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‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910
Author(s) -
Hamlett Jane
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01561.x
Subject(s) - space (punctuation) , gender studies , paradise , subject (documents) , middle class , sociology , class (philosophy) , power (physics) , morning , living space , everyday life , aesthetics , visual arts , history , art , law , art history , political science , demography , medicine , philosophy , linguistics , physics , residence , quantum mechanics , artificial intelligence , library science , computer science
In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.