A Brief History of the Gender of Home Gardens and Gardening

I like gardening, but I don’t have much of a green thumb.  The way I think of it, sometimes the things I plant “take,” and sometimes they don’t.  Gardens and gardening was never something that I gave much thought to as a topic of sociological analysis until a saw a presentation at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in 2006 that changed my mind.*  I went to a session because Marjorie DeVault was presiding (and I LOVE her work).  It was an interesting panel full of people at all different stages of their careers.  One woman’s presentation dealt with front yard gardens and she convinced me the topic was worthwhile.

Gardens and gardening (particularly domestic gardens and gardening)—as you might imagine—are not topics of study that receive a great deal of attention.  When gardens are mentioned in sociology, it’s often a variable included somewhere in a list of “chores” people do around the house.  Quantitative studies of the division of household labor sometimes have oddly exhaustive lists of chores like this.  But gardens are also a space.  They are places we go to relax (sometimes even while we’re “working”).  Like our homes, they are part of a performance of domestic identity that we labor to keep up.  Gardens are also gendered spaces and gardening, a gendered activity.  Bhatti and Church put it this way,

meanings of gardens are highly gendered, and… the garden is a place within which gender relations are often played out or re-negotiated…  [I]t is necessary, as with studies of the home as a domestic sphere and consumption in the home, to view domestic gardens not simply as sites where man and women adopt different roles, but as places shaped by the continual restructuring of gender relations. (here)

Smoking Rooms – Unintentionally Providing Space for Gender Inequality

In Victorian houses, there are simply too many rooms by modern standards.  The idea was to have a separate room for separate activities, replacing the old idea of simply moving furniture around the room to suit various purposes throughout the day.*  One of the rooms I find fascinating is the “smoking room” in Victorian homes.  Tobacco was sort of a fad in England in the 1800’s, but not everyone was a fan.  Smoking rooms emerged for a few reasons.  Initially, the smell of tobacco was thought odious and people smoked outside.  But gradually, people became accustomed and the practice moved indoors.  Inside the house, smoking rooms became assigned, so I’ve read, because women did not want men smoking throughout the house.  It was a room designed to segregate a very specific activity to one room in the home–a room that was not accidentally situated far away from bedrooms, the kitchen, and dining areas.

Smoking rooms were also outfitted with their own specific interior design.  Perhaps most characteristic of the room was the rampant and excessive use of velvet.  Home owners had velvet curtains made, some of the furniture was upholstered with velvet and smoking jackets were routinely made of velvet as well.  The velvet was thought to absorb smoke to rid its odor from the rest of the house.  It’s also true that smoking really ruined rooms, drapes, upholstery, and more.  So, having it relegated to a single room was probably a good idea practically as well.  Dining rooms were actually initially used for similar reasons (we began to use dining rooms right around the same time that we began upholstering furniture en masse).

Smoking rooms were intended to be used after dinner.  The women might gather in the drawing room** and the men would retreat to the smoking room.  As such, it was common practice to decorate the room in a “masculine” style.  Many men displayed gun collections there, decorated the room with Turkish themes (as Turkish tobacco was what they were likely smoking, popularized after the Crimean War), “worldly” books and objects, and more.

Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon – Issues of Access and Space

This post relates some of the ideas in an article just published in the most recent issue of Gender & Society (June 2012). Joya Misra–the current editor-in-chief–is really interested in getting more scholarship from outside of the U.S., and this issue is a great illustration of some of the fruits of her labor. One article that caught my attention documents Amrita Pande’s research on migrant domestic work in Lebanon (here). It deals with inequality and issues of space because Pande documents how migrant domestic workers in Lebanon (primarily from countries like Ethiopia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) endure severe restrictions on virtually all aspects of their daily lives.

Studying this population at all is pretty amazing. All qualitative researchers confront issues of access, but this struck me as a population incredibly difficult to access. Pande was clearly not deterred by this fact. In fact, one of the initial ways she entered the field was to have “balcony talks” with domestic workers. Migrant domestic workers have sort of colonized balconies as a space for outreach and assistance–some in circumstances of incredibly cruelty and hardship. They speak across balconies with other domestic workers to ask about wages, time off, and trade tips for dealing with some of the more challenging issues with employers. It is a space to which many of them are largely relegated; yet they have found an interesting way of utilizing the space in a way that allows for what Pande refers to as meso-level collective action–playing on James Scott’s conceptualization of “infrapolitics” (here). But their collective action in not confined to the home.

Spatial structures discipline MDWs [migrant domestic workers] in Lebanon in two distinct ways: through the delineation of appropriate space within the employer’s house and through the restriction and surveillance of space outside the house. (390)

Designing Homes that Made Life Better (and Worse) for Women

The history of American home architecture and interior design—as the history of many fields—is a domain that was initially dominated by men. As such, the design of homes was largely to men’s specifications, with men’s interests in mind. Women’s entry into the field initially emerged, as one might expect, through influence and suggestion before they were involved in actual home design.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983) wrote a wonderful book, More Work for Mother, tracing the historical origins of Hochschild’s “second shift.” Cowan argued that the changes in the home with the advent of industrialization had the somewhat counterintuitive effect of creating more work for the household at precisely the same time as less people were understood as responsible for the work. The household was, as Cowan famously put it, “incompletely industrialized,” leaving more work for women. So, new appliances, like refrigerators and stoves brought with them more things to clean, and standards of cleanliness began to reach new heights.

In the U.S., it was women who were at the forefront of technological innovation in the home at the turn of the 20^th century. When domestic technology entered the American home, it entered–as Rybcyznski said–“through the kitchen door.” When women did begin designing homes, the homes they designed were decidedly different from those designed by men. The “masculine” interest in the architecture of the home at the time was primarily visual. Though the 20^th century brought with it a new appreciation for functionality and utility, men’s designs were concerned primarily with the beauty and aesthetics of the home (see Andrew J. Downing for example). Even some of the European designers who were more concerned with comfort (like Robert Kerr) were less concerned with convenience, considering it the business of servants and women once the house was already constructed. Men’s architectural books were written to men, but some of the early American women who wrote books on architectural design wrote their books to women. Women, they argued, were the primary “users” of the home, and as such, ought to play a leading role in its construction and design.

The Bachelor Pad: Myths and Reality

There is not actually a great deal of literature on “man caves,” “man dens,” and the like–save for some anthropological and archeological work using the term a bit differently.  There is, however, a substantial body of literature dealing with bachelor pads.  The “bachelor pad” is a term that emerged in the 1960s.  It was a style of masculinizing domestic spaces heavily influenced by “gentlemen’s” magazines like Esquire and Playboy.  Originally referred to as “bachelor apartments,” “bachelor pad” was coined in an article in the Chicago Tribune, and by 1964 it appeared in The New York Times and Playboy as well.

It’s somewhat ironic that the “bachelor pad” came into the American cultural consciousness at a time when the median age at first marriage was at a historic low (20.3 for women and 22.8 for men).  So, the term came into usage at a time when heterosexual marriage was in vogue.  Why then?  Another ironic twist is that while the term has only become more popular since it was introduced, “bachelorette pad” never took off–despite the interesting finding that women live alone in larger numbers than do men.  I think these two paradoxes substantiate a fundamental truth about the bachelor pad–it has always been more myth than reality (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Gender Segregation By Victorian Design

Homes have always illustrated a great deal about those who inhabit them.  And changes in architectural design reflect much more than simply new techniques and styles.  They also reflect changing relationships between groups of people.  Victorian architecture is famous for a number of things, but one of my favorites is the notion that rooms really ought to only have one purpose.*  One of my favorite ways that this is illustrated is by highlighting the lack of a bedside table in most bedrooms in the 1800s in England.  Reading (or anything else for that matter) was an activity that was best undertaken in a separate (and more appropriate) room of its own.

To accomplish this, larger houses had an extraordinary number of rooms.  Smaller houses were forced to shift furniture around depending on what was going on that particular day.  While one of the premises of modern architectural design involves breaking down walls and opening up space, the Victorians were much more concerned with erecting walls and closing spaces off.  There are all sorts of remnants of this time still present in homes today – though they are often put to separate use.  For instance, parlors are still present in many homes.  They’re typically small rooms near the front of the house where household guests would have congregated, and within which Victorian forms of courtship took place (see Bailey on courtship here).  But few of us use these spaces as they were originally intended.  They feel impractical by today’s standards.

Bachelor…ETTE Pads?

If you take a look at the changes in family living arrangements since the 1970s, a few things seem to jump off the graph.  First, you can’t help but miss the drop in the proportion of married couples with children households (a percentage almost halved in just under 40 years).  What’s more interesting, however, are the family forms (defined by the Census as “nonfamily households” – which has the feel of a pointed term) that have picked up those stray percentage points.

Living arrangements that fall into the categories that the Census designates as “family households” really don’t show enormous change aside from the huge decline in married couples with children.  A great deal of attention has been paid to the “other nonfamily households” as interest in cohabitation and it’s alleged effects are heavily scrutinized.  The other categories (women living alone and men living alone) receive a bit less attention, but together, all three categories account for a great deal of the decline in married couple with children households.

Where are Men and Women Happiest in Their Homes?

There have been a number of different methods for attempting to document what people do in their homes, how people living together divide housework between themselves, and how they feel about it.  Initially, scholars just asked people questions like, “How many hours a week do you spend [fill in the blank with various household activities and obligations]?”  Certainly this method lends itself to statistical analysis, but what are we actually learning about people?

Research has found that people tend to over-estimate how much housework they actually do when asked on surveys.  Time use diary studies are a bit different and a lot more accurate.  This method asks participants to record their daily tasks and activities (where they were, what they did, how long they spent doing it, who they did it with, etc.) for small periods of time over the course of an entire day.  Most scholars agree that time use diary studies are more accurate portrayals of people’s actual experiences than surveys.  And it makes sense.  If you’ve ever tried to lose weight by eating less and then tried counted calories to lose weight, you can understand why.

Less research, however, focuses explicitly on how we feel when we’re doing different things throughout the day.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a psychology professor at the University of Chicago) set out to do just that (see here and here).  He gave study participants beepers that were programmed to go off at random moments throughout the day.  When paged, participants are asked to record what they are doing, who they are with, what they are thinking about, rate their emotional experience of the moment, and – significant for this blog – where they are. 

Retiring and Gay? Where?

If you were 18 the summer of the Stonewall Riots, Happy 60th!  (Sorry if I missed it.)  As the generation of gay men and lesbians that came of age during the gay rights movement reaches their 60s, we need to get serious about a conversation about sexuality and retirement.  How will these men and women choose to retire?  Are retirement communities for heterosexual individuals and couples heterosexualized in ways that make them unattractive to gay and lesbian couples and individuals?  Are they open to sexual diversity?  Is this how gay men and lesbians want to retire?  And if so, can we expect them to have the same rosy experiences marketed to heterosexual couples?

Some new research suggests that this is a significant issue.  Older gay men and lesbians ought to worry about retiring and growing old in communities where they don’t experience stigma.  The study focuses exclusively on gay men, but did compare single gay men with gay men with domestic partners and legally married gay men.  They found that stress related to aging was compounded by “sexual minority stress” in ways that pose significant mental health risks for gay men.

Progress?

I think many people understand American society as on a steady march toward the end of gender inequality.  We might call this the “narrative of progress.”  Within the boundaries of this narrative is the ability to recognize that women are still subject to various disadvantages, but (and here’s the important part of this narrative) things are better now than they used to be.

This particular form of collective nostalgia might be seen as empowering as it could potentially help us continue to push gender boundaries in new arenas.  However, it also has more sinister consequences.  This narrative only acknowledges forward progress and fails to examine the ways that “progress” is often accompanied by new forms of inequality.  I’ll briefly discuss the narrative in relation to heterosexual families.

This narratives occurs in many ways, but three of the most pernicious ways are: (1) it’s not going to happen all at once, but we’ve always been moving in the right direction; (2) lots of heterosexual couples have achieved equality; and (3) even if men and women are responsible for different things around the house, what’s the big deal?