ABSTRACT
The belief in the existence of a psychological link between women and the domestic sphere contained in the above statement made by the interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe, in her 1913 home-decorating advice book, The House in Good Taste, was rooted in the mid-nineteenth-century idea of the ‘separate spheres’. It was clearly still alive and well in the early twentieth century.2 By that time, it had effected the emergence of a new female professional, the interior decorator, an aesthetic practitioner who provided decorative schemes for the homes of clients who were wealthy enough to afford her services. That a number of women began to undertake this work from the 1870s onwards in Britain and in the USA a couple of decades later, was a result both of the growing custom of women taking on the responsibility for their domestic interior décor as part of their role as ‘beautifiers of the home’ and of the growing number of middle-class ladies seeking employment outside the home. Inevitably the latter turned to, and were encouraged to undertake, jobs which were extensions of their familiar domestic responsibilities; teaching and social work and a range of aesthetic practices among them.3 This new imperative rendered ambiguous the much stricter division that had existed hitherto between the private and public spheres. Thus, the interior decorator began to occupy a middle ground, maintaining her commitment to the cultural links between domesticity and femininity but operating outside the home in the context of the ‘masculine’, public sphere of work defined as professional rather than amateur. From the perspective of women’s history the female interior decorator’s occupation of a middle ground can be seen as a prelude to women’s subsequent entrance into what had hitherto been considered masculine areas of work; their physical absorption into the public arena; their desire to align themselves with
the rationalism associated with the world of work and industrial production; and their relinquishing of their sole responsibility for domestic work. As such, it provided an important moment within the dramatic changes in women’s lives which were to occur through the twentieth century. From a design historical perspective, the work of the professional female interior decorators working at this time can be seen to represent the stylistic shift from nineteenth-century historicism to twentiethcentury architectural and design modernism. Fullyfledged by the years following the First World War, that latter movement aligned itself more closely with stereotypically masculine cultural values-ones that were linked to the public sphere, to rationalism and to the technological metaphor —than with values associated with the world of domestic femininity.4 Although, as a result of its perceived social elitism and its aesthetic historicism, it was rejected later by the proponents of modernism, the work of the pioneer American interior decorators of these years played, I wish to argue in this chapter, an important role in introducing women to modernity and in providing them with an active role, both as professionals and as amateurs, in the creation of the modern world. Interior decoration was restricted to the wealthy, but it both established and disseminated an aesthetic and cultural model which was more widely influential.5 It also represented a key transitional moment without which fullyfledged modernism might not have emerged. Indeed, a number of leading female aesthetic practitioners, Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Gray among them, who by the 1920s had aligned themselves with ‘masculine’ avant-garde modernism, had backgrounds in interior decoration.
