Domestic Economy

Definition

Domestic economy names the science — and the design method — of the household as a managed economy of labor, time, and expense. In Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's The American Woman's Home (1869), the founding program takes the form of a design brief: "The aim will be to exhibit modes of economizing labor, time, and expenses, so as to secure health, thrift, and domestic happiness to persons of limited means, in a measure rarely attained even by those who possess wealth" (p. 43). The house itself is the machine: "In the following drawings are presented modes of economizing time, labor, and expense by the close packing of conveniences" (p. 44), so that "small and economical houses can be made to secure most of the comforts and many of the refinements of large and expensive ones" (p. 44). Its three criteria — "health, industry, and economy, those cardinal requisites of domestic enjoyment and success" (p. 43) — are utilitarian and anti-displayal: the editors frame the whole as a conception of home under which "the interior is not for display but provides for health, industry and economy" (p. 43), with "'scientific' kitchen planning to accommodate changes in food preparation and management" (p. 43) as its technical core. Domestic economy is thus the historical root of both home economics as a discipline and the planned, workspace kitchen as a design problem — the first systematic claim that the interior's plan is an instrument for the rationalization of everyday labor.

Key Thinkers

• Catharine E. Beecher — the program's author: A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and The American Woman's Home (1869, with Stowe); "scientific" kitchen planning; the close packing of conveniences; domestic management as female expertise.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe — co-author of the 1869 text; the colony projection with its common laundry as domestic economy's collectivist horizon.
• (Related, not yet paged — see log: Ellen Swallow Richards and the late-nineteenth-century home economics movement that institutionalized the Beechers' program; Dolores Hayden, "Catharine Beecher and the Politics of Housework" (1977), the feminist historiography of the program.)

Related Concepts

• The Christian House — the theological frame within which the economy operates: economy as piety, thrift as heavenly accumulation.
• Domestic Feminism — the political claim domestic economy carries: house-planning as female expertise and "female-led domestic government."
• Domestic Interior — the site the economy organizes; the anti-display interior of health, industry, economy.
• Flexible Interior — the economy's spatial instrument: the movable screen as the cheap substitute for more rooms.
• Interior Design — the disciplinary descendant: the kitchen plan and storage ergonomics as proto-interior-design knowledge.
• Everyday Life — the object-domain: "their detailed examination of everyday household objects" (editors, p. 43).
• Practical Wisdom — the epistemic form: "to be 'wise,' is 'to choose the best means for accomplishing the best end'" (p. 43).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the founding text: "modes of economizing time, labor, and expense by the close packing of conveniences" (p. 44); health, industry, and economy as the "cardinal requisites" (p. 43); "scientific" kitchen planning (editors, p. 43); shelf-boxes "cheaper and better than drawers" (p. 46); the oat-straw mattress specified by health criteria (p. 48); the common laundry of the colony projection (p. 48).
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the historical foil: the editors place Baldwin "in sharp contrast to advice literature of the nineteenth century" (p. 26) — the tradition of which domestic economy is the founding branch.
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the reader that canonizes the text, situating taste's "alliance to consumption" (p. 12) against the Beechers' economy of non-display.
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the economy's nostalgic-reproduction moment (1876): the Garretts' draperies chapter mourns household linen neglected since "the days of our grandmothers, who spun their own linen" (quoted pp. 113–114), and Ferry reads the passage against the Married Women's Property legislation: "here the Garretts have returned to an idealized historical vision, seeing the home as a site of production rather than consumption" (p. 114). Their prescription — the work of marking, "wherein the cleverness of the worker might devise some fresh conceit on each article, would be more interesting than half the busy idleness with which the daughters of England now beguile their time" (quoted p. 114) — is domestic economy's productionist ideal stated against the consumption-era leisure it displaced. Where the Beechers economize the household's labor (close packing, thrift), the Garretts mourn the household's production (spinning, marking) — the concept's two historical registers, rationalization and de-rationalization, appearing in the same decade. See separate-spheres, domestic-feminism, consumerism.

Open Questions

• The Beechers economize labor "by the close packing of conveniences" — but packed conveniences can also pack labor into one isolated worker. Did the plan liberate the houseworker, or rationalize her isolation? (The feminist historiography — Hayden's "Politics of Housework" — answers: both; see log.)
• The kitchen is planned "'scientific[ally]… to accommodate changes in food preparation and management'" (editors, p. 43) — does domestic economy constitute the first design response to technological change in the home, and what would a history of the kitchen from Beecher (1869) to the Frankfurt kitchen (1926) look like?
• Economy is justified theologically ("abundant treasures be laid up in heaven," p. 48). When the theology falls away in the home-economics movement, what replaces it — and does home economics without the Colony become merely the science of managing scarcity?
• The Beechers' economy is addressed "to persons of limited means" — can domestic economy be a design ethics for affluence, or does it only function where scarcity gives it teeth?
• The Garretts' productionist nostalgia ("the home as a site of production rather than consumption," Ferry) mourns precisely the labor the Beechers' economy rationalized away — is domestic economy's history therefore a double movement (rationalizing housework while destroying its productive content), and what would a domestic economy that restored meaningful production (without the spinning-wheel nostalgia) design for? See separate-spheres, domestic-feminism.