The Making of Home Read online

  Across the Channel, the home as a shelter, especially for women, was, briefly, retrograde among the ideological ferment of revolution for a brief period after Pitt’s speech. In the late 1780s and into the 1790s and the early days of the French Revolution, several Revolutionary clubs, including the Jacobins, had welcomed women as audiences for their debates. After all, women were fellow citizens. But this was not to last. In 1793, at the height of the Revolutionary Terror, the Jacobin Fabre d’Eglantine inveighed against those very same women appearing in such public arenas. These women were not ‘mothers of families, daughters of families, sisters occupied with their younger brothers or sisters’, but instead could only be ‘adventuresses, knights-errant, emancipated women, and amazons’, and the clubs that admitted them were guilty of subverting the natural order: women belonged in a family setting.

  The Catholic theologians who wrote on the subject of original sin generally treated it as an aspect of sexual desire, an adult concern. In contrast, Martin Luther and, after him, John Calvin, gave much consideration to the idea of original sin, and, treating it as a ‘hereditary depravity’ passed on at conception, turned it from being an adult wrong to being the inheritance of every child. Baptism was the first step towards its eradication, but that had to be followed by education, and behavioural control, matters of discipline and rigour: sparing the rod spoiled the child. In Calvinism, education had a crucial role in extirpating hereditary sin, while to Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century, it became paramount. John Locke, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), had already moved down this path: ‘of all the Men we meet with, Nine parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education. ’Tis that which makes the great difference in Mankind.’ The child was a tabula rasa, born clean and innocent, an innocence that was all too easily lost by coming into contact with the corrupt world. Educating a child was therefore less a matter of inculcating knowledge than it was of preventing the child from acquiring the wrong sort of knowledge. This was the background on which Rousseau built his theories of child-rearing, which became widespread through his hugely popular Émile, or, On Education (1762). Rousseau’s book promised that women who raised their boys according to these educational and behavioural precepts, while keeping the world at bay until they were strong enough to confront it, would mould future men of honour and sensibility. And while Émile’s narrator at points heartily rejected bookish learning for children – ‘I hate books!’ – he makes an exception for ‘the happiest treatise on natural education’, Robinson Crusoe. Desert islands were not a viable location for most readers, but the concept of a protected, private space became a fundamental of child-rearing, and by the nineteenth century Crusoe’s isolation was held up as an example: Coleridge thought the fictional character was what all men might have been had they not been tainted by society.

  It became increasingly accepted that a woman’s primary duty was no longer to act as her husband’s partner, but as her child’s mother. This was her fundamental role, to train her children to be their own Crusoes, with the home as their desert island. From the safety of this isolated location, boys would learn the skills that would enable them to leave their desert island homes and enter the outside world, while girls learned to guide more Crusoes when their turn came, ‘to educate them when [they are] young, to care for them when [they are] grown … to make their lives agreeable and sweet at all times – these are the duties of women at all times’. While many of Rousseau’s suggestions for child-rearing were revolutionary – he supplanted rote-learning with child-initiated discovery through play, for example – his view of girls and women was in step with that of both the church and middle-class society as a whole. In 1797, Thomas Gisborne, a Church of England clergyman, sounded little different from the radical philosopher as he outlined women’s subordinate role: women’s duty was to ‘daily and hourly’ think of ways to increase ‘the comfort of husbands, of parents, of brothers and sisters … connections and friends, in the intercourse of domestic life’. Rousseau put women at the centre of their children’s upbringing; the church confirmed their roles as gatekeepers to Crusoe’s island, the family home, as a place where their own weaker natures could be permanently sheltered, and where, finally, men could find solace and renewal, where they could temporarily be protected from the hurly-burly of commercial life, or the sinfulness of male sociability, by those whose job it now was, not to share their burdens, but to ‘make their lives agreeable and sweet’.

  The fierce rigidity with which these ideas were embraced was unsurprising in a world that was rapidly changing, and therefore felt unstable. Women’s withdrawal from the public sphere began to seem natural and right. For centuries the words ‘economy’ and ‘household’ had been interchangeable. The household had been a self-sustaining unit designed to keep its family members fed, clothed and sheltered, to rear children and train them to hand on, in turn, the skills needed to keep their own children fed, clothed and sheltered: the entire family worked together to this end. Tasks were gendered – in agricultural areas, men ploughed, women reared chickens; in shops and taverns, men did the purchasing, while women waited on customers; craftsmen kept for themselves the high-skilled, or brute-strength, elements of their trades, while their wives took on the more delicate, or the more routine, elements.

  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. Men began to be perceived as the family’s main, even only, providers. Yet barely had this financial change occurred, than industrialization altered men’s status once more, whether in the working class as cash earners, the upper class as property-owners, or the middle class as professionals, or the managers of trades or businesses. Now merchants and industrialists became a new caste, a challenge to the landed and professional classes of old. Even the status that all men assumed, as the head of the family, was less secure. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the new factories employed more women than men; together with the increase in domestic service, women were once more earning cash for their labour as they had in pre-industrial times. Children’s roles, too, had altered. In peasant societies children were financial burdens on their families until they were in their mid- to late teens. The economic value of the tasks they were able to perform were always less than the cost of their food, lodging and clothes, as well as whatever education they might receive. With the development of proto-industrial society and the spread of home-based piecework, children had contributed more, and earlier; with the coming of the factory system, however, children were often the first hires, both their small hands and their malleable characters being of value.

  As the workforce was reshaped by the Industrial Revolution, therefore, so too was the home. Among the middle ranks, professional life for men was expanding, allowing them to earn sufficient to enable their wives and children to relinquish paid labour, whether outside the house, or from traditional work such as poultry-keeping and dairying. At the same time, men’s work migrated from their homes to offices, counting-houses and other specialized locations, and their apprentices naturally followed. Fewer rural workers too were housed by their employers, instead being paid in cash and finding their own lodgings. More and more, homes therefore housed a nuclear family alone, or, at most, a family and a few servants. Houses were becoming places for those related by blood.

  Given this instability, this level of change, it was very natural that a belief-system developed to explain why the new living pattern was in fact an old one, and the only one possible. Men, according to this theory of gender roles, were designed by God to perform one set of functions, women another, and each most usefully did so when they operated in their own ‘separate sphere’. This notion was disseminated through sermons, educational literature, novels, magazines and journals. Yet it is of course entirely possible to believe one thing absolutely, while
living in a fashion that contradicts it entirely. And so it proved. On a day-to-day basis, separate spheres were adhered to only insofar as the variables of geography, circumstances, class, income, status and personal volition permitted.

  Because the ‘separate spheres’ were never more than an idea, and an idea for the prosperous. 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. The spheres were in practice permeated routinely. Many women worked in the public sphere: in shops, inns, and in many trades. The private sphere meanwhile was a worksite where employees – domestic servants – were trained, supervised and paid by an employer – the very women whose house was, ostensibly, sheltering her from the world of work. Some societies have physically cloistered women, but in nineteenth-century home countries, the women who were supposedly comfortable only in the private sphere in reality spent a great deal of their days in public spaces, whether on trains and buses, or in shops and theatres and eating-places. Some places were an ambiguous combination of public and private. Men’s clubs, nominally public spaces, were designed to resemble upper-class private houses. Shops and hotels and first-class railway carriages, also all in the public sphere, were customarily furnished to look like private parlours, making them pretend privacies where nominally home-bound women could take part in the public world without openly occupying male space. A journalist in 1854 recommended to his women readers in New York that, ‘if slightly fatigued’, they should head for the lobby of a hotel on Fifth Avenue. ‘Here … we feel at “home”.’ While many spaces in the public sphere took on the appearance of private spaces, so too did private spaces adopt elements of those that were public. The parlour in particular, with its furniture in matching sets, a room of unused chairs and tables, of display, drew heavily on the appearance of hotel lobbies.

  For whatever the theory, in reality the home was never, and could never be, a non-commercial private space. Nineteenth-century houses contained far more people than twentieth-century ones do. They were filled with more children, more servants, with lodgers and boarders. And through them daily passed an endless procession of people who carried work and services directly into this supposed private sphere: delivery boys for butchers, bakers, dairies and greengrocers; sellers of household goods and equipment; menders and repairers; buyers of old clothes, rags and other items of what today is called recycling; even entertainers who performed on the pavement outside. Despite the theory of home being a refuge from commerce, the reality was that the house, daily filled with employees and subcontractors, remained as much a worksite as it had been when the craftsman and his family earned their living there.

  Perhaps because of this unacknowledged reality, developments in house layouts for the more prosperous in many home countries increasingly suggested a desire to establish areas that were for family only, a recognition that the ‘separate sphere’ of the home was routinely breached by outsiders. Robert Walpole’s redesign of Houghton Hall was what could be done if money and space were liberally available. Among the wider population architectural alterations on a smaller scale gave houses both public and private faces. In the USA yards now began to be fenced in. No longer just areas where waste was stored, they were being turned into gardens for the use of those who lived inside: private outdoor areas, not public ones. Once past the yard, in both Britain and the USA, the hall-and-parlour house, with its front door opening directly into the main room, mixing residents and visitors together promiscuously, gave way to the I-house, where a porch or veranda filtered visitors before they entered. Inside, the I-house had a central foyer (confusingly also called a hall), which was a second filter, sending incomers to the appropriate area of the house, depending on whether they were guests, family, or servants and tradesmen. Upstairs more generally in many houses, unfinished loft rooms were plastered and partitioned and beds were moved into them, out of the public rooms. The private space for the family had been the main downstairs room. Now that was extended by these even-more-private areas above.

  Such were the houses of the prosperous classes in industrialized areas. Most people, however, had no likelihood of ever experiencing these changes, and the stability of building practice reflected the unchanging domestic circumstances of many householders. For those who lived in less urbanized areas, pre-industrial rhythms continued into the eighteenth century in Britain, and later in much of Germany and Scandinavia. This applied as much to the way the household was run as it did to the way it was organized structurally. As it is difficult to remember today how small houses were in earlier times, so too it is hard to comprehend the sheer labour, and time, involved in keeping that small space functioning. It has been estimated that three to four hours were spent daily on food preparation, an hour to fetch water, an hour to feed the children and keep the fire alight, an hour in the kitchen garden, two to three hours to milk cows and goats, feed chickens or perform other animal husbandry, an hour to clean, an hour spinning and an hour spent looking after the children, teaching them to read and write, or knit and sew: a total of sixteen hours a day. Add in the laundry, which occupied approximately eight hours weekly, and by the time meals were eaten, there was little time to do more than fall into bed in order to get up and do it all over again the following day.

  In many rural areas of the USA, this lifestyle remained standard throughout the nineteenth, and in some places into the twentieth, century, even as the extremes of the climate and the isolation of a scattered population made these already heavy daily routines more onerous than they were elsewhere. The woman’s sphere for those who lived like this was not a matter of creating comfort, as it was perceived by urban writers in technologically advanced London or New York. It was a struggle to ensure survival. In districts just being settled, there were even more tasks. The land had to be cleared before it could provide bare subsistence, and in the meantime the men hunted to feed their families, while the women made butter and cheese and raised chickens for their eggs, as well as sifting ash, used to manufacture soap, and maple sugar, by tapping trees, or spinning or weaving. The goods these activities produced were then bartered for essential items that could not be home-produced: tools, ironmongery, needles.

  Even though tasks were divided along gender lines, and denominated ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’, in reality these tasks were component parts of wider activities to which all ages and genders contributed. Housework was truly the work of the household, for the maintenance of the household. A single example of this interwoven labour can stand in for much of daily life. Most rural families cooked over an open fire, and thus, like generations before them, their diet was primarily various forms of stew. To make the stew, the men trapped or shot and butchered the animals. The women and girls plucked birds and cleaned fish, they carried water for the pot from streams or wells, which had been dug by the men, to cook with vegetables grown by the women and grain grown, harvested, threshed and taken to be milled by the men. The stew then cooked in a fireplace built by the men, over wood they had cut, stacked and carried into the house.* The meal was dished up into wooden trenchers and eaten with wooden spoons, both carved by the men and boys on winter evenings. Afterwards, the women and girls wiped the trenchers clean with rags they had woven if there was enough help available, or not too many small children, or bought if there was enough cash, and shops nearby. They scoured the pot with brushes made of twigs the children had gathered, before sweeping the floor with another twig broom. The men looked after the cows, the women or children milked them, and women made the butter; men grew the grain, women baked the bread; men grew and prepared flax, women spun it. Women and children fetched the water for cooking and daily cleaning, men did it on laundry-day, when up to 400 litres was needed for a week’s wash; women made soap, and braided horsehair or grass for clotheslines, men and boys whittled clothes-pegs.

  The differ
ences in urban, settled areas of the USA and in Europe were differences in kind, with many of these tasks vanishing, work replaced by consumer purchasing, but the partnership and labour divisions remaining constant. In the 1820s in New York, John Pintard earned more than $1,000 a year, which put him among the elite, and yet his wives and daughters made the family’s clothes and cooked; they did carpentry jobs around the house, whitewashed rooms, and even the house’s exterior; they cleared the yard and pruned hedges. Half a century later, Esther Burr, the wife of a minister and college president in New Jersey, had a slave who did the cooking, and hired other help when necessary, but her own jobs included childcare, teaching, nursing, cleaning, laundry, spinning, dressmaking, sewing household items, shopping, entertaining, supervising her husband’s students, who lodged with them, and ‘visiting’ – making social calls – a task she disliked, but which she regarded as her job no less than the laundry. The accounts for many small shops were often intermixed with a family’s household accounts, reflecting the equal contribution of husband, wife and children to both arenas.