Cooperative Housekeeping

Definition

Cooperative housekeeping names the proposal to collectivize the heaviest domestic labors — laundry, cooking, cleaning — in shared facilities serving a cluster of households, so that each private house is relieved of "the most trying part of domestic labor." Its germ in this wiki is the Beechers' colony projection of 1869: "suppose such a colony, with a central church and schoolroom, library, hall for sports, and a common laundry, (taking the most trying part of domestic labor from each house)" (p. 48) — a Christian settlement in the Southern uplands where the private family house survives, but its most burdensome function is commoned. The concept stands at the intersection of domestic economy (labor economized at settlement scale rather than house scale), the commons (domestic functions as common pool resources) and utopia (the planned community as the vehicle of domestic reform). Historically, the proposal's era coincides exactly with the American cooperative-housekeeping movement launched by Melusina Fay Peirce in 1869 — the same year as The American Woman's Home — which proposed cooperative kitchens and laundries run by federated housewives; the movement's failure, and the twentieth-century victory of the mechanized private kitchen, is the unresolved history this concept marks.

Key Thinkers

• Catharine E. Beecher — with Stowe, the colony's planner: the common laundry inside an otherwise privatized Christian domesticity.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe — co-author of the projection; the economized surplus redirected to "diffusing similar enjoyments and culture among the poor" (p. 48).
• (Related, not yet paged — see log: Melusina Fay Peirce, "Cooperative Housekeeping" (1869) and Cooperative Housekeeping: How Not to Do It and How to Do It (1884), the movement's founder and historian; Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981), the standard history of material feminist domestic collectivism; Ebenezer Howard's garden city as the communal-laundry's town-planning descendant.)

Related Concepts

• Domestic Economy — the parent method: economy of labor, time and expense — here collectivized from house-scale to settlement-scale.
• The Commons — the institutional form: the laundry, kitchen and schoolroom as common facilities within a privatized housing stock.
• Utopia — the genre: the colony projection as spatial utopia in the Christian-reform register (against the Situationist dismissal of "technocratic" utopias, a pious one).
• Domestic Feminism — the political ambiguity: commoning "the most trying part of domestic labor" is both a feminist relief of women's work and a way of preserving the privatized family as the basic unit.
• The Christian House — the theological vehicle: the settlement organized around "a central church and schoolroom."
• Housing — the scale question: whether domestic reform is a matter of the house plan, the block, or the settlement.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the founding projection: "a central church and schoolroom, library, hall for sports, and a common laundry, (taking the most trying part of domestic labor from each house)" (p. 48); children trained "to labor with the hands as a healthful and honorable duty" (p. 48); the economized wealth "laid up in heaven" through diffusion "among the poor, ignorant, and neglected ones" (p. 48).
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the anthology frame that reads the Beechers' "detailed examination of everyday household objects" (p. 43) as familiarity with "the role the household played within Christian society" — the institutional setting of the collectivist proposal.

Open Questions

• The colony commons the laundry but not the kitchen, and keeps the family house intact: is cooperative housekeeping a radical collectivization or a safety valve that preserved the private household by sacrificing only its worst chore?
• The proposal is dated 1869 — the year of Peirce's cooperative-housekeeping articles: why did domestic collectivism fail in the very decade of its most systematic formulation, and what does the failure imply for any contemporary revival (co-living, shared amenities)?
• The common laundry is justified by economy and piety, not by women's emancipation: can domestic labor be commoned without a theory of who does the commoned labor? (Hayden's history answers: the movement split on exactly this — see log.)
• Is the colony's "common laundry" the missing scale in the wiki's housing cluster — the block-level facility between the dwelling (dwelling) and the city — and does its absence from modern housing typologies mark a defeat of the collectivist strand of domestic reform?