ABSTRACT
As was noted in Chapter 4, since the Industrial Revolution for the middle classes ‘work’ and ‘home life’1 has taken place in different domains in advanced capitalist economies such as Canada, the USA and the UK. The home is both a physical location – as a bounded and clearly demarcated space – and a psychological concept. Often presented in positive terms of warmth, as security, as a haven from the pressures of work and public life (Bowlby et al. 1997: 343). Houses are assumed to become homes because they provide and become the environment within which family relationships – close, private and intimate – are located. While it is true that non-family households also have homes, a crucial understanding of home is a notion of a place of origin, a place of belonging, a place to which to return, a place where children are/will/may be reared. Thus the white, Western ideology is of a home as a physical entity, and a set of social, economic and sexual relations (Peck 1996: 37-40).
