ABSTRACT
It has long been believed that a particular ideal of domesticity inspired the middle-class Victorian house. With men at work away from the home, it has been argued, women were left behind to provide a safe haven for husband and children within the very private “domestic sphere”. Here women and their families worshipped the “Cult of True Womanhood”, the belief in a morally pure and sequestered motherhood. Sociologist Mike Hepworth outlines this version of the Victorian ideal, with its religious overtones, using evidence from Victorian literature and painting (see Fig. 23). As a result of this ideal, the dwelling is thought to have evolved in distinctive ways, with great emphasis on “front” and “back”, on “public” and “private” spaces, and on a proliferation of rooms with special purposes. Attention has focused particularly on the parlor, full of knick-knacks, where the central life of the family was supposed to take place, and which also served as the main reception room (Fig. 24). As Elizabeth Blackmar shows in Chapter 5, the inclusion of a parlor in middle-class dwellings was already taking place in the early nineteenth century. But a principal inspiration for the parlor, and for Victorian ideas of spaces and privacy more generally, was provided by the writings and designs of British architect Robert Kerr. Included here are excerpts from his The Gentleman’s House of 1864, and architectural designs that show his emphasis on the multiplication of spaces for specific purposes (Figs. 25, 26). Many of these spaces, but especially the parlor (or “Drawing-room” in Kerr’s terminology), reappeared in the later nineteenth century in a wide range of American dwellings, from architectthrough builder-to factory-designed houses (Figs. 27, 28, 29 and 30; see also Fig. 24). Yet Suzanne Spencer-Wood challenges traditional views of Victorian domesticity and Victorian housing design, showing far more interpenetration of “public” and “private” activities than has usually been observed. Spencer-Wood argues that “the Cult of True Womanhood”, rather than confining women to the home, actually provided a springboard for women’s leadership in political, social and architectural reform movements. And art historian Susan Sidlauskas, analyzing a single painting by Edgar Degas, reminds us of the darker side of Victorian domestic life – of the sexual conflicts and gender uncertainties that took place in the private spaces of Victorian dwellings.
