A better home for every body: homemaking and liberal individualism in 1920s America

This dissertation finds the meaning of twentieth-century American liberalism within the assortment of historical voices who, during the 1920s, promoted the transformation of houses into beautiful, comfortable, well-managed homes. Most prominent among these was Herbert Hoover, and his efforts to promulgate a modern ideal of domesticity coincided with his promotion of an ideology that he labeled American Individualism. Explaining this connection between material culture and political philosophy is Hoover’s belief that “better” homes sustained American liberalism’s presumptions of individual autonomy and consensual self-government. These precursors of civil entitlement and national identity enabled his model citizen to reconcile the antinomies characteristic of the liberal subject: Hoover’s American Individual was, at once, liberated and restrained, singular and identical, distinct from the state and inseparable from it. Hoover’s perception of the better home’s circular function to reflect as well as construct liberal subjectivity was echoed by housing professionals, social scientists, interior decorators, home economists, popular writers, and civic activists. Examining the prescriptive literature these figures authored, the dissertation identifies within their diverse texts a narrative structure and logic that traced the liberal citizen’s, and thus America’s, origin and development to an innate yearning for an appealing home. Perceived as an authentic, metaphysical condition, this desire not only transformed primal drives into productive initiative, but also established the home-loving subject’s temporal precedence to the political economy. When created and managed through prescribed standards, the beautiful home aesthetically embodied this priority; its décor metaphorically reconciled liberty’s pursuit with a submission to the collectivizing ideals that constituted the nation; and by focusing and educating desire, the home’s beauty and comfort catalyzed a supposedly consensual enactment of the liberal virtues that enabled its inhabitants to become what the better home aesthetically signified. The modern home idealized during the 1920s was thus a product of public policy, civic engagement, scholarly analysis, artistic design, and literary production through which the liberal state created the condition of its own possibility. Although modernizing the home reinforced the traditional role of domesticity in American liberalism’s reproduction, this project prompted professional decorators, housing experts, and home economists to construe homemaking as an allegory for the performance of liberal individualism and, consequently, to frame the liberal subject as potentially androgynous. Emphasizing homemaking’s essential purpose within liberalism’s developmental narrative, white home economists stressed men’s dependency on their wives’ liberal attributes, which the professionalization of household labor served to display. This attempt to depict homemaking as a mode of liberal identity nevertheless failed to establish an identity between the women who worked at home and the men who relaxed there. African-American clubwomen encountered a different paradox when they similarly sought political opportunity in domesticity’s acknowledged function to cultivate liberal virtues and values within citizens who admittedly lacked them. These activists for racial equality confronted a homogenizing racial binary despite the declared inclusiveness of Hoover’s home ownership and home improvement campaigns. Imposed on black citizens geographically, narratively, and aesthetically, racialized otherness helped to make the home an evocative, private space, one that purportedly enabled a liberated and disciplined American Individual to create a progressive, liberal civilization.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Jennifer Lynn Petti