Home Strategy

The ideas of the Industrial Revolution brought much confusion to the roles of both women and the home. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there were defined roles to both men and women. Men were the breadwinners and worked outside of the home, mostly in an agricultural setting. Women were responsible for all things that revolved around the home, including the raising of children. However, when the Industrial Revolution set in, the movement of society towards the city and the increase in industrial jobs brought into question these roles. “Industrial development wastransforming allother work and workplaces, and it was expected that domestic work and residential environments would be transformed as well” (Hayden, 85). This call for change brought forward many reformersleaving three main strategic options for how to adjust (or avoid change) in this new era: the haven strategy, the industrial strategy, and finally the neighborhood strategy. Some of these were more adopted than others.

The leading proponent of the haven strategy was Catharine Beecher, who wanted to maintain the current role of the woman within the home and glorify her position and improve upon it. She proposed to do this greatly through improving the design of the workspaces within the home. By giving her a more efficient kitchen (with a stove!) and the much-appreciated technologies of running water and heating she could become more efficient in her duties as a wife and mother. It was her responsibility to provide everything her husband and children needed, emotional support included.

“For she, with harmonizing will,

Her pleasures in her duties found,

And strove, with still advancing skill

To make her home’s secluded bound

An Eden refuge, sweet and blest,

When weary, he returned for rest”

(76, Wright).

(Picture to right: Woman Greeting Her Husband)

In the opinion of those proponents of the haven strategy, the perfect spatial area for this was a “cottage in a garden” (89, Hayden). “Each house needed separate areas for family social life, personal privacy, and household production. The frequent use of the phrase “work room”…indicates that in most rural families, the wife and daughters spent much of their time there” (Wright, 77).

(Picture to Left: House Outline from Beecher)

A second, quite different strategy created by August Bebel, a Marxist thinker, was called the industrial strategy. This strategy represents very clearly a socialist states way of thinking. In this strategy the woman’s domestic role is completely abolished. He suggested that in the future everything would be communal. No house will have a kitchen, because instead there will be large mess halls were all families would eat a prepared meal together and there would even me large laundries that did everyone’s laundry. The duties of a housewife would be no more; instead she would join industrialized society. Even her duties as a mother would be taken over by national nurseries and daycares. “The effects of industrialization would be general, and women would share in the gains and losses with men, although their new factory work would probably be occupationally segregated labor in the laundry or the pie factory” (Hayden, 89).

(Picture to the left: Women Under Socialism Cover)

(Video above: Etsy, "There's No Place Like Here: Communal Living with Nikki Silva")

The last of these proposed strategies could be seen more as a middle ground between the other two, known as the neighborhood strategy, started by Melusina Fay Peirce. This argument empowered women yet, maintained their domestic duties. Proponents of this strategy argued that women should be paid for the work they do in the home. “I demand for the wife who acts as cook, as nursery-maid, or seamstress, or all three, fair wages, or her rightful share in net income”(Hayden, 91). She stressed an organizing of women, with this was proposed a neighborhood workplace, where all the women of the community would get together and display their talents in the areas they were most skilled, they would then be paid for their duties. The use of technology (like industrial washing machines) would be used in this workplace. This strategy guaranteed the economic independence of women.

These three models are all very different; however have theirsimilarities. For example, they all dismiss the idea of mans role in the domestic world. They all also keep the home separate from the rest of the domestic world. In turn all of these models have left women in disadvantaged societal roles.

(Picture Above: Life as We Know It)

Work Cited

Etsy. There’s No Place Like Here: Communal Living With Nikki Silva. YouTube.com. etsy.com, 23 Sept. 2009. Web. 2 Mar. 2012. .

Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning The American Dream. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. Print.

House Outline From Beecher. N.d. Xroads Virginia. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2012. .

Life As We Know It. N.d. Cut Print Review. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2012. .

Woman Greeting Husband. N.d. Victoriana. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2012. .

Women Under Socialism Cover. N.d. Gutenberg. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2012. .

Wright, Gwendolyn. Building The Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983. Print.