‘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

Abstract

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.

Home and Away: The Flight from Domesticity in Late‐Nineteenth‐Century England Re‐visited

“…Middle-class households were more likely to feature such a room by the late nineteenth century (though Jane Hamlett shows that this was not as widespread as contemporary comment suggested). 37 The flight from domesticity brought to the surface tensions which were integral to marriage. It was a Victorian axiom that men's gender identity was formed as much by familial relations as by occupation, but in its domestic dimension masculinity was inherently unstable.…”

‘From the Housewife’s Point of View’: Female Citizenship and the Gendered Domestic Interior in Post-First World War Britain, 1918–1928.

“…Deborah Cohen and Jane Hamlett have argued that the designation of certain rooms as 'feminine' could, in Hamlett's words, 'ensure the empowerment' of women as much as their segregation. 103 Hamlett's reading of late nineteenth-century domestic advice literature aimed at a middle-class readership has uncovered several examples of authors arguing for the inclusion of desks and writing tables in the drawing room, suggesting that the space might promote female autonomy through encouraging pursuits such as writing. These included some early writing by Mrs C.S.…”

“Any Lady Can Do This Without Much Trouble …”: Class and Gender in The Dining Room (1878)

“…(Loftie 1878: 77-8) Thus, the imagined class and financial position of the readership makes this room a multifunctional family space. Indeed as Jane Hamlett (2009), who has reexamined the relationship between the gendered hierarchies of the middle-class home, comments:…”