ABSTRACT
Buying for the home is, materially speaking, buying a dwelling and the goods for its creation, maintenance, and adornment. What generally makes a house a home, though, are the affective associations of specific, tangible objects acquired in preparation for what in the nineteenth-century United States was termed housekeeping and what by the twentieth century became homemaking. Though both terms were, and are, employed to describe woman’s work, they together chart subtly a historic cultural shift recognizing the rise of mass production and mass consumption. Housekeeping referred to the utilitarian, quotidian processes of provisioning and maintaining a dwelling; keeping (like curatorship) was feminine, sometimes paid work in a culture in which endeavours of mastery and creation and production were coded masculine. By the advent of the twentieth century, homemaking had superseded greatly housekeeping, in recognition of modern women’s power to make – create, produce – the set of values and affections associated with the selection and care of a house and its contents, both material and animal. At the same time, homemakers were unpaid wives and mothers who toiled about the house, often but not always without the aid of servants, their labour invested in the maintenance of an idea that subverted the possibility of economic equality. The establishment of home economics at the turn of the twentieth century endorsed women’s knowledge as a form of mastery as it rationalized through sociology, economics, the natural and physical sciences, and architectural and interior design of the domestic dwelling – especially the kitchen – as not only a laboratory for modern living but a primary site of consumption.
