La Grande Révolution domestique: Une histoire de l’architecture féministe

by Dolores Hayden

Ce livre propose une histoire de l’architecture féministe en revenant sur les théories de plusieurs penseuses et théoriciennes étatsuniennes (Malusina Fay Pierce, Mary Livermore, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, etc.) qui postulaient dès le XIXe siècle que la prise en charge intégrale du travail domestique par les femmes constituait une des causes fondamentales des inégalités de genre. La Grand Révolution domestique donne à voir les plans innovants et les stratégies visionnaires de ces femmes ayant contribué à remettre en question notre manière de concevoir les logements et les villes modernes afin d’accompagner les femmes vers une plus grande indépendance économique et ainsi permettre l’égalité sociale. Dans ce livre, Dolores Hayden analyse les sources utopiques et pragmatiques des programmes de réorganisation domestique proposés au XIXe siècle par certaines féministes et donne à voir les conflits de classe, de race et de genre qu’elles ont rencontrés. Cette histoire d’une tradition intellectuelle peu connue en France offre une nouvelle interprétation de l’histoire du féminisme, du logement et de l’urbanisme. L’autrice montre comment l’idéologie politique défendue par ces féministes de la première heure les a amenées, dès le XIXe siècle, à concevoir des espaces physiques innovants pour créer des coopératives de femmes au foyer, des maisons sans cuisine, des garderies, des cuisines partagées et des salles à manger communautaires. En évoquant ces premières luttes féministes pour la transformation environnementale et économique de la société étatsunienne, Dolores Hayden met en lumière les contradictions économiques et spatiales fondamentales que certaines formes de logement dépassées (logements individuels notamment) ou services communautaires inadéquats (absence ou déficit de crèches par exemple) créent, aujourd’hui encore, pour les femmes – constat qui n’est pas sans faire écho au regain d’intérêt pour les modes de vies en collectivité ou les résidences partagées au début des années 2020.

Genres: Feminism, History, Nonfiction, Architecture, Urbanism, Cities, Gender

368 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1981

Reviews

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 and work entirely in our tiny separate spheres?)

Worth reading, but not as intensely engaging as her Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, perhaps partly because Building Suburbia is about choices made, while The Grand Domestic Revolution is ultimately more about roads not taken. It did make me think a lot about my own rather anomic living choices, and how much they're shaped by the society around me, and what a better world might look like.

[Karla Huebner]

I discovered this (and many related works, some by the same author) while researching a short essay on American feminist influence on Czech cooperative housing. This book came out in 1981, with some sections published earlier as journal articles, but it remains a fascinating and provocative classic that examines the history of what the author terms "material feminism" in relation to design of housing and neighborhoods. It deals primarily with the period between about 1850 and 1930, when numerous women and some men attempted to develop new forms of household that would ease the burden of gender-unequal domestic labor through such innovations as shared or commercial kitchen and laundry facilities. The book is thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and a good read. I was immediately able to make use of what I learned in my teaching, and I plan to get my own copy since I had to borrow from a library two hours from home.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book came out in 1981, so it's surprising that I don't remember reading it. I feel fortunate that I read it now, after decades of developing a context for it. Yet I also feel sorry that my understanding of architecture is not even at the level of amateur. It's an excellent, well-organized overview of the history of materialist feminism, a first-wave feminist ideology that emphasized women's economic independence and the importance of gendered work.

Hayden's first book was on the architecture of communitarian socialist projects, and she shows the reader the continuity between such projects (including the Shaker, the Oneida community, the Bruderhof, and various Owenite and Fourierist communes) and the work of feminist activists to ameliorate the burden and the isolation of 19th century housekeeping. The first section of the book establishes this continuity. One piece that interested me: many common household gadgets were invented in these communities where household work was shared.

In the second section of the book, Hayden shows the gradual development of ideas of cooperative housekeeping among self-identified feminists. Her fourth chapter is devoted to the ideas of Melusina Fay Peirce, a Cambridge, Massachusetts activist whose co-operative housekeeping project failed. Her ideas succeeded and spread, however. The fifth chapter, devoted to utopian feminists who believed in free love and cooperative living, is mainly focused on the work of Marie Howland, whose cooperative housekeeping and especially early childhood daycare projects were successful. The sixth chapter on materialist feminism among suffrage, women's club and temperance feminists is mainly about the suffrage speaker Mary Livermore.

The third section of the book is on the spread of ideas of reform. Chapter seven is on fictional socialist cities, with special emphasis on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and the people it influenced. (I have not read Looking Backward, but it's always mentioned in the same breath with William Morris' The News from Nowhere, which I loved.)

The eighth chapter is on settlement houses and actual attempts to provide food to low-income city dwellers. Hayden covers Jane Addams and Ellen Swallow Richards. I liked the way Hayden contrasted top-down attempts of wealthier women to help poorer women with socialist ideas of women organizing. Hayden doesn't neglect issues of class throughout the book.

Chapters 9-12 of this book were about Charlotte Perkins Gillman. That should surprise no one who is familiar with the history of the feminist movement. Because I am familiar with this history, I skimmed this section. I think I probably need to go back and reread it. The chapters aren't only about Gillman, but about the people she influenced, even very indirectly. For some reason this is the section where the famous co-op apartments of the early 20th century, set up mainly by Jewish socialists, was mentioned. I would like to go back to the book and scope out the footnotes for this section.

The last two chapters of the book are on the backlash against feminism and against materialist feminist ideas of cooperative housing and community planning, with a final chapter reflecting on the issue in the present. (Of course this is the present in 1981, when I was starting high school!) The backlash of the 1920s makes a lot more sense to me nearly 100 years later than it did when I first learned about it. You would think that, in the aftermath of WWI, with women getting the vote for the first time in so many countries, that it would be difficult to discredit feminism. It was specifically household operations that red baiters and corporate interests feared, however. The apparent success of the Russian Revolution, which motivated many countries to give women the vote as a calming influence, definitely had an impact. This was also the period in which the idea of companionate marriage became mainstream. The promotion of homeownership as a way to pacify the workforce is an important factor in this backlash also. I would say that without consideration of the technological improvements in home life, none of this could have happened.

I was simultaneously saddened and delighted that Hayden takes an opportunity to trash Lilian Moller Gibreth in this chapter. Saddened because Cheaper by the Dozen was my favorite book as a child, delighted because Hayden is reclaiming the importance of women even in the backlash against feminism. She shows how Gilbreth and especially with Christine Frederick, highly educated women, pushed home economics not as a way for women to be engaged and less isolated, but again to be the angel of the hearth and the engine of a culture of consumption. Also in this section, almost as a throwaway, Hayden mentions a black women's group, the National Association of Wage Earners, and its leader Nannie Burroughs. I want to return to that organization and to her.

I've now read two books about utopian architecture, and I could see in both of them the implicit ideas about the role of women and cooking. It feels like we swing between two extremes. On the one hand is the home as homestead model, where the family can have its own kitchen and garden and laundry, and on the other, a model where there's no room to cook or do laundry, but either a communal laundry and dining hall or commercial laundries and restaurant kitchens make up the difference. I wonder how Hayden thinks of the boxed meal services that come as ingredients with recipes--sparing the householder the chore of shopping and planning, but not of cooking and cleaning up. Such services did not exist in 1981, when many families relied on frozen dinners so they wouldn't have to shop as often, and television so they could get their kids ready for daycare.

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written book that will make you depressed that over two centuries on from the events the author talks about, and 40 years from the time the book was published, we are still trying to figure out how to solve the problems of housework, childcare, and individual isolation.

Want to know why? Spoiler alert--capitalism and bigotry.

Lots of illustrations, building and town plans, and sketches throughout. Probably will be of interest to urban planners.

[Tamara]

Classic. Critical analysis, little built on since.

Also, beautiful illustrations and awful cover.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Grand Domestic Revolution, Dolores Hayden sets out to reimagine or rediscover the past efforts of feminists, socialists and other social activists to reshape domestic life for women and families. I want to like this book more than I did, but I found it lacking. Hayden begins her work by calling attention to the public sphere and private sphere dichotomy, with women being relegated to the private sphere and shut out of waged labor and are thus dependent on men. She reimagines previous activists, including many well-known feminist icons, as "material feminists" (which I interpreted as a nod to Marxism). Hayden argues that what these women called for amounted to a revolution of a very different kind than a bourgeois or proletarian revolution: a revolution in the organization of home life, a blurring of the private and public dichotomy. The book is laid out in a curious manner: each chapter is devoted to a topic, and the chapter usually focuses on one reformer and her efforts to reshape domestic life. Architecture and home design is a consistent theme in the book. A glaring problem is that almost all the reformers she surveys were white, and many were affluent and/or highly religious. I cannot overlook how Black, Indigenous and many other non-white peoples' contributions to reimagining domestic life were excluded from Hayden's analysis. Hayden also doesn't look beyond the U.S. and Europe; instead she relies heavily on women inspired by European utopian socialists like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, and the intentional communities those mens' ideas inspired. Contributions from women from the global South are non-existent in this book. Despite this criticism, there are many bright spots in the book, and I learned a lot from it. Hayden doesn't fall for anti-communist tropes and propaganda—a feat considering this book was published during the Cold War—and, instead, she demonstrates how the Red Scare harmed these women's advocacy for a new kind of home life. Furthermore, she writes about some of the accomplishments of the (now former) USSR regarding domestic life. In all, The Grand Domestic Revolution is worth a read, but keep in mind you're getting a rather bourgeois picture of womens' attempts to reshape domestic life. Hayden paints a new picture of many well-known feminist icons, and I am appreciative of becoming aware of this new perspective. Our privatized, isolated domestic life does not need to be this way. Many women have tackled this issue throughout history, and hopefully people today and in the future will pick up the baton and revolutionize our domestic lives.

[zo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un travail incroyable, vraiment intéressant qui recontextualise les recherches et finalement les avancées en matière de nos vies domestiques, qui restent très présent dans nos quotidiens contemporains : les crèches, des colocations maintenant pervertis par le capitalisme (we home and the like), Et avec une lecture féministe qui cherche à comprendre pourquoi ces projets de femmes n’ont jamais donné lieu finalement au grand changement domestique et à la libération réel des femmes de leur rôle assigné par la société.Hayden explique très bien aussi les différents movements et courants de pensée en utilisant les articles de presse de l’époque en question et en piochant aussi dans des généalogies de pensée. Les plans et les photos sont d’une richesse aussi pour bien comprendre l’articulation spatial de ces innovations plus théoriques proposées par des penseurs suffragistes, formalisé le plus souvent par des entrepreneurs masculins hélas.

En effet la conclusion semble rapide par rapport aux évènements plus récent et ce serait intéressant d’étudier la question de nos espaces domestiques aujourd’hui via à via des revendications féministes. C’est en tout cas super que cet ouvrage est enfin traduit, 40 ans après sa sortie en anglais, en français et j’espère que grand nombre d’architectes et urbanistes prendront le temps de lire cet ouvrage.

[Apolline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce livre m'a fait découvrir tout un monde du XIXe / début du XXe siècle dont je n'avais pas idée !
Cependant, le contenu du livre ne correspondait peut-être pas tout à fait à ce à quoi je m'attendais... On rentre peut-être un peu trop dans les détails sur chaque projet de cuisine coopérative ou de service de livraison de repas, l'auteure présentant avec une grande exhaustivité l'ensemble de ses recherches. Cela peut rendre la lecture un peu difficile (surtout que l'édition française est imprimée en caractères minuscules !!!). J'ai surtout apprécié l'introduction et la conclusion (sur le retour de bâton des années 1920 et la victoire du capitalisme).
Je n'avais pas envisagé que la mise en commun de services (blanchisserie, garderies, cuisines...) aurait pu conduire à la conception de logements sans cuisines (par exemple), et que cela relèverait de l'architecture féministe. Je suis toujours curieuse de voir à quoi pourrait ressembler une telle architecture !

[Raina · Rating 4 out of 5]

20% tedious but 80% fascinating, the author uncovers a whole untold history of architecture and domestic design. Why wasn't this one required reading for my college or masters curriculum? Not even in my "American Dream" class?

[Emily]

Request scan from the library of the chapter titled "Domestic Space in Fictional Socialist Cities"

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent exploration of a relatively unknown aspect of 19th and 20th century feminism - struggles over space. Hayden traces femimist women's attempts to exert influence over the design and uses of places they lived - homes, cities, neighourhoods and the like - considering places and politics as diverse as the Owenite world of New Lanarck, thew commualist attempts by Alexandra Kollontai when she still had meaningful influence on the Bolshevik government, socialist cities in Utopian fiction, and work of the polymath socialist feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book has a strng architectural and urban design flavour (not surprisingly) and should be read alongside Hayden's equally excellent Redesigning the American Dream where she sets out to explore a more conventional socially oriented history of spatial struggles in terms of their links to work and family life, the more recent Dreamers of the New Day where Shiela Rowbotham, inspired by Hayden, explores the broader Anglo-American aspects of this feminism. In The Grand Domestic Revolution however, Hayden provides us with a more internally focussed history of struggles largely lost to feminist history, yet a history the contemporary left needs to recover and re-engage with if we are wrestle control of our lives and build new worlds.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE MATERIAL FEMINISTS! "Would acceptance of men as potential domestic workers and recovery of the spatial critique of the home be a sufficient basis for a renewed campaign to create home-like feminist neighborhoods." Yes, that's right FEMINIST SPACIAL CRITIQUE OF THE HOME & HOME-LIKE FEMINIST NEIGHBORHOODS.

This is an extensive history of the material feminists (tied in with suffrage, temperance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman aka CPG, etc) and can be a bit of a tedious read at times but the subject matter is FASCINATING--a VERY important part of feminist history and history in general that for some reason (surprise, surprise) is not readily told. Read up.

[Alessandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hayden's well-researched work highlights the female materialist feminists who brought women's perspectives into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' Marxist claims for class consciousness. Brilliantly rendered. Shows the economic liberties women sought for, which included a radical re-spatialization of growing urban centers.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although its older, this is one of my favorite history books. It tells a different history of domesticity that includes 19th century feminists and reformers.

[Nansi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Groundbreaking but it leaves out a lot of the cultural history.... maybe purposefully??