racist white feminist architects… American domesticity

October 7, 2021 1:43 PM

[SL Guardian] with a review of domestic bliss meets intersectional oppression in American interior design.

The title quote:
“ Some racist white feminist architects envisioned a life truly free of domestic work spaces. They sought to free white women, and their homes, of kitchens altogether. The oppression of Black women and women of color was often an integral part of their designs.“

The article also covers interesting historical changes in kitchen designs.

In lieu of interesting meta links, I’ll just link to a different kind of domestic bliss with Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen.

posted by ec2y (24 comments total)

Thanks for that thought-provoking comment *eyeroll*

Reading the article by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on "the Negro Problem"... yikes. I guess I shouldn't be surprised whenever I learn about a white feminist who also turns out to have been really racist, but it's always so disappointing and gross. I haven't had "The Yellow Wallpaper" on my syllabus for Intro to Lit for a while, but if I ever put it back on, I'll also include her racist social proposal for context.
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:50 PM on October 7, 2021 [12 favorites]

Cabinetry fronts for refrigerators? That's been around forever.

Wait until they find out that rich people have second kitchens.

One is for showing off and entertaining and the other is where the work is done with crap all over the counters.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:51 PM on October 7, 2021 [5 favorites]

The article is also published on Meg Conley's website for those who won't click on a Guardian link.
posted by peeedro at 3:24 PM on October 7, 2021 [11 favorites]

Wait until they find out that rich people have second kitchens.

To be fair, I think this has also been a feature of non-rich/working class homes in certain times and places. In Toledo, where I grew up and went to a lot of estate sales, you could guess which homes had been occupied by folks from the Polish or Hungarian communities because they had a second "working" kitchen, usually in the basement.
posted by pullayup at 3:32 PM on October 7, 2021 [6 favorites]

When I was little we had a dishwasher that came with extra front panels you could swap out to go with your décor. There was white, avocado green, and state-park brown.

I’m a sucker for those old 1950’s home economics/domestic science educational films that are all about the New Scientific Kitchen, but yeah, I noticed a long time ago how lily-white and middle-classpirational the happy homemakers and their daughters-in-training all were. My mother remembers seeing them in school and feeling a huge disconnect between them and her own working-class home where they still heated the laundry water on the kitchen woodstove and both parents went out to work.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:49 PM on October 7, 2021 [6 favorites]

“Kitchens used to be concealed. It had a door. That was where you had all your appliances. It was like the work space. And now, kitchens are more of a lifestyle. You want to make it pretty and seamless,” she tells the Times.

This is interesting. Taking off the door to the kitchen was one of the first dozen things we did when we bought the house. It impeded traffic, after all.

But now we have a toaster oven, a chest freezer, a vacuum sealer, a mixer, too many cases of seltzer water, a coffee machine, etc, etc, and there's only so much counter space to go around. It's kind of messy. Maybe we need a door?
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 5:01 PM on October 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

This quote is something I’ve always basically known about patriarchy and capitalism, but put so succinctly:

“American housewives were not expected, or welcome, in the public arena. And they certainly weren’t about to be paid for their work in the private arena. You could hardly pay a woman for her work in the home if you were determined to prove consumerism ended her work.“
posted by knownassociate at 5:02 PM on October 7, 2021 [13 favorites]

you could guess which homes had been occupied by folks from the Polish or Hungarian communities because they had a second "working" kitchen

My relatives are Italian and I remember many homes with basement kitchens. But during family dinners and special events every single burner in that house was working hard.

I've talked with professional chefs that get contracted to cook for an event in a fancy home and discover the 48" 8-burner 100,000 BTU stainless Viking range still has the owner's manual clipped to the oven rack.

I’m a sucker for those old 1950’s home economics/domestic science educational films that are all about the New Scientific Kitchen,

The Westinghouse Corporation has got you covered (h/t eschatfische)
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:12 PM on October 7, 2021 [10 favorites]

This is a great article, but some of it is only partly true:

A practical theory of kitchen design didn’t emerge until the 20th century. Until then, kitchens were just random bits of furniture and a stove shoved in attics, basements and poorly ventilated back rooms. Architects didn’t care about kitchens because their high-end clients’ kitchens were filled with servants

The missing element is the shift away from wood and coal in the 20thC: permanent kitchen furniture is really only possible/desirable with technologies like electricity, running hot water, and refrigeration. In hot climates domestic kitchens were typically at the back rooms of houses to contain the risk of fire (and were regulated as such by early building regulations!); in cold climates they were in basements or central to make secondary use of heat, but the central *thing* was the fireplace or range, which architects/builders certainly had to design around a chimney, and had to pay very careful attention to. Get it wrong and eventually the house burns to the ground.

The fire was not movable, but everything around it had to be, because it was always used for multiple purposes in addition to cooking food (especially laundry). Buckets and tubs were preferred over sinks because they had multiple uses, tables were movable to make efficient use of space. It wasn't just because architects hadn't bothered to do the design, it was that their interiors weren't architecture; the lack of permanent counters, sinks, and so on was key to the way people used them. Kitchens furniture in the era before electricity and town gas was very definitely and carefully designed, but the designers were the people who used them.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:25 PM on October 7, 2021 [78 favorites]

This quote is something I’ve always basically known about patriarchy and capitalism, but put so succinctly:

Especially ironic considering its source. I wonder how many women read that and thanked their lucky stars to not be living under such tyranny?
posted by 2N2222 at 5:29 PM on October 7, 2021

Building on Fiasco da Gama's comment about older kitchens: In some parts of North America larger houses would even have a "summer kitchen" that was either detached or semi-detached from the main house, for when the weather got too hot to have a fire in your living quarters. There might be a second stove or hearth, or the main stove might be moved out there for the summer months. Besides meal preparation, it was a good place for the constant cooking fire needed for preserving summer fruits and vegetables. When not being used as a kitchen it could be pressed into service for other work such as laundry (especially convenient during times when laundry couldn't be hung outside).

One house we lived in when I was growing up contained a basement apartment we never rented out. Mom would often use that kitchen for canning or bulk baking, and we'd jokingly call it "the summer kitchen."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:44 PM on October 7, 2021 [12 favorites]

I've been thinking about kitchens for hours now—thank you for this post.

The link to the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate is in the article but in passing, I find the context fascinating. Nixon pitched the American consumer kitchen as an appliance-filled liberation from manual chores for women, and the promise of material plenty that Communism couldn't compete with, Khrushchev countered that there was no liberation for women in the kitchen when capitalism forced them out of the workplace to be domestic labourers. Both men would have agreed on the basics: kitchens were for domestic chores, those chores were probably unpleasant and worth reducing, and that work was for women.

In retrospect they both would have been baffled by the current status of kitchens in 21stC housing; instead of having elaborate showy rooms for social functions (drawing room, living room etc.) and a bare kitchen for doing chores, modern houses tend towards open-plan, functionless spaces with an elaborate and beautiful kitchen in the centre, the place where social life happens, where you invite people to chat, and where the most expensive investment occurs of status objects. Partly it's housing investment value displacing the labour of the place, and partly it's that culturally, we don't want to see kitchens as chore-places, but of cooking-hobbies, family time, enjoyment.

In my work I get to see a lot of architectural plans for rich people's houses. One I came across a while ago had what was obviously a second kitchen, with stove and sink, set behind a door, marked as 'butler's pantry', but away and invisible from the very large, central, main kitchen. I was baffled, until my coworker explained it was for when people who live in houses like that get caterers in for parties; the cooks prepare the food in the small working-kitchen, while the guests gather to socialise in the status-kitchen.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:35 PM on October 7, 2021 [14 favorites]

If you're interested in the Frankfurter Küche, one of the earliest modular kitchens, don't miss this 1930 movie clip that explains how it all works.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:57 AM on October 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

What a career Schüette-Lihotzky had!
posted by doctornemo at 6:21 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

modern houses tend towards open-plan, functionless spaces with an elaborate and beautiful kitchen in the centre, the place where social life happens, where you invite people to chat, and where the most expensive investment occurs of status objects.

Also in the grand scheme of things, kitchen parts are not terribly expensive, especially once you have a lot of excess income. Even a $15k fridge is comparable to a $15k subcompact car that sits in the garage or on the street most of the time. I'd a say a household spends more time looking at a fridge, and probably gets more discrete uses though each use of the car is much longer. And a wealthy persons' car cost 4X as much.

And the $15k doesn't compare to the cost of building or purchasing the room at $150 per sq foot (and up in many cities now).
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:02 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Fascinating link, and also Fiasco da Gama's comments.

I googled some images of 19th century kitchens and they seem to be mostly a stove and a big table, if they were constantly rearranging things that makes sense.

I hate cooking and I always wish a home kitchen could be more like a commercial kitchen, with indestructible easy-clean stainless steel everywhere and heatlamps to park shit under. Like the first time I encountered a "granite worktop" I thought "Cool, granite, I bet that's robust and easy" but apparently it shatters if you look it wrong and discolours if anything touches.

I do wonder what commercial kitchens looked like before Lihotzky and Frederick: did the lab-like layout come from actual labs or were commercial kitchens built that way.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:52 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think food safety requirements also prompted the design of modern commercial kitchens. NSF standards kind of lead you to making more out of smooth stainless steel surfaces and less out of wood and stone.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:19 AM on October 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

I feel like there's something missing here. It starts with the description of the apparent current hot trend in luxury apartment kitchens, then goes into the history of kitchen design that stops in the 50s. So what was the point of starting with current trends if it's not going to link up with the rest of the article?
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:20 AM on October 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

I agree, and so I went and looked at the original, un-edited essay. I think this might explain why, while full of good information, the piece does not really hold together:

This started out as snippy little essay about design but I can’t seem to muster the energy to finish with much zip. Is kitchen design still a political act? For good or evil? For the people the kitchen serves or the people who serve in the kitchens? I don’t know. What impact can fitted rooms have if the women who live in them are consistently, deliberately, designedly disempowered?
posted by oneirodynia at 1:25 PM on October 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

I’m a sucker for those old 1950’s home economics/domestic science educational films that are all about the New Scientific Kitchen

When I was a kid (in the 80s), some of my favorite episodes of cartoons like Looney Tunes etc. were when they parodied these sorts of films with some wacky Home/Car of the Future!! that had all sorts of ridiculous gadgets that ended up backfiring in hilarious ways. It makes me think that even in the 50s-60s a lot of people saw how stupid and implausible those films were.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:31 PM on October 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

This video came up in the recommendations after I watched Too-Ticky's link above - it shows a 1929 Frankfurter Kitchen that's been reassembled in a museum, with the restorer explaining some of the features.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:55 PM on October 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

I like this piece, but one of the things I've always felt is that big household appliances did liberate women, all kinds of women. The most important was the washing machine. Washing clothes is backbreaking work. Fully automatic washing machines weren't really commonplace here in the UK until the 1980s, but twin tubs and launderettes were things slightly earlier. When my father-in-law as a little boy in the 1950s his mother was doing the wash once a week by hand and it took all day; they were very poor and she had a hard life and died fairly young. The washing machine, led to the end of the Magdalen laundries - and while those women were almost exclusively white, they weren't middle class or protected. Yes, in middle class America you have a period in the 1950s and 1960s where housework was considered the most appropriate outlet for women who had shiny kitchens with all mod cons, but that's a relatively limited group. By the time such appliances were available here, we also started to have women's liberation. In any case, many women worked outside the home - my mother-in-law worked for pay from when she left school at 16 to when she had her first child ten years later. And then she worked for pay after her second child was born, because they needed the money and she wanted to work. Perhaps these things were designed on behalf of a certain kind of woman, but I think they have benefited more people than that.
posted by plonkee at 2:45 AM on October 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

Yeah, in families like both my parents grew up in, the older children were drafted as unpaid domestic labor because both parents had to work outside the home. And when you count in line drying and ironing, which the advent of electric dryers and wrinkle-free synthetic fabrics drastically reduced, laundry for a larger family could take days.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:03 AM on October 9, 2021

As others have noted, domestic work without appliances is backbreaking, labor intensive, and time consuming. Appliances were, in fact, genuinely liberating for women because they drastically reduced the labor needed. That the politics of design was subject to all the same biases and problems of society at the time (and now) shouldn't elide that fact.
posted by Galvanic at 9:10 AM on October 12, 2021