The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities in Not Exceeding Ten Miles Square

Feb 08, 2024 ambyr rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: authorㅡfemale, acquiredㅡfrom-work, genreㅡnonfictionㅡcities

I wish Hayden would release an updated version to this book; it's so strong in its weaving of a coherent intellectual history between many individuals and incidents that I'd previously learned about only in isolation, but its late 1970s ending leaves many questions unanswered to modern eyes. (What _does_ it mean that after nearly two centuries of women fighting for the right to not be bound to the sphere of the home, we're now all--men and women alike--fighting for the right to eschew the office ...more

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Jan 14, 2024 DW Rowlands rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: category-academic, recs-urban-book-club, topic-wgs-gender

I'm a bit embarrassed that I hadn't heard of this book before my queer urbanist book club decided to read it, and that I didn't immediately recognize Delores Hayden's name, despite having read and even cited both her academic papers and Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000.

While The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities is just over forty years old, sadly little progress has been made the fundamental issue Hay I'm a bit embarrassed that I hadn't heard of this book before my queer urbanist book club decided to read it, and that I didn't immediately recognize Delores Hayden's name, despite having read and even cited both her academic papers and Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000.

While The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities is just over forty years old, sadly little progress has been made the fundamental issue Hayden examines: developing a new way of living and built environment that is both more efficient and less socially isolating. The book is a history of various attempts—religious, socialist, and sometimes explicitly feminist—to redesign the built environment, housekeeping, and sometimes family structure of the American family to make housekeeping, cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing labor more efficient in terms of time and money and, in general, to reduce the burden of domestic labor on women.

In general, I hadn't heard of these attempts—even, as with Jane Addams's Hull House, I'd heard of their contexts—and I was surprised to realize how many different motivations they had, including both explicitly feminist ones and ones based on religion (the Shakers, one of the few attempts I did know about), and ones motivated by a general industrial-era belief that since labor outside the home had been made more efficient by the division of labor, it was time to apply this to domestic labor as well. It was depressingly unsurprising, however, to read about the reasons they failed: in most cases a combination of men's resistance to the idea of someone other than their wife cooking food for them, or their wife cooking food for others in cooperative arrangements, a general unwillingness of upper-class households to come to terms with their class privilege with respect to their servants, and general social disapproval. It was also not surprising to learn that the most successful attempts were those involving groups—professional women and the low-income and largely unmarried individuals at Hull House—least susceptible to these issues.

I thought it interesting to see the breadth of these proposals as well: they varied from communal living proposals, such as the Shakers' communities and the Fourierist "North American Phalanx" to attempts by groups of families to establish community laundries and hot meal delivery services: both things which have, in practice, re-emerged as purely capitalist enterprises in recent years, at least for those rich and urban enough to rely heavily on them.

The book ends in the years between the World Wars, with a discussion of how the post-World-War-I Red Scare and the rise of a new consumer culture based around heavily-marketed housekeeping conveniences and car-dependent, low-density suburbanization (generally much less amenable to cooperative housekeeping schemes) killed off such schemes, at least among the "respectable" classes, for a generation, while creating a new and more severe problem of isolation for housewives expected to do all their housework alone, and in an environment even less accommodating of social interaction than that their mothers and grandmothers had experienced, even if technology had made the physical labor easier. I do wish, however, that Hayden had devoted more text to the discussion of how this transition happened. ...more

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