The Making of Home

Well into the second half of the twentieth century, the difference between respectable and not-respectable working-class households ‘concern only household economy, which is largely the wives’ affair’, and was measured by whether the family ate off a bare table or used a cloth, or used china dishes or tin, had ‘cooked meals, clean clothes’ or managed without owing money to the local tradesmen, a list that slides almost imperceptibly from purchased goods to the intangible, invisible commodities of nutrition, hygiene and thrift.

And visible hygiene was not merely an indicator of rank, or cash. It had become yet another way of distinguishing public and private

As more became available, the marker of status was now less a matter of owning such garments, than it was in keeping them white – that is, visibly clean.

Many of the architects and urban planners were inspired by left-wing ideas; at the same time, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, living conditions were also a matter of concern for many conservative women’s groups, worried by the ‘decline’ of the German housewife, and the consequent effect that the decline was said to be having on the birth rate.

that was beginning to happen. Childhood was becoming the centre of what a home was perceived to be, a place where children were kept apart from the contaminations of the world

At home, children were expected to adapt their lives to adults’, not the other way around.

Until you do this you can have no real weight or influence in society’. That ‘home’, of course, would be nothing more than a house until it was furnished, and furnishings alone were not enough. Cabell would only maintain the necessary social cachet if the interiors and objects were displayed to the right people

as the house, and the housewife, became increasingly isolated, housework became increasingly subject to scrutiny from outside

To believe that they had a full, physical reality, creating borders between home and not-home, between public and private, is comparable to believing that a nation’s borders are a painted line on the ground, which has been there since the creation of the world.

As we saw, with the enclosure of land, and in the early days of industrialization, even before the full development of the Industrial Revolution, men had become cash earners, while women’s economic contributions had appeared to diminish.