The Making of Home Read online

  Preserving was, in any case, increasingly less necessary. New transit networks and the more widespread availability of processed and preserved foods in the later nineteenth century improved nutrition without the necessity for home preserving. Public health also improved, as sewage systems and in time the internal combustion engine cleansed cities of dung. These developments were well outside the control of any individual, yet as health improved generally, it became a commodity to be sold back to the housewife, putting the responsibility for her family’s welfare firmly back into her lap. As electricity and gas replaced fires, cities were becoming cleaner than they had ever been, so clean that soap manufacturers faced a crisis: their product was being bought less, and used less, because there was less perceived dirt. In the early decades of the twentieth century in the USA, several manufacturers came together to promote ‘the business of cleanliness’, ostensibly an educational programme, more realistically a commercial strategy to boost demand for their products. They funded pamphlets that extolled the benefits of hand-washing, supplied free ‘Cleanliness Teaching’ packs to schools, and they published the Cleanliness Journal, available at no charge to teachers and civic leaders. At the same time, their advertising promised financial success only to those who reached new levels of cleanliness – bad breath, or (a new term) ‘body odour’, or yellow teeth, would, they warned, stand in the way of promotion, or salary increases, or even any employment at all. These advertisements were not, however, aimed at men, but at their wives at home. It was their job to send their men out to work each day meeting the new standards advocated by the companies, and swiftly assimilated by consumers as a societal norm. By the 1920s, daytime radio shows were sponsored by soap companies and manufacturers of cleaning products: the soap-opera was for the buyers of soap, and for those who enforced its use within the home. Cleanliness – soap – and the housewife had become inextricably linked. By the 1940s, middle-class hygiene, both personal and household, had changed beyond recognition. Deodorant, soap and toothpaste were the bare minimum – no more quick rubdowns with a towel. And that was on the personal level. In the home, too, all the rooms were to be cleaned out once a week, bathrooms and kitchens scrubbed down daily, while laundry occupied at least two days a week.

  For those not yet of the middle classes, cleanliness was promoted as an enabler of social mobility. In the USA it also promised assimilation, whether of class, race or nationality. The African-American educator and rights leader Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) preached what he named the ‘gospel of the toothbrush’, a way, although he didn’t articulate it as such, perhaps even to himself, for African-Americans to demonstrate their Americanness. Christine Frederick held a similar view. In The New Housekeeping she lauded ‘domestic science classes, model kitchens and tenements … night schools and mission classes’, all of which taught ‘the poor how to transmute their old-world ignorance into the shining knowledge of the new hemisphere’. She automatically assumed that the poor were of the ‘old-world’, that is, immigrants, which by default suggested that native-born Americans were prosperous, and modern, and not in need of teaching. To be clean was to be American.

  In Germany, too, it had long been received wisdom that German houses were cleaner than those of other countries. After unification in 1871, the superiority of German housekeeping became part of a new sense of nationhood. Belonging was inculcated by the disparagement of housekeeping in other countries or cultures: ‘Polish management’, or ‘It looks like Hottentots live here’. Housewifery had long been part of German girls’ formal schooling, after which many worked in the house of a relative or friend to refine their skills. From 1913, girls did an additional mandatory school year, in which they studied ‘those virtues that should adorn every housewife: cleanliness and orderliness, thriftiness and industriousness, simplicity and good taste’ to the exclusion of everything else. World War I brought the government into every kitchen, as rationing, food distribution and central control of both prices and ingredients – the government’s K-bread was named for both Krieg (war) and its main ingredient, Kartoffel (potato) – made housekeeping an act of ‘service to the country, defence of the country, and a form of citizenship’.

  The connection between good housekeeping and good citizenship only grew stronger as the century progressed. Bad housekeepers might be viewed as immoral, criminal, even politically suspect. Under the Nazis, the Mother Cross was awarded both to women who had borne a specified number of children (the Soviets celebrated their Heroine Mothers in a similar fashion), and to women who reached high standards of housekeeping; there were campaigns to ‘re-shape household consumption’; and, more horrifyingly, the Hashude Educational Settlement was established in Bremen. This ‘re-education camp’ forcibly detained ‘asocial’ families behind barbed wire in order to inculcate the women with right-thinking methods of ‘household management, particularly how clean they keep their homes’. Domestic arrangements were checked daily, and families were not released until the husband was in regular work and the wife kept house in a manner deemed satisfactory by her supervisors, the two pillars of a ‘respectable’ household.

  This was an aberration, but it was a natural development (if unnatural application) of half a century of laying an ever-rising importance on the invisible commodities of hygiene, nutrition and good housekeeping. The wellbeing of a house’s residents was increasingly seen as a matter that could be controlled through hard work, or the application of scientific knowledge. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the site of the house itself had also become a factor to be considered. The coal fires of the Industrial Revolution had created cities with notably poor air quality, and health was therefore to be found in a visit to the seaside, or the mountains, or just the countryside more generally. Such trips were thought to be sure routes to ameliorating many of the ailments caused by poor air, poor water and the other inconveniences of urban living. If visiting the country was good for the health, obviously living there was even better. The arrival of new modes of transport as the century progressed – trains, omnibuses – and better roads made living further away from their new places of work possible for some of the middle classes. And as the idea of separate spheres for men and women, public and private, developed, so did this new ideal of home, away from built-up areas, seem to be a way of achieving segregation. Within half a century, for many, the suburban idyll had become the template of the ideal home.

  The earliest suburbs were not extensions to cities, built on their outskirts, but were separate developments, as garden-city developments were later to be. In the USA, enclaves of upper-middle-class housing had existed from the 1850s. Home countries had similar settlements, but these mostly on city outskirts. All of them, however, were limited to those who could afford their own transport, always a very small proportion of the population. Over subsequent decades in the USA, a sharp increase in population after the Civil War gave an impetus to new building. For the first time, the choice of housing for many more of the population was not limited to a stark choice between rural and urban. Instead suburban living was seen as a desirable halfway house, offering the benefits of country air, lower rents and less crowded conditions, together with relatively quick access to shops and offices via the constantly expanding forms of mass transit. New roads were built to open up previously inaccessible land and the railways made commuting possible for those who could never have afforded their own carriages.

  The attractions of suburbia were not merely a matter of health, or cost, but had an emotional resonance that went far beyond the reality of any suburban ‘cottage’. And the source of this was derived in part from changing attitudes towards the land. In the USA, in fairly recent history the wilderness had first been a place to be feared, then one to be tamed. By the nineteenth century, even as new tracts of the country continued to be settled, the idea of the land was now being reimagined, and artists and writers such as Frederick Church and James Fenimore Cooper were – to great popular success – hymning the wonders of the u
nspoiled natural world, as the Romantics had done in Britain a few decades earlier. By 1864, as Yosemite Valley came under governmental protection, to be preserved ‘for public use, resort, and recreation’, it was possible to believe that all the wilderness might one day be regulated, no longer frighteningly limitless, but legislatively bounded. In Britain, allowing for smaller distances and a tamer wilderness, a comparable shift in attitudes was under way. The countryside had been the province of the elite – first owned by the gentry, then adopted intellectually, if not physically, by middle-class professionals, the readers of the Lake Poets, who venerated these unbuilt spaces as their own Arcadia. As the century progressed, railways and mass tourism opened up regions such as the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District to a mass market, turning them into holiday locations for a wider populace. In both countries, the taming of these areas was a joint enterprise of government and private industry. In the USA, railway companies and the army frequently operated together in opening up and managing the land, and the National Park Service came into being in 1916. In Britain, the Commons Preservation Society was founded in 1865, which aimed to protect open spaces being encroached on by urban building, and included Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon Common, some 3,000 acres of Epping Forest and parts of Ashdown Forest and the New Forest. The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty, a private trust, was founded in 1895, initially also concerned with protecting open spaces. By the early twentieth century, it was a commonplace that access to the countryside was something that benefitted everyone. Outdoor living was encouraged for city children, to make them hale and responsible citizens. The Woodcraft League in the USA (1902), the Boy Scouts (from 1908) and Girl Guides (1910) were just a few of the groups that promoted this equation.

  Although the countries are dramatically different in size, population density and therefore in the levels of wild and domesticated landscapes, the ideals of suburban living in Britain and the USA developed in tandem, and each influenced the other. The father of the garden-city movement, Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), as a young man abandoned his job as a clerk in the City of London and sailed to the USA. He attempted to settle a homestead claim in Nebraska in the 1870s, and when it failed, he moved to Chicago just as the city parks were being laid out, the town reimagined as a ‘garden city’. By 1889, Howard was back in London and planning a community, first named Unionville, then Rurisville and finally Garden City. It was 1903, however, before his First Garden City company raised the money to buy land in Hertfordshire, and work on the first British garden city, at Letchworth, commenced. Howard’s ideas were more widely popularized in his book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (later retitled, and more famous as, Garden Cities of To-morrow), where he outlined his vision for the garden city. The ideal community, Howard wrote, was one with space for industry, for commerce and for housing, a community that was purposefully limited in size, and that would always remain surrounded by large swathes of green, unspoiled land.

  Howard’s dream had, in some elements, been preceded by those model workers’ villages established by a handful of benevolent, patriarchal industrialists who had also been persuaded of the benefits of a combination of fresh air and employment. Saltaire was established in Yorkshire in 1851 by the woollen industrialist Titus Salt, and at the end of the century Port Sunlight near Liverpool, and Bournville, outside Birmingham, were built by the owners of Lever Brothers and Cadbury respectively. This was not entirely new. In the eighteenth century, Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory near Birmingham had provided workers with housing, as had Josiah Wedgwood’s Etruria Works in Staffordshire. The difference between these villages and the garden cities was one of scale, and that now these working-class enclaves were being mirrored by settlements for the middle classes.

  But working-class enclaves, dependent on employment with a specific employer, were not what most people meant when they spoke of suburbs. Early suburbs in Britain that were planned, rather than those that had simply evolved, were intended, as Howard had hoped, as mixed housing for residents with a range of incomes. This was the initial intention for Bedford Park, in west London, designed in the 1870s by the architects Norman Shaw and E. W. Godwin. But, like many such projects, idealism proved to outrun the money available from private investment, and the area was ultimately entirely populated by the professional middle classes. Even Howard’s own Letchworth garden city was to see financial considerations outweigh its visionary origins, as high infrastructure costs ensured that the houses were entirely bought by the middle classes. Similar housing projects in the USA, clustering outside Boston, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland and across the country to Los Angeles, soon produced communities that were remarkably uniform in background and income. Many suburbs had their own individual profile – in type of workers, average salary, location of work, commuting routes, class, race. There were suburbs for clerks, suburbs for professionals, suburbs for the wealthy, all newly constructed communities of homogeneity.

  Furthermore, Howard and his two influential designers, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, had not only envisaged a mixed community, but had also expected to integrate housing with commercial and light industrial premises. This, too, rarely became reality. The standard nineteenth-century suburb was far more frequently planned, in Britain often by a single landlord, as entirely residential, with all industry and commerce – indeed work of any type, including shops – firmly kept outside its borders. Many suburban leases even contained clauses that prevented householders from conducting any professional activities at home. William Morris despaired of the subsequent deadness of rows of ‘villas and nothing but villas save a chemist’s shop and a dry [non-alcoholic] public house’. This was the notion of separate spheres made a physical reality: nothing that was public was to impinge on these rows of private spaces.

  Yet just as the home, the private sphere, was in reality commonly a place of work, so too these suburban communities, superficially so isolated and inward turning, the model of independent living, were built on – and dependent on – networks of connections to the greater world. The suburb was presented as a freestanding community, a place of privacy and chosen isolation for its residents. Yet without governmental involvement, suburbs simply could not exist. From the first communities, government investment in irrigation, canal-building, sewerage, roads, mass transportation, gas supply and electrification laid the foundations for the deep infrastructure without which suburbs could neither come into being, nor survive. And in the twentieth century, government involvement in suburban development expanded even further. By the end of World War I, the British government played a part in building nearly 60 per cent of all housing in the country; twenty years later, of the 4 million new houses erected, the government was directly responsible for building 1.5 million, and had financed many hundreds of thousands more. In Germany, as we have seen, new social housing was one of the Weimar Republic’s driving forces. And in America, suburbs existed at all only because of intensive, and expensive, government involvement. There were the same infrastructure investments as in Britain: roads, sewers, gas, light, transport. In addition, the government increased its financial support of suburbs throughout the twentieth century: in the 1930s, low-income loans to remortgage the houses of families devastated by the Depression saved thousands of communities; after the war, returning soldiers were eligible for government loans for down-payments on their first homes; and wartime government production and research – the development of aluminium, prefabricated construction techniques – were turned over to private companies, the equivalent of a $50 billion investment by the government in private home-building industries. Over the following decades, the government funded architectural designs and drew up business plans for small developers, which it made available to builders at no cost.

  This involvement had implications for the overall appearance of the new suburbs. In the nineteenth century, the preferred style for suburban housing had been a highly modified Gothic, a style that, under the influ
ence of the Romantic movement, had become associated with the natural world. Neo-Gothic housing, however, was neither particularly utilitarian, nor did it lend itself to mass replication. Once suburbs were no longer confined to the upper-middle classes, therefore, the style was no longer viable financially, nor by this time aesthetically desirable either. By the early twentieth century in the USA, most of the financing of suburban building was predicated on the economics of prefab housing. Everything possible was done in the factory – the plumbing assembled, the lumber cut – and 80 per cent of the building work was completed before the contractors arrived at the building site. With the houses built on concrete slabs with no, or only a small, cellar, onsite work took as little as two weeks. Most builders were small contractors, building fewer than 100 houses a year, but William Levitt, the ‘King of Suburbia’, was the mighty exception. His company built 17,000 houses on Long Island in the late 1940s, as homes for returning GIs; another 22,000 in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the following decade; and more in Illinois and Maryland. By his saturation of the market, Levitt’s architectural decisions became the standard, many others following his lead, and making the Levitt visual style virtually an American shorthand for ‘suburb’. Levittown, on Long Island, reduced choices to a minimum, offering two styles, a heavily simplified Cape Cod, and a ranch house, which the English call a bungalow. With a single storey, usually covered in wood, stucco, shingle or clapboards, a wide, low, pitched roof often overhanging a porch, the ranch house was a rejection of Victorian two- and three-storey houses, which were now widely viewed as overly formal, even staid. Despite Levitt’s and his fellow builders’ reliance on prefabrication and mass production, the ranch house was nevertheless read as ‘natural’, or ‘informal’, an epitome, even in its suburban rows, of ‘country living’. This reading enabled it to be perceived as both anti-commercial and anti-consumerist in a way more traditional houses were not, even though the single-storey buildings required more land than traditional two-storey houses did, and were thus ultimately more expensive.