The Modern Interior by Penny Sparke

Author:Penny Sparke [Sparke, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

An ‘Efficient Grouping of Kitchen Equipment’ from Christine Frederick’s Efficient House-keeping, 1915.

Frederick’s advocacy of grouping kitchen equipment and tools in line with the craftsman’s workshop and tool bench revealed her dependence on undivided labour and the skilled craft process in the domestic setting. Her idea that the home should become a site of efficient production was novel, however, and, to that end, Frederick sought to rationalize, and make more efficient the activities that went on in it. Her ambitions were linked to a general desire at that time to grant the housewife a new professional status, to make her the equivalent of a scientist working in his laboratory. Not only was the housewife to be seen as an efficient worker, she was also expected to have considerable managerial responsibility in the home making her ‘an executive as well as a manual labourer’.10 Although its effects were felt much more strongly in the kitchen than in the other spaces of the house, Frederick’s advocacy of scientific management in the home had a significant impact on the development of the modern interior. It confirmed the movement away from the home as a place ruled by moral, spiritual, ideological and aesthetic values, and the ‘irrational’ forces of feminine consumption, and towards it becoming one in which the emphasis was on its occupants undertaking household tasks and which recalled the public spaces in which they worked. Frederick’s attempt to transform the home into an arena dominated by reason opened the way for a completely new way of thinking about domestic equipment and furniture and their spatial arrangements in the home. It served to undermine Victorian domestic ideology and the idea of the separate spheres, and to align the home with the public, rational face of industrial modernity.

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