Making Homes

Question 1

Primary Material on Making Homes

Provide key contextual information for MO Household Diaries

Answer 1

• J298 - Massive movement from the 1950s - joint working, appreciation of a joint need to contribute effort. Working irregular hours, which tends to result in a reliance on frozen food.
• M381 - Wife performs majority of functions - particularly traditional in nature. Husband (who is retired!) does relatively little - but fairly gendered functions. Repairs, maintenance, with little dusting, vacuuming. Only concession seems to be washing up.
• N402 - Self-conscious - “I have tried to see this project as useful to historians, but realise I am ‘atypical’. I hope you have some young observers who are truly typical of the 1980s” - notion that typicality comes down to generational ownership of a timeframe is interesting. Does not maintain routine, but at same time, is likely retired.
• O406 - Conscious of gender stereotypes - attempts to signal his disagreement, but cites laziness as a reason for maintaining the wife as the head cook for i.e. Importance is placed on the weekend as a time for doing stuff, the week being more superficial due to work.
• P418 - Cleaning - 75% wife ; shopping - 90% wife; cooking - 95% wife
• R456 - Demonstrates movement to more domestic function equality - but still entrenchment of spheres - wife exclusively does washing clothes and ironing, other cleaning is disproportionately balanced in favour of the male. Maintenance and gardening is placed on the husband.
• S473 - Gender role reversal - wife as main breadwinner, husband assumes daily functions
• W566 - Share of some of the domestic functions were shared, however cooking was still exclusively female, as was shopping and making the bed. Male work hours probably 1/3 of female

Question 2

Primary Material on Making Homes

Provide key contextual information for Wendy Whitfield, His n Her Housework

Answer 2

1982 - Writes Book ‘Diary of Divorce’

• • Language of infantilisation - family planning clinic - made her feel like a child - feel like a sick person married to a male - marriage seen as humiliating - marital happiness as illusion
• • Nod to broader structural changes - college seen as liberating - exposure to feminine literature - becoming more accessible. Challenged conventions - uneasy freedoms
• • Finds herself torn between worlds
• ○ Familial connections condemned Whitfield’s rejection of doing housework
• ○ Ideas of respectability and status remained present
• • Women’s Lib gave Whitfield a voice - dispensed with illusion of a couple - better relationship as a result of the movement
• ○ Note of sadness?
• ○ Worries that inequality is endemic in society
• Key Contentions Around Subject
• The role of gender, the nature of domesticity in the less manual-worker dominated environment. The power of sex and the role of psychoanalysis
• Silences
• International feminism, the direction of the Left
• Agency of men - “Dave’s standards
• Stylistics
• Aggressive, intentionally provocative

Question 3

Primary Material on Making Homes

Provide key contextual information for Bloom

Answer 3

Ursula Bloom - Could be the novellist, known for other contributions to Radio Pictorial in the 1930s (such as What Women Listeners Want)

• Condensed Chronological Narrative*
• Discusses how to embroider sheets, types of technical stitches, pragmatic utility of existing materials
• Key Quotes*
• “I cut up badly-worn bath towels into small guest flannels, and convert the smallest pieces into face flannels, button-holing the edges. They take on a new life this way” - very much a make do and mend mentality during the period of high consumerism

Question 4

Primary Material on Making Homes

Provide key contextual information for MO Enquiry Into People’s Homes

Answer 4

• ‘Invaluable information for politicians, planners, architects’
• Primitive methodological techniques - every 11th house, divided cohort into 5 broad, but non-representative classes.
• Optimistic for future, though people did not reflect this sentiment
• Competed with other publications claiming authority in field
• Peak MO - govt funding, first phase, though not as surreal as usual.
• Dislike gardens being overlooked - notions of privacy were very important
• Privacy shines through in ‘ideal’ neighbour - pleasant but private
• London City Council - 17550 - 20000 flats - without second living room

Source Legacy

• Joe Moran - contrasts with the critiques of modernity - moment in which intellectuals and planners influences what the state can do
• Mike Savage - 1960s- sociology becomes more rationalistic, objective mode of understanding social knowledge. Despite this, Goldthorpe still has judgemental field notes- Always a disconnect between the observer and observed.
• Jon Law - sociology was concerned with social problems prewar, postwar, more to do with the everyday - focus on the slums, the rubble and the destruction of the Blitz - idea of a new, better world to emerge from this

Question 5

Primary Material on Making Homes

Provide key contextual information for Winter Warmth, Unaccustomed, 7 Radiators

Answer 5

• Picture Post
• Heating played an important part in encouraging more indoor, sedentary functions, according to Lenneke Kuijer.
• These processes can be summarized as: 1) materializations of ideals of separating domestic activities; 2) the delegation of work and control to infrastructures and appliances; and 3) the emergence of new uses for heat following from a shift towards more sedentary, indoor activities.
  
  • ‘That’s when we started using the living room’

Question 6

Secondary Material on Making Homes

Summarise the findings of Joe Moran in ‘Housing, Memory and the Everyday’

Answer 6

• Argues that housing in Britain has been inspired by international trends (i.e. high-rise blocks took inspiration from the Bauhaus movement), but at the same time, resistant to other movements. Britains reject pre-fabricated houses for pursuit of character

Question 7

Secondary Material on Making Homes

Summarise the findings of Jon Lawrence in ‘Class, Affluence…’

Answer 7

• Argues that the sociological construction of class in the post-war era led to, initially, the idea that class was destroyed from above - embourgeoisement. This is embodied through a range of sociologists, including Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Hoggart, Willmott and Young. Lawrence prefers the anti-romantic line put forward by Seabrook later on, which suggested that working class communities of the past were bound through mutual convenience/ dependence - rather, WC were selfish, and given the opportunity, were happy to destroy their own culture.

Question 8

Secondary Material on Making Homes

Summarise the findings of Claire Langhammer in ‘Meanings of Home’

Answer 8

• In 1950, many still were excluded from home-centred society: housing remained political issue.
• Privatised home life important to both genders. MO evidences sense of relaxation, freedom, privacy. Gender however prominent - men saw home as complete with a woman.
• 49% wanted home with small garden, 10% wanted a bungalow, very few approved of flats.
• Home is fluid concept - not simply house.
• Hoggart -> home centre of working class life. The warmest welcome is still ‘Mek y’self at ‘ome’
• V1 & V2 rockets destroyed 1.5 million homes.
• Hoggart identified that women were relegated to domestic functions, even though male attitudinal behaviour was changing.
• When Mass-Observation asked for memories and recollections of the 1950s in spring 2003, popular memories of this period were cut through by gender. Amongst men, home and domestic life were infrequently explicitly central to reconstructions of the past.