The Modern Interior

directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened
by it. The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by
the woman.’ 12 The material feminists advocated the introduction of
cooperative housing, kitchenless homes, public kitchens, community
dining clubs, day-care centres for children and communal laundries.
Borrowing ideas from hotels, restaurants and factories they sought to
challenge the idea of the separate spheres and to end women’s isolation
in the home, their dependency on men, and their old-fashioned ‘craft’
approach towards housework. 13 Theirs was a total rejection of the traditional
domestic ideal. In search of alternative ways of living and bringing
up children they advocated a radical revision not only of the way of life
built around the Victorian concepts of the family and the home but also,
most importantly, of the visual, material and spatial environments which
had both engendered and supported it. 14
Gilman and her co-workers went a significant way towards redefining
the relationship of the private with the public sphere in the name of
radical feminism. They understood the relationship between interior
spaces and the lives that were lived in them and that a radical transformation
of those spaces was the only means of changing those lives. Like
the supporters of scientific management, they were driven less by aesthetics
than by rational thought and an interest in the activities that went
on in the home. The means of transforming the status quo advocated by
them were above all practically conceived. Transferring communal eating,
for example, such as might occur in a hotel, a factory canteen or a
hospital, to a site outside the workplace or the institution, would, they
believed, put an immediate end to the isolation of the housewife preparing
food in her kitchen, whether rationally conceived or otherwise.
Similar solutions were offered for childcare and for doing the laundry.
Yet another, this time European, face of the development of the
modern interior – which was also heavily ideologically driven and committed
to the implementation of ideas developed within the rational,
functional, public sphere – emerged as a direct result of the work on
social housing programmes initiated by a number of architects in the
early twentieth century. From then, and into the inter-war years, a number
of Modernist architects drew upon late nineteenth-century ideas and
practices related to public arena interiors as stimuli for their democratically
conceived dwellings and interior spaces. They intended them to
provide ‘minimum existences’ for people who had hitherto been
deprived of that level of comfort in their homes. The 1920s saw a number 135