housewife, highlight the centrality of gender in these discursive processes. Bardsley focuses on the 1950s as a juncture “when [gender roles] could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model” (p. 5). She approaches the housewife (shufu) as a postwar icon of Japanese modernity connoting democratic progress and economic recovery, on the one hand, and modern domesticity, on the other. The housewife is, thus, comparable to earlier and similarly controversial constructs of femininity, such as the girl student (jogakusei), the new woman (atarashii onna), and the modern girl (modan gāru, or moga). In other words, the postwar housewife was, in her time, the latest in a series of female icons at the center of twentieth-century discourses of Japaneseness. The book, as its title suggests, understands 1950s representations of the housewife to be inseparably intertwined with discourses and power structures pertaining to the Cold War. Indeed, Cold War economic and cultural politics continued to hold up the ideal of the modern, emancipated, and sexually attractive American housewife even after the end of Japan’s Allied Occupation (1952), and while Japanese women were exhorted to emulate this model, Japanese men were denounced as a hindrance to women’s emancipation. The author traces the processes and products of such transnational gender politics in a range of sources—texts of various genres from women’s magazines, newspaper reportage, and visual images including photographs and cartoons. Her textual analysis “recreat[es] the theater” of five major disputes, or issues, she singles out from these sources and reconstructs the images and meanings that were attached to the housewife in these [End Page 247] controversies (p. 5). While Bardsley thus treats the housewife in the abstract, as a discursive phenomenon, her narrative also features flesh-and-blood housewives—most of whom identify themselves as such. These women inhabit the “contact zone” (discussed below) of 1950s Japan and participate in negotiations of “competing domesticities” (p. 2) as actors and/or objects in the debate. The introduction (chapter 1) begins with a short look at a 1959 Time magazine feature article on the emancipation of Japanese women, thus highlighting the transnational character of the book’s research subject and approach. As told in the magazine, this process of emancipation—which culminated in the wedding of Crown Princess (and now Empress) Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the royal family—owed its success to the American-led Occupation of Japan. Bardsley then takes up the social and political reality of housewives both in Japan and the United States and introduces the reader to the Cold War rhetoric of American domesticity as well as to a view of early postwar Japan through the lens of Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” (p. 11). The final part of the introduction argues for the current relevance of Bardsley’s research by pointing out the persistence of competing narratives that evolved or gained prominence in the late 1950s. Among these are the notion of Japanese women being in need of foreign rescue from oppressive Japanese men; the idea of the Japanese housewife as a symbol and guarantor of public order and national identity by virtue of her very domesticity; and, not least, images of royal women and beauty queens as personifications of these contradictory concepts of femininity. Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 6 provide in-depth analyses of single issues that each...

Taming and Training Greek “Peasant Girls” and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s–1960s

Drawing on the voluminous government records as well as selective interviews in a large oral history archive created over several years, this article explores Canada's recruitment of Greek female domestics in the 1950s and early 1960s within the context of the feminist scholarship on female labour schemes as well as more recent whiteness literature on the in-between racial status of peripheral Europeans. In considering the contradictory features of a large but little-known labour scheme through which more than ten thousand Greek women arrived, many of them before their families, it documents the role of the bureaucrats – who envisioned the domestics' transformation into models of modern domesticity while portraying them as victims of their patriarchal communities and manipulators of Canadian immigration policy – and that of the women who negotiated various challenges. To account for the scheme's remarkable longevity, a key argument probes the mix of factors that repositioned a traditionally non-preferred Southern European group of women into a desirable white source of immigrant labour and future Canadian motherhood. Ultimately, Greek women enjoyed a racial privilege and mobility not afforded to later arriving women from the Caribbean and Philippines.

Imported but not delivered: the construction of modern domesticity and the spatial politics of mass housing in 1930s' Ankara

The social history of the ‘modern house’ in the early years of the Turkish Republic has predominantly been told as the story of the affluent. This group's residential, professional and entertainment culture became a prime marker of modernisation whereas Turkish architectural historians have limited their research largely to the ‘cubic style’ single family houses built for and by the upper and middle classes. But can these models explain the complexity of the ‘modern house’ in 1930s' Turkey? How did architectural layouts, when transferred to different social, cultural and spatial contexts, contribute to the production of gendered divisions? My article adopts domesticity, gender and class as a framework to identify the emergence of ‘indigenous’ forms of modern architecture and urbanism in early republican Ankara. Analysing the Workers' Houses Settlement (1938), I argue that although individual units were characterised by minimalised spatial configurations, the layouts significantly deviated from Western models. Furthermore, by appropriating localised building traditions and living with extended families, lower-income residents shifted the widely disseminated image of the middle-class ideal of domesticity imported from Central and Western Europe, which has become integral to Turkey's official discourse of modernism since the 1930s.

National Domesticity: “The Fairy Way of Writing”

AbstractMichael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity is a powerful account of early modern culture partly because of its abandonment of the traditional (Marxist) association of domesticity with the bourgeoisie. However, the book’s scrupulous avoidance of anachronistic ideological terms of analysis also seems to entail a relative lack of interest in nationalism, which is arguably emerging in the period. This paper argues for the relevance of the emergence of a national literary imaginary as a version of early modern domesticity.

The Scientific and Hygienic Housewife-and-Mother: Education, Consumption and the Discourse of Domesticity

This article examines the development of a discourse on modern domesticity in colonial Burma that not only emphasized the role of a woman in safeguarding the health and welfare of her family and nation, but also associated housewifery and motherhood with “domestic science,” medicine, and hygienic behavior. The article shows that two cultural and didactic institutions, one formal and the other informal, served to disseminate this discourse on modern domesticity: “secular” government-funded co-educational schools and the popular press. It reveals that the emergence of the ideal of the scientific and hygienic housewife-and-mother was not simply an effect of a unilateral and hegemonic process of imperialism. Rather, it is best understood as a phenomenon informed simultaneously and conjointly by “Western” and cosmopolitan notions of scientific progress, bodily discipline and hygiene, bourgeois femininity, and health technologies, and the rise of consumer culture, aided by the spread of illustrated printed material, especially advertisements.

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.

Suburban Studies and College Writing

An ecocompositional turn to suburban studies can help unlock the wider promise of environmentally oriented composition curricula by encouraging student writers to reevaluate the language in which they describe their world. As the embodiment of modern domesticity, suburban life dramatizes the fundamental role of place in the construction of writers' subjectivity.

The Representation of Modern Domesticity in the Belgian Section of the Brussels World's Fair of 1958

In many Western countries the post-war period, up to the end of the 1950s, was characterized by a broad social, political and cultural debate about ideal or 'good' modern living. This debate had its roots in the period between the wars, but developed extensively after the war, owing to the enormous housing demand and expanding industrialization. This article aims to shed light on the lesser-known dissemination of modernist housing models in Belgium in the 1950s. More specifically, it focuses on the representation of domestic ideals in the Belgian Section of the Brussels World's Fair of 1958, an important breakthrough in the slowly developing popularization of contemporary design in Belgium. Several participants in the debate on good homes were present in the Belgian Section of the Brussels World's Fair the Institut National du Logement , national societies for architects and building firms, a selection of avant-garde designers, etc. The presentations by these actors, clustered into several 'groups', reveal a set of independent approaches to the home. It is the thesis of this article that this heterogeneous promotion of modern domesticity in the Belgian Section of Expo 58 tellingly reflects the then fragmented national discourse on contemporary living.

Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting

Shakespeare, Vermeer, Lope de Vega, Moliere, and Diderot don't usually keep company with one another. But in this book, Richard Helgerson shows that each contributed to a common project of great significance: the artistic promotion of the middle-class home. In a study that stretches over two centuries, Helgerson looks beneath European drama and painting to reveal an unexpected prehistory of modern domesticity.

“She Is Hostile to Our Ways”: First Nations Girls Sentenced to the Ontario Training School for Girls, 1933–1960

When industrial schools were initially proposed in late nineteenth-century Canada, they were perceived to be a common solution for the neglected and delinquent working-class boy of the urban slums and for the Aboriginal boy in need of similar education, discipline, and moral and vocational training. This undertaking briefly encapsulated the twinned aims of Canada's nation-building project: to civilize and acculturate both the poor and the colonized to middle-class, Western, white and Anglo norms. As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff remark of nineteenth-century British imperialism, the taming of the “uncivilised and immoral” indigenous African and British slum dweller were overlapping projects, with the “primitive and the pauper” seen as “one in spirit. …the sacred task of the colonizing mission was to reconstruct the home lives of both” by inculcating in their daily lives the bourgeois values of “modern domesticity.”

Good Wives and Unfaithful Men: Gender Negotiations and Sexual Conflicts in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1964 –1973

Good Wives and Unfaithful Men: Gender Negotiations and Sexual Conflicts in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1964 –1973