Kitchen sink dramas: Women, modernity and space in Weimar Germany

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 538-556

  Jerram, Leif ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DESIGN; SOCIAL HISTORY; SOCIAL HOUSING; SOCIAL POLICY; SPACE USE; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

CENTRAL EUROPE; EURASIA; EUROPE; GERMANY;

EID: 33845703834     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474006cgj374oa     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. See e.g. Mark Wigley's psychoanalytically inspired analysis of two canonical works on building homes and producing order in domestic space, 'Untitled: the housing of gender', in B. Colomina, ed., Sexuality and space (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), pp. 327-89.
2. E.g. Sharon Marcus's discussion of novels and the lobbies of apartment buildings, Apartment stories: city and home in nineteenth century Paris and London (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999);
3. Lynda Nead's use of songs to analyse a pleasure garden, Victorian Babylon: people, streets and images in nineteenth-century London (London, Yale University Press, 2000).
4. L. Lees, 'Urban geography: discourse analysis and urban research', Progress in human geography 28 (2004), pp. 101-7;
5. 'Rematerializing geography: the "new" urban geography', Progress in human geography 26 (2002), pp. 101-12;
6. C. Philo, 'More words, more worlds: reflections on the cultural turn in human geography', in I. Crouch et al., eds, Cultural turns/ geographical turns: perspectives in cultural geography (Harlow, Prentice Hall, 2000);
7. P. Jackson, 'Rematerializing social and cultural geography', Social and cultural geography 1 (2000), pp. 9-14.
8. H. Heynen, Architecture and modernity: a critique (London, MIT Press, 1999);
9. P. Rowe, Modernity and housing (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995);
10. P. Gay, Weimar culture: the outsider as insider (London, Penguin, 1974);
11. J. Willett, The new sobriety: art and politics in the Weimar period (London, Thames & Hudson, 1978);
12. D. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: the crisis of classical modernity (London, Penguin, 1991).
13. P. Betts, The authority of everyday objects: a cultural history of West German industrial design (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004).
14. For example, in Thomas Markus's excellent Buildings and power: freedom and control in the origins of modern building types (London, Routledge, 1993), plans of both 'real' and 'ideal' buildings are shown. However, real and ideal are ascribed equal importance, and producers' rhetoric surrounding the plans is privileged at the expense of how they must have intervened in people's lives.
15. I. Cieraad, 'Anthropology at home', in Cieraad, ed., At home: an anthropology of domestic space (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 1-12.
16. M. Llewellyn, 'Designed by women and designing women: gender, planning and the geographies of the kitchen in Britain, 1917-19-16', Cultural geographies 11 (2005), pp. 42-60.
17. E. Blau, The architecture of Red Vienna (London, MIT Press, 1999), pp. 182-87.
18. May was far from the only 'hero' of Modernist architecture to be so; the word 'Taylorism' appears in all of Le Corbusier's works of the 1920s and 1930s. M. McLeod, 'Architecture or revolution: Taylorism, technocracy and social change', Art journal 2 (1983), pp. 132-47.
19. C. Frederick, Household engineering: scientific management in the home (London, Routledge, 1920 [Chicago, American School of Home Economics, 1919]);
20. first German edn Die rationelle Haushaltsführung: Betriebswissenschaftliche Studien, trans. I. Witte (Berlin, 1922).
21. G. Kuhn, Wohnkultur und kommunale Wohnungspolitik in Frankfurt am Main, 1880-1930: Auf dem Wege zu einer pluralen Gesellschaft der Individuen (Bonn, Dietz, 1998), pp. 142-76;
22. G. Schütte Lihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde (Salzburg, Residenz Verlag, 2004), p. 153;
23. M. Nolan, 'Housework made easy: the Taylorized housewife in Weimar Germany's rationalized economy', Feminist studies 3 (1990), pp. 549-77;
24. R. Pokorny, 'Die Rationalisierungsexpertin Irene M. Witte (1894-1976): Biografie einer Grenzengängerin' (doctoral dissertation, Technische Unversität Berlin, 2003), pp. 80-88.
25. L. Kramer, 'Rationalisierung des Haushaltes und Frauenfrage - Die Frankfurter Küche und Zeitgenössische Kritik', in H. Klotz, ed., Ernst May und das neue Frankfurt, 1925-1930 (Berlin, Verlag für Architektur und Technische Wissenschaften, 1986), pp. 77-84.
26. A trend first outlined by Barbara Welter in the 1960s: 'The cult of true womanhood', American quarterly 18 (1966), pp. 151-74;
27. she enlarges her thesis in Dimity convictions: the American woman in the nineteenth century (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 21-41.
28. C. Beecher, A treatise on domestic economy for the use of young ladies at home and at school (Boston, Marsh, Capen, Lyon & Webb, 1841), pp. 121-34, 268-98, and esp. 366-70,
29. 'On the importance of a convenient kitchen'; C. Beecher and H. Beecher Stowe, The American woman's home, or, Principles of domestic science (New York, J.B. Ford, 1869).
30. See V. Gill, 'Catharine Beecher and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: architects of female power', Journal of American culture 2 (1998), pp. 17-24;
31. D. Hayden, The grand domestic revolution: a history of feminist designs for American homes, neighborhoods, and cities (London, MIT Press, 1981), esp. pp. 55-63.
32. M. Nolan, Visions of modernity: American business and the modernisation of Germany (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994).
33. Literature promoting this phenomenon is easily to be found in the public libraries of industrial towns in Britain. A good introduction to the basic principles can be found in F. Gilbreth and L. Gilbreth, Applied motion study: a collection of papers on the efficient method to industrial preparedness (New York, Sturigs & Walton, 1917).
34. Lillian's application of them to the home are analysed in L. Graham, 'Domesticating efficiency: Lillian Gilbreth's scientific management of homemakers, 1924-1930', Signs: journal of women in culture and society 3 (1999), pp. 633-75.
35. S. Kern, The culture of time and space, 1880-1919 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University-Press, 1983).
36. R. Barnes, Motion and time study, 2nd edn (New York, Wiley, 1940), p. 15.
37. Cited in D. Gross, 'Space, time and modern culture', Telos 50 (1981-82), pp. 59-78.
38. Frederick, Household engineering, p. 7.
39. Frederick, Household engineering, Ibid. p. 19.
40. Frederick, Household engineering, Ibid. p. 34.
41. Frederick, Household engineering, Ibid. p. 381.
42. For a good analysis of this phenomenon, see Hayden, Grand domestic revolution, pp. 280-89.
43. Frederick, Household engineering, pp. 316-17 (emphasis original).
44. P. Sparke, As long as it's pink: the sexual politics of taste (London, Pandora, 1995).
45. Hayden, Grand domestic revolution, pp. 281-87;
46. J. Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the rise of household efficiency (Athens, Georgia University Press, 2003), pp. 121-35, 146-57.
47. Cited in Hayden, Grand domestic revolution, p. 286.
48. D. Miller, 'Appropriating the state on the council estate', Man 2 (1988), pp. 353-72;
49. J. Attfield, 'Bringing modernity home: open plan and the British domestic interior', in Cieraad, At home, pp. 73-82;
50. J. Freeman, The making of the modern kitchen: a cultural history (Oxford, Berg, 2004).
51. Wohnungsreferent Karl Preis, Die Beseitigung der Wohnungsnot in München: Denkschrift und Anträge (Munich, Landeshauptstadt München, 1927), p. 12.
52. Adelheid von Saldern, 'Social rationalization of living and housework in Germany and the United States in the 1920s', History of the family 2 (1997), pp. 81-83.
53. See also Sparke, As long as it's pink.
54. Saldern, 'Social rationalization', pp. 87-89.
55. C. Benninghaus, 'Mothers' toil and daughters' leisure: working-class girls and time in 1920s Germany', History workshop journal 50 (2000), pp. 45-72.
56. K. Hagemann, 'Von "guten" und "schlechten" Hausfrauen: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Rationalisierung im großstädtischen Arbeiterhaushalt der Weimarer Republik', Historische Mitteilungen der Ranke Gesellschaft 8 (1995), pp. 65-84;
57. Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, Dietz, 1990), esp. pp. 106-14 on household reform.
58. Lihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde, p. 147.
59. Bericht über die Reise der Mitglieder der Stadtratskommission beim Wohnungsamt nach Nürnberg und Frankfurt a. M. vom 22.-24. November 1926. Stadtarchiv München [SAM]-Wohnungsamt [WA]-63;
60. Jahresbericht des Vorstandes der Gemeinnützigen Wohnungsfü rsorge AG München, 1928, p. 8. SAM-Bürgermeister und Rat [B&R]-1458.
61. Preis, Die Beseitigung der Wohnungsnot in München, p. 14.
62. Which dominates the historiography of building this period, and which the Munich exhibition deliberately set out to challenge. See R. Pommer and C. Otto, Weißenhof 1927 and the modern movement in architecture (London, Chicago University Press, 1991), and the excellent bibliographical details there.
63. Gemeinnützige Wohnungsfürsorge AG München, Die Siedlungen der Gemeinnützigen Wohnungsfürsorge AG München (Munich, Gemeinnützige Wohnungsfürsorge AG München, 1928), p. 6.
64. Bavarian cities in this period always had two mayors, one elected and one appointed by the government.
65. K. Scharnagl, 'Geleitwort', in Amtlicher Katalog: Ausstellung 'München 1928: Heim und Technik' (Munich, Hochbauamt, 1928), p. 13.
66. Frederick, Household engineering, p. 84.
67. This position was most fully elaborated in Referat VII [Wohnungsreferat], Principles for judging the housing question [in English], 1930, SAM-B&-R-993.
68. J. Jelinek, 'Die Vernunftehe Heim & Technik', in Amtlicher Katalog: Ausstellung 'München 1928: Heim und Technik', p. 75.
69. J. Jelinek, 'Die Vernunftehe Heim & Technik', in Amtlicher Katalog: Ausstellung 'München 1928: Heim und Technik', p. 75 Ibid. (emphasis added).
70. Sparke, As long as it's pink, p. 22.