The Making of Home

by Judith Flanders

  If we accept that the creation of new households by couples with cash to spend drove demand, then it is not surprising that many of the early manifestations of home as a private space for a nuclear family appeared first in the centre of both early urban development and trade, the Netherlands. The first of the world’s great trading companies, the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), was founded in 1602. (Its nearest rival, England’s Honourable East India Company, was two years older, but the country’s Civil War ensured that it took longer to hit its stride, and throughout the eighteenth century its trade remained a fifth of that of the VOC.) The great strengths of the VOC were that it both brought new goods to the European market and also had a flourishing inter-Asian network of trade, in the early days in spices, and then moving on to trade in metals, textiles and porcelain, as well as that economic underpinning of trade and colonization, slaves.*

  The way in which trade operated altered substantially in the early seventeenth century. This new world of capitalist investment took off in the Netherlands, a country chronically short of arable land, and one that therefore had a weak landed aristocracy. The Low Countries had long been a centre of trade – cloth fairs had, from at least the thirteenth century, drawn merchants from across Europe. As the Dutch ports, especially Amsterdam, became Europe’s trade centre, trade was no longer a seasonal affair for organized merchant groups or guilds, but was year round and open to individuals as well as what quickly became companies. In a similar fashion, the VOC’s Asian trade supplanted Portuguese monopolies: a limited liability company replacing a decaying remnant of an older type of court-sponsored venture. Power as a birthright declined; now a new urban class of professional men, those overseeing the expanding cash economy, took control both economically and politically. (Indeed the Oxford English Dictionary locates the first use of the word ‘capitalism’ in English in a reference to the markets of Holland.) England was not far behind: land, for centuries the prime indicator of wealth, was now being challenged by other forms of capital. A decade after Crusoe returned from his island, Defoe observed: ‘The revolution in trade brought a revolution in the very nature of things … now the gentry are richer than the nobility, and the tradesmen are richer than them all.’ Financial opportunities were no longer in the agricultural districts, but in what were becoming the world’s first great cities. By the late seventeenth century, nearly half the population of the Netherlands lived in towns, compared to a European average of 10 per cent.

  Here again, the Reformation, with its emphasis on individual responsibility and the sanctification of work, also played a role. Rich merchants did not make their fortunes and automatically retire to become gentlemen of leisure: work had been redefined, and was now a way of affirming individual value. This produced radical changes both in economic life and in the shape of family life. Dutch notions of marriage and the roles of husband and wife were influenced by the teachings of Martin Luther, and developed by the Rotterdam-born theologian Erasmus, who wrote on matrimony and on the particular responsibilities of family members. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an outpouring of Dutch conduct manuals simplified and codified these writings, spreading these theological and philosophical views on model households more widely. Many were translated into English and welcomed by an eager audience, especially among Puritans; these books, and the ideas they contained, then travelled with settlers to the colonies, where they flourished.* Calvinism, especially as practised in a softened form in the Netherlands, was a religion of daily life: God was glorified not through fasting and penitence, but by living a sober, industrious life. From there, it was a short step to believing that the rewards of a sober and industrious life – prosperity – were indications of God’s favour. And if that were the case, thought many, it then followed that consumption of the world’s goods, the careful and sober acquisition of the plenty given by God, must be a virtue. In this trading nation, as the VOC expanded in Asia, and its counterpart, the Dutch West India Company, explored the Americas, the world’s goods were readily available. Swiftly these trade routes spread not only the world’s commodities, but also the Dutch view of them as heaven’s blessings falling on the righteous.

  In the ideal little commonwealth, the husband was the senior partner, the public face of the couple and the primary or entire financial support; the wife, the junior partner, was called on by God to make a home for him, and for their children, by acquiring and caring for the consumables that their partnership had achieved. The value that was given to both roles can be seen by the arrival of a new subject in Dutch genre paintings in the 1630s. Superficially, pictures of women shopping recorded an everyday occupation never before deemed worthy of art. Yet just as scenes of women sewing, or playing musical instruments, were not slice-of-life reflections of reality, so too these images had a symbolic meaning, of wifely virtue and duty, as the women were shown laying out their husband’s earnings in order to maintain a beautiful and orderly household. Other nations, according to The Mirror of the State of the United Netherlands (1706), vaunted their status in costly court ceremonies or spectacular army parades; the Netherlands, in contrast, confined their national pride to displays that were strictly ‘in the manner of thrifty and modest households’. Henrick Sorgh’s Portrait of Jacob Bierens and His Family (1663) depicts husband and son as providers, bringing food, while the wife and daughters cook, that is, they manage these resources, all presided over by another son, a musician, a symbolic enactment of Plutarch’s metaphor ‘to ensure the tunefulness of marriage and home’ through ‘discourse, harmony and philosophy’.

  This kind of domestic symbolism quickly spread. Even images that today do not appear overtly domestic – images of the greatest in society – quietly partook of, and reinforced, a new veneration of middle-class values, symbolized through elements found in their homes. In 1634, Anthony van Dyck (perhaps significantly originally from the Low Countries) painted a group portrait of the three older children of Charles I (see plate section, no. 6). Rather than setting his subjects in an imaginary architectural space, with the classical imagery that conventionally accompanied royalty, the painter posed the children in front of a window, through which a flower-garden is visible, and then further emphasized the lack of ceremony by setting the Prince of Wales on the same level as his two siblings even though only he, it was assumed, would inherit the throne (as it happened, of course, both James and Mary also ruled). In actuality the royal children each lived in a separate royal household, and this image of them playing together was as fictional as the garden behind them. Yet by now the idea of family trumped the trappings of royal grandeur: it was important that they were presented more as children than royal. The king was reported to be ‘fâché’, angry, that the Prince of Wales was painted wearing his baby-dress, not the more adult and masculine breeches he would soon assume, but it might be significant that he was not so fâché that he had the work repainted.

  In eighteenth-century Britain such idealized images of domesticity spread down the social scale. No longer confined to royalty, the new genre of conversation pieces became popular among the prosperous middle classes, who embraced the opportunity they gave to display themselves in their own homes, surrounded by the possessions – porcelain from the Far East, chintzes from India – that stood as a visual shorthand, conveying their social status via their purchases. We now know, from comparing the complete output of the painters in a way that was impossible before widespread reproduction, that the sitters’ surroundings were often altered, or entirely invented, to reflect a superior reality, while many of the objects on display, and even the clothes the subjects wore, were the artists’ own props. As with Dutch genre paintings, as with van Dyck’s royal children, so too eighteenth-century reality was modified towards an ideal. William Atherton and his wife, Lucy, lived in a house that overlooked a butchers’ shambles and the narrow lanes of Preston. Yet in Arthur Devis’s painting of them in their sitting room in 1742–3 (see plate section, no.
7), the windows open on to a beautiful garden, the plants no less valuable possessions as products of trade and colonial expansion than the elaborate silks and lace the couple wear, or the porcelain vase on display.

  This focus on the possessions of the home reflected the new realities of a commodified world. Earlier, as we saw, the betrothal, the vow, not the marriage ceremony, had been the main element of the tripartite wedding. By the nineteenth century, the gap between betrothal and ceremony had grown ever longer, largely to enable the middle-class bride to accumulate her trousseau, the now necessary, now vast array of goods considered essential to furnish her new house, without which a marriage was felt to be incomplete. The house and the wedding had become indissolubly linked, and the purchase or ownership of household goods had in effect become a synonym for marriage. In Anthony Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her? (1864–5), a farmer courts a potential bride by showing her around his house, taking care to display ‘every bit of china, delf, glass, and plate’, and then encouraging her to check the quality of the household’s blankets, adding as a final inducement before he proposes, ‘There ain’t a bedroom in my house, – not one of the front ones, – that isn’t mahogany furnished!’ His value as a potential husband is intertwined with the value of the house and furniture his wife would take on with him.

  By this time, among the wealthier classes in Britain, it was routinely stated that no man could, as a point of honour, propose to a woman without having the financial wherewithal to offer her a home – that is, a house – that was equal or better than the one she lived in with her parents. For much of the population, even among the middle classes, this could be nothing more than a fantasy. But while few lived the reality, many more believed in the idea. A second fantasy of middle-class marriage that emerged in the same period also measured a man’s worldly success through the prism of domestic life. A successful man’s wife, it was believed, would not have to work, and indeed many considered the threshold for achieving middle-class status to be not income, nor the financial ability to employ a servant, but whether or not the wife worked outside the house.

  This was a significant development, for until then, the house was assumed to be the place of work for almost everyone. Edmund Spenser, who had found Ireland so ‘wylde’ in the seventeenth century, described Irish houses as ‘wretched nasty cabins’ not because they were in some way unsuitable for family life, but because they were ‘wholly unfit for the making of merchantable butter, cheese, or the manufactures of woollen, linen, or leather’. For him, and his times, houses were assessed not by the wellbeing of the people who lived in them, but by their suitability for work. The household and the economy were one and the same. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Wirtschaft in German meant household management in the widest sense, anything that sustained the members of the household – das ganze Haus, the whole house, ‘the unit of production, consumption and socialization’.

  As an integral part of das ganze Haus, women were not just workers, participants, but were at the centre of a web of reciprocal goods and services that enabled their households to function: helping neighbours with the harvest, dairying, making cheese or other home-produced goods for sale or barter, chopping wood, lending household equipment. In the USA, such goods and services were valuable enough that there existed a well-understood tariff in kind or time, with repayments that were measured and budgeted for.* Where husbands ran businesses from home, certain functions were assumed to be the responsibility of their wives: the women fed, clothed and supervised labourers, looked after the apprentices; or managed the business’s paperwork or books. The economic importance of women at home was indicated by the fact that in home countries a swift remarriage on the death of a husband was routine, in contrast to early-marriage societies, where widows were frequently forbidden remarriage (or even forbidden continued life, as in the Indian practice of sati). Up to a third of all widowed women in England remarried, half within a year of losing their husbands. Home-country women were valued, and invaluable.

  Yet while the desires of the family may well have spurred on the Industrial Revolution, in turn the Industrial Revolution reconfigured the work, and therefore the life, of the family. Even before full industrialization, the development of proto-industrial economies began to reshape men’s and women’s roles. Men, who had previously worked at home, whether as craftsmen, tradesmen or professionals, began to move out of the house to work in specialized spaces such as factories, workshops and, later, offices. This happened at different times in different places: agricultural regions were slower to accommodate the change; those living in and around industrial areas saw it happen sooner. The rural nature of the American south, combined with the plantation system, kept production household-based there for longer than it did in the industrial north: farmers did not have the option of moving their workplace, while for others the labour that they owned – the slaves – produced the goods that in urban areas were now products of workplaces, not homes. In urban areas, when the break with the older patterns came, it often came swiftly: in New York City, in 1800, less than 5 per cent of men had a workplace outside the house; by 1820 it was 25 per cent, and by 1840 it was 70 per cent.

  The same new working practices saw women leaving the house too, for factories, for workrooms and shops, which were now much less rarely the main room of a private house. Women who did not have paying work outside the house were also affected. From the sixteenth century in the British Isles, the enclosure of common land had brought a consequent diminution of women’s work, which had included foraging and gleaning. Later, as their husbands lost their land, or moved to the new urban centres, yet more women found their work vanishing, whether it was poultry-rearing, milking and dairying, or growing vegetables. What work remained – keeping an allotment or a few chickens – continued to contribute to the family’s subsistence, but it brought in less, or no, income. And as this was happening, men, working outside the house, whether on the land or in the new towns and cities, were increasingly paid in cash rather than in old-fashioned kind, so their incomes rose as women’s declined or disappeared entirely. Cash work became the only sort that was thought of as work, and it was what men did; the work women did, although no different than it had ever been, was without cash payment and so was now redefined as something that was not work. Cleaning, raising children, sewing and cooking were no longer considered work, but were instead an expression of what women were, an innate function of their gender, an instinctive, reflex result of their biology.

  This was the final piece in the jigsaw, moving the relationship between women, home and child-rearing into a new phase. Children and their place had always been fluid, subject to alteration as the world around them altered. When men and women had worked at home, children had routinely participated in their household’s economic activities, doing small jobs that were within their age-appropriate capacities. As work moved away from the house, children’s contributions were in general financially too poorly remunerated for them to be considered worth continuing, and so they went out to work later and later. With the Industrial Revolution this picture changed once more. Working-class children made up a significant part of the workforce of the new factories, while at the other end of the economic scale the railways made the idea of boarding school more palatable to prosperous parents from the 1840s: the new network of trains returned the children of both rich and poor more often and more swiftly than had been possible before. Increasingly, only the children of the middle classes were routinely found at home year round. As the century progressed, improved hygiene and disease control saw child mortality fall. By the end of the century, too, many in the middle and upper classes were limiting their family size. Fewer children, who lived longer, and lived at home longer, meant that each child received more individual attention, and therefore more emotional investment. In the eighteenth century in German-speaking Europe, das ganze Haus, the economic as well as the social unit, a hierarchical structure, began to give way to Familie, a lo
an-word from the French famille, created to convey the emotional bonding that was changing the nature of home.

  Thus children, and childhood, became increasingly central to family life in home countries, its raison-d’être, in a way that amazed visitors from house countries. One Italian reported that English parents sang and spoke to their babies, played and even danced with them – almost as though they could understand, he marvelled. In many home societies, the birth of children was treated as a civic event. The Dutch, as with so much to do with the home, led the way. In the seventeenth century, proud Dutch fathers wore special paternity hats to announce the new arrival, and for a period after the birth some civic taxes were rebated. The child’s home, too, was marked with a kraam kloppertje, or birth favour, a wooden placard covered in lace-edged red silk that was tied to the household’s doorknocker to notify the community at large. (Even a stillbirth was announced, by a black silk cover.) This civic publication of private happiness continued for centuries. As late as the nineteenth century in Britain, gloves were tied to the doorknockers to notify an otherwise uncaring, anonymous city that a child had arrived, and later so did newspaper announcements. Whether through pasteboard, gloves or newsprint, songs or dances to amuse the babies, families had been redefined over three centuries: no longer economic units of survival, they had become symbols of human emotional investment.

  * * *

  The late-marriage pattern pre-dated the Industrial Revolution by centuries, but the fact that the geographical areas that saw the rise of capitalism and industrialization are the same as those geographical areas – they are the only geographical areas – where the late-marriage pattern arose does suggest that this marriage pattern may have enabled these later developments. Late marriage produced generations who, by needing to equip new houses, and having the cash to do so, created a demand; in time, capitalism and industrialization produced the means to supply that demand. From there, it is possible to consider that the church and the state might have taken their modern forms, whether Protestantism or democratic government, from the family, and not solely vice versa. To put it in economic terms, the family was the demand, the church, the state, the consumer and Industrial Revolutions the supply. As the attributes of the home family were defined, the state swiftly assimilated its terms for its own use. James I famously presented himself as ‘the Husband’, with ‘the whole Isle’ taking the role of his ‘lawfull Wife’. In turn, women who killed their husbands in England and Scotland were charged not with murder, but with petty treason, for acting against the ‘government’ of their husbands. If the little commonwealth was a state, then the husband-killer had attempted a coup d’état. While the idea of the little commonwealth presented the family as modelled on the hierarchy of both church and state, it is possible that the reality was more complex, and more reciprocal: the development of the modern northwest European family may have influenced the development of Protestantism and the new nation-states as much as Protestantism and the shape of the new nation-states influenced the structure of the northwest European family, as traditional readings of history would have it. The places where the earliest lasting modern democratic, or quasi-democratic, political institutions arose – northwestern Europe and colonial America – were also the places where home households, participatory governance at its simplest, were the norm.