Books about Domesticity from Amazon.com

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Shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women, Hoganson makes it clear that globalization did not just happen beyond America’s shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences..
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Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero’s Home Fronts shows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America.
Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middle-class home and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African-American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.
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Taking English culture as its representative sample, The Secret History of Domesticity asks how the modern notion of the public-private relation emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treating that relation as a crucial instance of the modern division of knowledge, Michael McKeon narrates its pre-history along with that of its essential component, domesticity.

This narrative draws upon the entire spectrum of English people's experience. At the most "public" extreme are political developments like the formation of civil society over against the state, the rise of contractual thinking, and the devolution of absolutism from monarch to individual subject. The middle range of experience takes in the influence of Protestant and scientific thought, the printed publication of the private, the conceptualization of virtual publics -- society, public opinion, the market -- and the capitalization of production, the decline of the domestic economy, and the increase in the sexual division of labor. The most "private" pole of experience involves the privatization of marriage, the family, and the household, and the complex entanglement of femininity, interiority, subjectivity, and sexuality.

McKeon accounts for how the relationship between public and private experience first became intelligible as a variable interaction of distinct modes of being -- not a static dichotomy, but a tool to think with. Richly illustrated with nearly 100 images, including paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and a representative selection of architectural floor plans for domestic interiors, this volume reads graphic forms to emphasize how susceptible the public-private relation was to concrete and spatial representation. McKeon is similarly attentive to how literary forms evoked a tangible sense of public-private relations -- among them figurative imagery, allegorical narration, parody, the author-character-reader dialectic, aesthetic distance, and free indirect discourse. He also finds a structural analogue for the emergence of the modern public-private relation in the conjunction of what contemporaries called the "secret history" and the domestic novel.

A capacious and synthetic historical investigation, The Secret History of Domesticity exemplifies how the methods of literary interpretation and historical analysis can inform and enrich one another.

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Cookbooks tell stories They open up the worlds in which the people who wrote and read them once lived. In the hands of a good historian, cookbooks can be shown to contain the markings of political, social, and ideological changes that we conventionally locate outside the kitchen. Cookbooks allow us to trace the course of empires, of social roles, and of new nations over time. Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity and National Identity, 1616-1901 draws from three hundred years of Danish cookbooks to trace the growth of a bourgeois consciousness, the development of domesticity and gendered spheres, and the evolution of nationalism and a specific Danish identity from the early seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Like all prescriptive literature, cookbooks do not merely reflect the changes of the day but also constitute them. Historian Carol Gold reads recipes and cooking instructions for what they can tell us about literacy levels, division of labor in the kitchen and in society, and changes in the gendered aspects of publishing and using cookbooks. Gold explores the authors' instructions for economic and hygienic housekeeping and their sentiments about Danish identity as spelled out in dishes and spices. Just as the Danish nation would manage the body politic, so women were exhorted to manage the house and ensure the family's physical and moral health. Through the pages of cookbooks - in recipes, menus, and table settings - we can chart the growth of a nationalist Denmark and track the development of what it means to be a Dane. Written with the ease of a veteran historian and in an accessible and engaging style, Danish Cookbooks will appeal to scholars in Scandinavian studies as well as in gender and women's studies. It will also appeal to nonacademic readers interested in historical aspects of Danish nationalism and identity, women's social history, and cookbooks and cooking..
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Housewives constitute a large section of the population, yet they have received very little attention, let alone respect Glenna Matthews, who herself spent many years as "just a housewife" before becoming a scholar of American history, sets out to redress this imbalance.
While the male world of work has always received the most respect, Matthews maintains that widespread reverence for the home prevailed in the nineteenth century. The early stages of industrialization made possible a strong tradition of cooking, baking, and sewing that gave women great satisfaction and a place in the world. Viewed as the center of republican virtue, the home also played an important religious role. Examining novels, letters, popular magazines, and cookbooks, Matthews seeks to depict what women had and what they have lost in modern times. She argues that the culture of professionalism in the late nineteenth century and the culture of consumption that came to fruition in the 1920s combined to kill off the "cult of domesticity." This important, challenging book sheds new light on a central aspect of human experience: the essential task of providing a society's nurture and daily maintenance..
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In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture—not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity—going from missiles to washing machines—American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, turning "weaponry into livingry."

This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss—suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories—went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody.

Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images, the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports on, among other things, MOMA's exhibition of a Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU), a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter, barracks, or housing; Charles and Ray Eames's vigorous domestic life and their idea of architecture as a flexible stage for the theatrical spectacle of everyday life; and the American lawn as patriotic site and inalienable right.

Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations—most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more..
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Tarbell (1862-1938) was a major painter of his era, extremely influential as a teacher in Boston and leader of the avant-garde. This elegant volume presents Tarbell's finest work in the context of a biographical text filled with fascinating quotations from the artist's contemporaries..
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For 17 years Bob Shacochis has been living in unwedded bliss with the woman he calls "Miss F." He has also been cooking for her. This lyrical, irreverent, and often mouth-watering "prose stew" takes in Shacochis' thoughts on monogamy and hot sauce, sex and seafood, and the enduring consolations of soup. It is the ideal valentine for lovers of prose and food..
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The first decades of the twentieth century brought enormous change in Britain. Men's and women's roles came under scrutiny, class and social structures were transformed. This book casts new light on the notorious Bloomsbury Group and how the issues of their day influenced their interpretation and decoration of the home. Christopher Reed analyzes the rooms designed by Bloomsbury artists as spaces in which to be modern. The book traces the development of Bloomsbury's domestic aesthetic from the group's influential promulgation of Post-Impressionism in Britain around 1910 through the 1930s. In detailed studies of rooms and environments created by Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, Reed challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from modernism. He presents their work as an alternative form of modernism, later suppressed by sexist and homophobic attitudes that disparaged the decorative arts and domesticity in general, as well as Bloomsbury in particular. The aesthetic and ideological implications of the Bloomsbury interiors were international in scope, Reed argues, and these domestic designs served as an important marker along the route to modernity..
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