Abstract
For millennia, the image of Penelope sitting by the hearth and weaving, saving and preserving the home while her man roams the earth in daring adventures, has defined one of Western cultures basic ideas of womanhood. Many other cultures historically and today equate women with home, expecting women to serve men at home and sometimes preventing them from leaving the house. If house and home mean the confinement of women for the sake of nourishing male projects, then feminists have good reason to reject home as a value. But it is difficult even for feminists to exorcise a positive valence to the idea of home. We often look forward to going home and invite others to make themselves at home. House and home are deeply ambivalent values.
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). Hereafter cited as BDT.
Compare Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 112. Casey also notes (pp. 176–177) that Heidegger slides into identifying dwelling with construction even though he begins with a wider scope for building.
Hannah Arendt also theorized building as a fundamental aspect of human meaning. She distinguishes between labor, activity useful for production and consumption of the means of living, and work, the construction of artifacts that transcend mere life because they are made to be permanent. Thus for Arendt the moment of founding is the primordial moment of action. Through the construction of edifices people create a built environment, a civilization, by means of which they emerge as thinking and speaking subjects. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Aliye Pekin Celik, “Women’s Participation in the Production of Shelter,” and Victoria Basolo and Michelle Moraln, “Women and the Production of Housing: An Overview,” both in Shelter, Women and Development: First and Third World Perspectives, ed. Hemalata C. Dandekar (Ann Arbor: George Wahr Pub. Co., 1993).
Caroline O. N. Moser, “Women, Human Settlements, and Housing: A Conceptual Framework for Analysis and Policy-Making,” in Women, Human Settlements, and Housing, ed. Caroline O. N. Moser and Linda Peake (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987);
Irene Tinker, “Beyond Economics: Sheltering the Whole Woman,” Engendering Wealth and Well-Being, ed. Blumberg, Rakowski, Tinker, and Mancton (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 261–284.
Luce Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 101. Hereafter cited as ESD.
One of the classic statements of this idea is Herbert Marcuses One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); see also
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
See James S. Duncan, “From Container of Women to Status Symbol: The Impact of Social Structure on the Meaning of the House,” in James S. Duncan, ed., Housing and Identity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Holmes and Meier Pub., 1982).
See Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
See Sophie Watson, Accommodating Inequality: Gender and Housing (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988).
D. J. Van Lennep, “The Hotel Room,” in Phenomenological Psychology: The Dutch School, ed. Joseph J. Kockelman (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 209–215.
On the distinction between nostalgia and memory, see Gayle Greene, “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory,” Signs 16, no. 2 (Winter 1991), 290–321.
See Keya Ganguly, “Migrant Identities: Personal Memory and the Construction of Selfhood,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (January 1992): 27–49; Susan Thomason, “Suburbs of Opportunity: The Power of Home for Migrant Women,” Proceedings of the Postmodern City Conference, Sydney University, 1993.
See Delores Hayden, The Power of Place (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
Governments all over the world, in both developed and developing countries, have been cutting social services and allowing prices for basic foodstuffs to rise. The result is usually more domestic work for women. See Haleh Afshar and Carolyne Dennis, Women and Adjustment Politicies in the Third World (New York: St. Martins Press, 1993).
Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With it?” in Feminist Studies!Cultural Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 191–212.
Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 115–150.
Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,” Social Research 61, no. 3 (Fall 1994), 563–597.
See Benice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 356–369. Reagon criticizes the attempt to seek the comforts of home in politics, but as I read her she does not reject the values of home.
bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 42.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1983).
Compare Jeremy Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom,” in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981—1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 309–338.
Seyla Benhabib affirms this individuating function of home and privacy in her discussion of the need for feminists to retain a certain meaning to a distinction between public and private. See Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996), 213.
For a feminist defense of privacy as the right to inviolate personality, see Jean L. Cohen, “Democracy, Difference and the Right of Privacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Anita Allen, Uneasy Access (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Allenheld, 1988).
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© 2005 Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer
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Young, I.M. (2005). House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme. In: Hardy, S., Wiedmer, C. (eds) Motherhood and Space. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12103-5_8
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