HOME SWEET HOME

Before the early industrial era there had been little or no discernible division between home and work. The idea of the household incorporated family life and working life. The boundary between the household interior and the work which was undertaken outside was permeable.

Nineteenth-century industrialisation altered this situation. The home was gradually distinguished from the household. The functions — or at least those that were visible — which took place within the household gradually came to represent the opposite of work; the home became an ideological location for consumption rather than production. The decline of household production and the rise of large-scale capitalist agriculture presaged a shift in the rela­tionships within the household. Increasingly, men left home to work. The male's position as primary wage-earner still supported his position as head of the household but it was predicated upon the dependency of the middle­class married woman and the wife's new role as homemaker incorporating manager of the household finances, juggler of resources and creator of domestic bliss. Housework was redefined as unproductive and the home increasingly became a female domain.

It is in this period that the household — a place of residence and work as well as a political term incorporating hierarchy and authority — was gradually transformed into the ‘home' inhabited by the ‘family'. The home became a place and an idea. It was a place of retreat, a sanctum, a symbol of family unity and peace, a source of social order. And it was women, and more especially the wife, who carried out this transformation, so that by 1881 the English feminist Frances Power Cobbe could state that ‘It is a woman, and only a woman... who can turn a house into a home.'⁴ Indeed, the wife or mother became so intimately associated with the home in the popular imagination that she came to embody the very concept. In the houses of the wealthy urban middle classes she even began to resemble the domestic interior, her voluminous dresses mirroring the heavy fabrics enveloping the cosy family space. Yet, of course, the very process of homemaking required more than a woman's smiling presence; it constituted physical and emo­tional work. The home nurtured femininity and was maintained by women's labour.

Home symbolised the separation between private functions and public activity, and thus delineated the boundary between the female private and the male public world. Of course, this boundary was never as rigid in prac­tice as it seemed to be in theory, but the existence of a series of physical and ideological boundaries erected to separate the home from work, the street and the intrusion of the outside world, is testimony to the strength of an idea if not its success. The urban middle classes were the first to pioneer the idea of the private home which was both separated from the work­place and internally segregated in order to mask the physical labour of main­taining the house from the emotional work of creating the home.

In 1864 the English writer John Ruskin put into words the sentiment that the home was a refuge, a sanctuary, from the outside world:

it is a place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it... and the hostile society of the outer world is allowed either by husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be a home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in.⁵

With its heavy fabrics and furniture and decorated with family treasures and knick-knacks, the parlour became a retreat which contained the family in a cocoon-like state, but also allowed the family to represent itself to visitors and to its own members. The adornment of the home was not new. Wealthy families in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were addicted to interior decor. Parisian houses were full of pictures, tapestries, mirrors and collectables — snuffboxes, vases, clocks and porcelain which were indicators of status and wealth.⁶ But nineteenth-century middle-class homes mirrored femininity; they were full of family photographs, embroidered footstools and antimacassers, fancy goods, sewing frames and china ornaments. All of these furnishings identified the home as a feminine space devoted to family and domestic activities such as needlework, music-making and taking tea.

This separation of home and work was manifested differently in working­class homes. Here space was at a premium. In working-class areas of towns, women worked hard to maintain the visible separation of home and work at the threshold. The practice of donkey-stoning or whitening the front step of English terraced houses — which involved considerable labour by the woman of the house — was deemed essential for the maintenance of a boundary between the street and the home, between the world of commerce and the domestic world. The practice served to identify women as proud and respect­able custodians of the interior. In London, clean steps, pavements, hearths and so on ‘were physical outlines of women's space in households and streets'. Men sullied these symbols of female power at their peril.⁷ Inside, the main­tenance of a front parlour or best room which was rarely used by family members served a similar purpose, signifying to visitors that the home was a familial space, unsullied by work. ‘You lived in the kitchen and then you went in the parlour for your best room', recalled an inhabitant of a textile town in north-west England. ‘It was dusted and kept nice and never sat on... It was just used on special occasions.'⁸ Of course, behind the four walls many women were working, not only at housework and child care, but also under­taking paid work at home as home-workers.

One of the consequences of the sexual division of labour and the separa­tion of the household from production was what Davidoff has termed the elaboration of domestic life.⁹ Amongst the middle classes the transformation of the household into a home meant that the home became the symbol of their status as dependent women — albeit often at the expense of another woman's labour.

In rural and urban areas, amongst the middle and working classes, ‘housework' was gradually distinguished from ‘household tasks' and was consolidated as management of the domestic sphere. Even in agricultural regions, housework was slowly beginning to replace farm work for girls. In Italy, for example, the movement of men away from agriculture and into wage-earning left the women to carry on subsistence farming, but they were defined in official statistics as housewives rather than as farmers. This situation was particularly marked in Sicily. Here, the rise of cash-crop pro­duction in the 1880s — oranges, grapes, olives — provided many women with wage-earning opportunities, but the collapse of markets and the simultan­eous decline of domestic cloth production meant women lost their public productive role. These newly ‘domesticated’ women — 44 per cent of the female active population — became defined as housewives.¹¹ In Ireland, by the end of the century women were undertaking unpaid domestic work in preference to paid farm work. In England, the 1833 Agriculture Select Committee reported that farmers’ daughters were more likely to undertake housework than work in the dairy; and similarly in Denmark women’s roles shifted from ‘dairy wives to housekeepers’.¹² Now housework was associated with new standards of cleanliness and orderliness and it was women who were judged according to their ability to maintain these standards, either on their own or with the help of, usually female, servants.

It was in the middle-class home that housework reached its apotheosis. Bourgeois interiors were segregated so that the home would not be con­taminated by the appearance of industry. The domestic area was physically separated from spaces used for preparing and cooking food, cleaning, wash­ing and sleeping. Ideally, the Victorian wife was to allow ‘no smell of washing and ironing [to] pervade the home, no talking of [the servants’] short­comings; or of the baby’s ailments — baby should be in bed when Mr Hall returns, and then be sure that no basket of stocking-mending or household needlework be introduced to his notice, under the idea that he may see how industrious you are.’¹⁴ The employment of servants was the means by which women like Mrs Hall maintained a fayade of non-work whilst at the same time consolidating their reputation as good housewives and household managers. The tasks carried out by servants were ‘functional and metaphorical’; they did the cooking, cleaning and mending but they also ‘helped focus atten­tion on the central female figure in the domestic world’.¹⁵ The lady of the house was judged on the appearance of her home, the ‘domestic symbols’ — furniture, decor, decorative handicrafts — and on her own appearance. One German housekeeping manual in 1845 advised women who wished to disguise the fact that they carried out household chores in the absence of sufficient help about the home, to rub their hands with bacon before they retired to bed ‘to keep a soft hand like those fine ladies who have no heavier work to do than embroidering and sewing'.¹⁶ The femininity of her home, adorned with numerous ornamentation, and the femininity of her dress which was so constricting and so fulsome as to preclude her from engaging in any domestic labour, expressed both the fragility and the power of the bourgeois woman.¹⁷ She could only achieve this domestic femininity if domestic servants performed the coarse household chores unobtrusively in the background or if she could conceal their absence.

Household management became skilled work entailing considerable responsibility for the middle-class mistress. As the housewives' guru of her time, Isabella Beeton (1836—65) explained, in probably the most widely read British advice book of the century, her Book of Household Management published in 1861:

As with the commander of an army, or the leader of an enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path. Of all those acquirements which more particularly belong to the female character there are none which take a higher rank, in our estima­tion, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties; for on these are per­petually dependent the happiness, comfort and well-being of a family. In this opinion we are borne out by the author of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield' who says: — ‘the modest virgin, the prudent wife, and the careful matron, are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queans [sic]. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romances, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver, or their eyes.'¹⁸

Household management was a full-time vocation requiring a combination of character, good temper, cheerfulness, firmness and moral conduct, as well as knowledge of how to manage servants, how to entertain, how to cook economically, how to manage children and so on. Mrs Beeton's book was written to help women achieve one of their most important roles in life: the creation of a welcoming and well-run household.

Good Temper should be cultivated by every mistress, as upon it the welfare of the household maybe said to turn... Every head of a household should strive to be cheerful, and should never fail to show a deep interest in all that appertains to the well-being of those who claim the protection of her roof. Gentleness, not partial and temporary, but universal and regular, should pervade her conduct; for where such a spirit is habitually manifested, it not only delights her children, but makes her domestics attentive and respectful; her visitors are pleased by it, and their happiness is increased.¹⁹

Household manuals and women's magazines such as long-running Die deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung, the Norwegian Manual of Household Arts (1848) and the French Guide des femmes de menage, des cuisinieres, et des bonnes d’enfants (1862) were full of advice on how to maintain standards of cleanliness, neatness and thrift, but they also helped to create a common consciousness amongst middle-class women of themselves as good housekeepers. Some even formed housewives’ associations which concerned themselves with domestic train­ing for young women and the ‘servant question’.²⁰ The message Isabella Beeton imparted to her readers was that household management was a fulfilling occupation in itself, but some of her contemporaries, not surpris­ingly, disagreed. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell commented to a friend in 1850: ‘One thing is pretty clear. Women must give up the artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life.’ Elizabeth Gaskell was troubled by this tension between what she described as selfishness in wishing to pursue her art and the duty of home.

I am sure it is healthy for [women] to have the refuge of the hidden world of Art to shelter themselves in when too much pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of peddling cares; it keeps them from being morbid... I have felt this in writing, you in painting, so assuredly a blending of the two is desirable (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean)... but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other.²¹

The exclusive association of women with housework in the nineteenth century might, alternatively, be interpreted as a positive choice on women’s part. In rural Ireland, for example, where, by 1901, 81 per cent of women were recorded as unwaged full-time houseworkers, it has been suggested that housework provided women with an autonomy and status that could not be acquired from other occupations. The housewife controlled house­hold expenditure, she was responsible for her family’s well-being, and she could take pride in her skill. Housewifery was becoming ‘a profession for which very careful training is required’ for ‘a woman wants something more than her sex to qualify her for her profession’.²² In Britain, the working­class Victorian housewife carved out a powerful sphere for herself; the home was her space, and knowledge about housework gave her a degree of expertise that her husband was unable to reach. Domestic education classes organised by local authorities and private organisations were popular because domestic labour was raised above the menial to become something skilled and specialised.²³

Housework was feminised but it was not always carried out by the mis­tress of the house. In earlier ages, young people of both sexes entered service. In Ancien Regime France, for instance, male servants in the houses of the rich were almost as numerous as female, and the work they undertook could not really be described as housework. Only the women at the bottom of the servant hierarchy — the servantes andfemme de charge — spent their time cleaning.²⁴ In the industrialising states, domestic service soon became the largest employer of women. In Britain, around 45 per cent of the female labour force were employed in service by the 1870s, a figure never exceeded by other industrial states where urbanisation had been less extensive. In France, the equivalent figure was around 40 per cent, and in Germany 26 per cent. Around one- third of all employed females in Paris and Berlin as well as in London were classed as domestic servants by the 1880s. By 1871 more than 70 per cent of French servants were female; in England the figure was 92 per cent.²⁵ Domestic service had become overwhelmingly a female occupation.

The reasons for the feminisation of domestic service are manifold. Firstly, the redefinition of housework as the maintenance of domesticity favoured females. Many of the tasks required of a servant — attending to cleaning and personal hygiene, to clothing repairs and kitchen work — were already seen as woman's work. Secondly, male servants were not willing to undertake such work for the low wages offered to women. Thirdly, such employment was increasingly regarded as suitable for young women in contrast with industrial or even agricultural work. Domestic service confined a woman inside the home and helped to protect her from immoral influences. In 1843, the Royal Commission on Women and Children in Agriculture, reporting on conditions of work in England and Wales, noted that field labour ‘is a bad school of morals for girls and that the mixing up with men on whom poverty and ignorance have encrusted coarse and vulgar habits, tends to greatly uncivilise and demoralise women'.²⁶ Similarly in France, concerns were expressed that female factory workers would be morally degraded by being exposed to the ‘licentious discourses' consequent upon mixing with their male comrades.²⁷ Domestic service served a dual purpose then. It was the means by which middle-class women sought to maintain their femininity and it was the means by which they attempted to mould working-class girls into hard working, disciplined and above all moral women who would later go on to marry and run households of their own in the image of their superiors. Domestic service was regarded as a preparation for life evidenced by the efforts of philanthropists and welfare officials to train wayward or poor girls in housewifery.

The life of a domestic servant was hard. Most were young, single women and girls. The vast majority were under the age of 30; in England over 70 per cent were younger than 25. Many had migrated to towns from the countryside to take up their first job. In Paris and in London two-thirds of servants in the middle of the century had been born outside the city. In the case of France, agricultural decline and rural impoverishment was the spur for many young girls to move to the cities in search of work, and presumably their parents hoped they would be better off working in someone else’s household than in a factory. The provision of room and board was certainly one of the attractions of an otherwise fairly unattract­ive job. However, although most lived in their employers’ house they were not regarded as part of the family. Their living quarters were commonly squashed into the attic or, in some smaller French households, they were forced to sleep on a makeshift bed in the kitchen or share a bed with another servant. Only wet nurses, nannies and governesses had living quarters in the main part of the house. Servants generally worked a six- or even seven- day week with few holidays. The working day started at dawn and could continue until midnight and their day was spent carrying out a multitude of household chores, many involving hard physical labour such as carrying water, scrubbing floors and laundering clothing. Up until the 1880s, wages were good in comparison with the alternative forms of female employment, especially in the cities, but, on the other hand, female domestics earned far less than their male counterparts. By 1900, servants’ wages began to level off and with no improvement in working conditions girls began to choose alternative employment which also guaranteed greater personal freedom. One woman from a small Scottish town began her working life in service for ten shillings a week. She stayed just one month commenting: ‘About the back of seven in the morning you would be shouted to and you would be at their beck and call ’til about eight or nine at night... I didnae wait very long, I don’t mind telling you.’²⁸ Many of her contemporaries had similar experiences and moved on to retail work or found a job in the local textile mills. It was not necessarily the hard work that women began to object to but the subordination.

The relationship between mistress and servant was complicated. The female servant was a status symbol; her very presence but also her neat and tidy appearance and her polite and submissive demeanour, reflected upon her household and more particularly her mistress. The home defined the identity of both mistress and servant but the separation of home and work, and the lesser value placed on housework in contrast with household management, highlighted the profoundly unequal relationship between these women. The mistress and the servant contrived to sustain a dangerous fiction: that women's work outside the home could only result in her neglect of her own home. ‘The idea of women's work outside the home in industry became associated with squalor, fatigue, bad cooking and neglected children', wrote Winifred Holtby in a perceptive comment on the consequences of the definition of woman as housewife and homemaker.²⁹ The domestic servant thus helped to maintain the nineteenth-century notion of home as a serene and private place unsullied by physical labour, but her presence in such numbers in middle-class homes also helped to cast a spotlight on working­class women who could not afford hired help and who struggled to combine paid work with housework and child care.