New Space For Women

Gerda R Wekerle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367019136
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429716171
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, increasing self-awareness has led women to examine and question their environments-largely designed and structured by men-in light of their particular needs and experiences. Inevitably, these changes in consciousness have led to demands for changes in existing architectural, social, and psychological environments and for an increas

Part 1
The Domestic Workplace

Introduction

Rebecca Peterson

Until now, the home as an environment has not been a significant topic for study. This may be partially attributable to the extreme segregation of public and private realms within our culture, with the subsequent devaluation of the home as an important economic or societal sphere. The five chapters in Part 1, written by psychologists, sociologists, planners, and architects, rely on scientific research, exploratory interviews, observation of behavior, and historical analysis to pose questions about women’s needs within the home. Part 1 includes chapters on defining the problem as well as solving it. The authors suggest that if we fail to deal with the complexity of social and design problems within the home environment we will block women’s attempts to change their life patterns outside the home.

Susan Saegert and Gary Winkel’s chapter explores the relationship between sex roles and the meaning and use of the home. Their research explored the possibility that men and women with sharply segregated sex roles would hold widely different home-related attitudes and values and that the degree of physical segregation of the home from the broader world (urbanites vs. suburbanites) would be related to differences in use and meaning of the home. Saegert and Winkel found that women invested more labor in the home and placed more value on the home expressing their personalities than did men. Parallel with this is the finding that women gain more satisfaction from the home. Women in the city and men in the suburbs both tend to value home and work equally whereas urban men emphasize work and suburban women focus primarily on the home. This chapter explicitly addresses the ambivalence of the home as “woman’s place” and the source of her oppression. The authors propose higher density mixed-use residential environments as partial solutions to the dilemmas faced by men and women who must choose small urban apartments in social and physical settings that are not suitable for childrearing (due to crime, pollution, lack of contact with nature, unsatisfactory schools) or accept the loss of social and cultural opportunities, especially for the wife, within the suburban environment.

Findings from studies by Sarah F. Berk suggest that alterations in the physical characteristics of the household, either through design or mechanical variations, will not necessarily lead to alterations in social relations. Berk reports on research she conducted on the distribution of responsibilities within the home. Her findings demonstrate that women continue to carry the primary responsibility for the accomplishment of roughly 80 to 90 percent of the household tasks investigated. This chapter has relevance to the definition of the home as a work-place and to the social definition of the division of labor between husbands, children, and wives.

Proposals for change in home design come from a number of sources. The chapters by Cynthia Rock, Susana Torre and Gwendolyn Wright, and Dolores Hayden focus on single-family dwelling and collective solutions, respectively. The chapter by Rock, Torre, and Wright presents an historical overview of the way in which women’s magazines have portrayed the conflicts in the definition of the home environment as embodied by designers and users since the 1830s. The authors contend that the home as it presently exists reinforces traditional sex roles. They give illustrations of ways in which individuals can redefine the use of spaces within existing housing types in order to facilitate shared domestic work.

In contrast to the single-family housing solutions proposed by Rock, Torre, and Wright, Hayden reviews plans of improved domestic architecture proposed by the utopian socialists and cooperative housekeepers. These groups challenged the separation of work and home, production and reproduction, that they felt was brought about by industrial capitalism. Hayden chronicles their attempts to end the isolation of the housewife, increase efficiency through division of labor, provide better design and equipment in kitchens and spaces for child care, and increase the amount of leisure time available to the women in their groups. This chapter demonstrates that collective domestic architecture has existed in workable and complex forms even though these experiments have been isolated and limited in scope to groups outside the cultural mainstream.

In summary, these chapters illustrate the way in which a combination of psychological, social, and design factors interact to pose problems for women within the home environment. Economic factors limiting women’s access to options for both initial choice and modification of housing were not explored here, but must be assumed to be part of the problem definition. Some alternatives for single-family and collective solutions are suggested. Mary Soper’s chapter in Part 4 will explore an example of a present-day attempt by women to influence the design of housing for single-parent families.

1
The Home: A Critical Problem for Changing Sex Roles¹

Susan Saegert
Gary Winkel

The home is both a physical space where certain activities are performed and a value-laden symbol. Both meanings of the word “home” are closely linked to definitions of the female sex role in our culture. Physically and symbolically the home is a private place, away from the public world of work. It is a place for being with one’s family and for sharing feelings, a place to retreat to, both alone and for close relationships. The activities that go on in the home differ from those outside in many ways. Work in the home is generally not conducted on a wage basis and most of it is done by women. In fact we would suggest that it is almost impossible to imagine a “home” in both senses of the word without imagining a caretaking woman in the setting.

Clearly the idea of a home evokes many positive associations, yet as the research to be discussed will suggest, it is also the nexus of considerable ambivalence. It is a place where the cultural values of individualism and achievement can be laid aside for a time. The family and personal relationships become the focus rather than the individual. Simply maintaining life takes the place of achieving goals and striving for money and success. And in all this there is a woman on the scene, providing food, care, and nurturance. To the extent that the household runs smoothly or roughly, she is usually held responsible.

The home is so intimately tied to the definition of men’s and women’s roles that one might even say it exists as a cultural symbol primarily through these roles. Evidence for this assertion can be drawn from the images of women presented in the various media as well as from behavioral and interview studies concerning the home-related attitudes and activities of women and men.

From childhood, girls are presented with the role of housewife as most desirable and probable future for themselves. For example, an analysis of 134 elementary school readers (Women on Words and Images, 1972) showed that the girls portrayed in these books were constantly rehearsing domestic activities (166 instances as compared to 50 for boys). Adult women were usually presented as full-time, apron-wearing housewives. Only three mothers working outside the home appeared at all. Of the potential occupational roles presented by adults, men were shown doing 147 different jobs, while women had only 26 different jobs, most of them domestic or service work. The mass media overwhelmingly depict girls and women as domestic creatures, found primarily in the home or in supermarkets buying products to keep their homes clean and attractive (Tuchman, Kaplan, and Benet, 1978). Many fewer women than men are portrayed at all on television. When women do appear they are usually in the home as housewives, unless they are the victims of violence or are “evil women.”

These images do not accurately reflect either the increasing prevalence of women who are working outside the home (c.f. Kreps, 1976; Hoffman and Nye, 1974) or the rising incidence of women who are not “housewives” but rather heads of households (c.f. Ross and Sawhill, 1975). However, they are correct in implying that women do most of the homemaking. A UNESCO Time Budget Series (Szalai, 1972) done in twelve countries shows that women in all countries, even the socialist ones, spent much more time on housework than did men. Only in one Soviet city was child care equally divided. Not only do women spend more time in caring for the home, they also overwhelmingly spend more time in it than men (Hole and Attenborough, 1966).

Numerous sociological investigations continue to document the identification of women’s roles with the making of a home, even when other activities are pursued. In 1951, Rose found that college women’s expectations for themselves were to work full time, to volunteer for church and community work, to entertain, and to raise a large family. Wilensky’s 1968 data and the time-use studies described previously reveal that women who work outside the home simply add it on to other tasks.

While this taking on of additional roles may be physically tiring, it could be taken as representative of women’s progress in achieving fuller lives. However, studies of very different sample populations (c.f. Komarovsky, 1973; Lopata, 1971; Oakley, 1974) reveal two sources of conflict in this identification of women with the making of homes. One arises from the assumption that for women the home must come first, regardless of what else they are involved in. The second involves cultural ambivalence toward, and at times devaluation of, homemaking activities and the homemaker role (Burnett, n.d.; Komarovsky, 1973; Lopata, 1971; Oakley, 1974). Thus women are on the one hand committing themselves to and taking responsibility for the home and on the other being denigrated when they are “nothing but a housewife.” They may be providing an alternative to the pressures of the individualistic, achievement-oriented public world, but they are being judged negatively by the criteria of that world while being expected by all to continue to manage the home.

On the basis of this research we feel that it is important then to ask what part the home, as a physical locale and a symbolic space, does play in the struggles of women and men toward liberation from the constraint of sex roles in our society. Are men assuming more responsibility for household work? Are the sexes becoming more equally associated with the nurturing private world of the home? In short, are the kinds of investments, both psychological and behavioral, that men and women make in the home becoming more similar?

Most of the information presented thus far indicates little movement in the direction of greater equality either in activity or in symbolic involvement. Rather it appears that women are generally attempting to add to their repertoire of activities and social roles outside the home while continuing to bear major responsibility for the making of a home. This is a very demanding endeavor. In these circumstances the options and constraints presented by the sociophysical environment are likely to have a very significant effect on the feasibility of being involved in the private world of the home and the world beyond. Three particular aspects of the context of women’s lives are expected to importantly affect their ability to combine home-related activities and values with pursuits and fulfillments in other domains.

The first of these involves the degree of sharing of household tasks with their partners. Even though, overall, men may not be taking on much of the work of homemaking, individual variation in this domain would be expected to affect a woman’s opportunities to become invested in goals outside the home and the equality of the psychological investment of the man and woman in the home.

Secondly, the accessibility of other pursuits in the physical environment is expected to influence a woman’s potential involvement outside the home. This hypothesis is suggested by data from several sources. Looking at couples in northern California over a forty-year time span, Maas and Kuypers (1974) found that the adult life-styles of women were more affected by the accessibility to sources of satisfaction in the sociophysical environment than were those of men. Further, women who in older age were described as least well adjusted and happy were likely to live in remote suburban or rural locations and to have focused most of their activities around home and family. The balance of interests evidenced by most of the men in the sample was apparently little influenced by the location of their homes.

We can perhaps understand women’s dependency on the environment more clearly when we look at the concrete opportunities women have for pursuits outside the home. Palm and Pred have taken this approach in their thought-provoking paper entitled “A Time-Geographic Perspective on Problems of Inequality for Women” (1974). On the basis of information about the required daily activities of women and the accessibility of transportation and services in the San Francisco Bay area of northern California, they concluded that for many women the distances to activities outside the home, the unavailability of transportation, and the time schedules imposed by household duties and child care made the possibility of involvement in pursuits outside the home very remote. These data plus our own preliminary interviews led us to expect that the location of the home with respect to other activity spaces would be related to the use and meaning of the home for women.

Finally, perhaps the most importan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• The Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Domestic Workplace
• Part 2 Urban Design: The Price Women Pay
• Part 3 Women in Environmental Decisionmaking: Institutional Constraints
• Part 4 Women as Environmental Activists