The Modern Interior

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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.
In their desire to raise the status of the housewife, Frederick and
others, including Lillian Gilbreth, the wife of Frank Gilbreth, a colleague
of F. W. Taylor, aimed to rethink the bases on which the concept of modern
domesticity and, by implication, its interior spaces, were conceived.
An even more radical idea was embraced by another group of American
women, described as ‘material feminists’, however. They sought to reject
not only the Victorian domestic ideal but also the idea of family life that
underpinned it. Above all, like the European Modernists who came after
them, they understood the potential of interior space not only to reflect
social ideals but actually to embody them and make them a reality. 11 Even
more actively than Frederick, women such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
the author of the The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), challenged
the physical separation of household space from public space and looked
to the latter as a model with which to transform the former. Gilman was
concerned about the psychological effects of bourgeois domesticity on
women. Her 1892 novella The Yellow Wallpaper described a woman
descending into mental illness through being forced to take a rest cure at
home. ‘It is not’, wrote Gilman, ‘that women are really smaller-minded,
weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or
woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected,