ABSTRACT
Domesticity, a constellation of skills and responsibilities associated with competently managing a household, also names an ideology equating these tasks with traits and realms of activity considered distinctively female. Middle-class norms for the competencies and the ideology itself have exerted forceful pressures on class and gender relations in modern society. Both uses of the term are relevant to social historians’ efforts to reconstruct the fabric of life. Reflecting middleclass praxis, the tasks and ideology have become inextricably linked in a historical paradigm of separate spheres that is widely employed to analyze gendered relations in industrial society, in the United States and Europe particularly, but also in other regions such as Japan.
