In the 1910s, an Indiana company marketed a ‘Hoosier Kitchen’, which joined a dresser, a table and a larder together to form a continuous workspace. While superficially this mimicked some elements Mrs Beecher had described half a century earlier, it misunderstood her intent, which had been to collect together in one place all the necessities for activities generally performed at the same time. Instead, the user of the Hoosier Kitchen was forced to traipse up and down one long narrow area, which was too narrow for a second person to work there as well, even as other parts of the room were under-utilized. Despite the poor design, the Hoosier Company’s contribution was important. It was the first time a commercial organization had seen that there was money to be made in selling, not furniture nor consumer durables, but the very way a room was arranged. As we have seen, the new ‘science’ of industrial efficiency was, just at this date, expanding from its origins in the factory, and moving into the housewife’s workspace, the home. Now many – domestic-manual writers, efficiency experts, architects and the population at large – began to consider space management not as a matter best decided by each individual household, but as an opportunity for profit, even if they had never heard of Mrs Beecher.
And while in Europe it is almost certain that Mrs Beecher was entirely unknown, the work of American industrial efficiency experts such as Frederick Taylor, and especially Christine Frederick, was being translated and avidly studied. By 1919, Germany was facing an acute housing shortage. House-building had been brought to a halt in the war years; the end of the war saw marriage rates rise as soldiers returned home; and peacetime populations were swollen by large numbers of refugees. The new Weimar Republic made social housing a primary goal in its 1919 constitution, with municipalities responsible for creating affordable housing in each region. From 1920, many German cities drew up plans for standardized apartment buildings, designed to meet local housing needs, and now also, for the first time, taking health into consideration and setting out legal minimums for space, light and ventilation. And thus most postwar advances in kitchen planning and design came from Germany. These new apartment buildings were intended to be mass-produced and ‘rationally’ organized; distinct spaces were allocated to the various functions of daily life, turning the traditional Wohnküche, or multipurpose living space, into three rooms: a living room, dining room and kitchen.
Many of the architects and urban planners were inspired by left-wing ideas; at the same time, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, living conditions were also a matter of concern for many conservative women’s groups, worried by the ‘decline’ of the German housewife, and the consequent effect that the decline was said to be having on the birth rate. Home-making, said one activist, was ‘a form of citizenship’: good housewives would raise the next generation of citizens, but they needed to have the homes in which to do so. Women from these groups therefore worked alongside public housing officials, city-planners and architects in this postwar period. Many were influenced by American experts such as Taylor, and as a result the German National Productivity Board produced a series of time-and-motion studies on daily routines such as dusting and washing floors. Kitchens therefore became a major preoccupation for many designers. In 1923, a compact kitchen, the Egri-Küche, was advertised, while the Bauhaus exhibited what was to become a key contribution to kitchen design. Its L-shaped room featured unbroken counters all at one height, with eye-level cabinets above – a single workspace incorporating the room’s three functions: cleaning, cooking and storage.
Most influential of all was the Frankfurt kitchen, designed in 1926 by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000), the first woman to study architecture at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule, or School of Arts and Crafts (it took a letter of recommendation from Gustav Klimt for her to be admitted). Schütte-Lihotzky’s reading of Christine Frederick led her to apply scientific management to daily life and design, and she was one of dozens of architects who put theory into practice in the years of the social-housing boom, working under Ernst May, Frankfurt’s city-planner, to build standardized, health-promoting public housing.* She began her work by considering how the layout of traditional kitchens wasted time and effort, and how many, in addition, were simply unhealthy environments. The Frankfurt kitchen (see plate section, no. 30) was long and narrow (less than 2 metres wide, just over 3 metres long), with areas organized by function: storage containers next to the work surface, which was beside the oven, not far from the dining table, and close to the counter beside the sink, all allowing the housewife to move seamlessly from food preparation to cooking, cooking to eating, eating to washing-up, and finally to putting everything away, in order to avoid what Frederick referred to as ‘wasted steps’, which had quickly become a catchphrase in design literature. Schütte-Lihotzky estimated that in a traditional kitchen a woman walked 19 metres to prepare each meal, over 20 kilometres a year. The Frankfurt kitchen reduced that to 8 metres, or 8 kilometres a year. Its single-level, connected workspaces made cleaning easier, and space was maximized by the use of built-in features, including a fold-down ironing board and a folding dish-rack. Dried goods were stored in lightweight drawers that pulled out, with spouts at the back to enable the contents to be poured directly into a bowl, removing the need for a scoop. This was a kitchen designed by a woman who performed household tasks for women who performed household tasks.
Yet the Frankfurt kitchen was not admired by all. The room was designed on sound ergonomic principles, but it failed to take other aspects of life into consideration. Many women disliked the single-function nature of Schütte-Lihotzky’s room: family members could no longer occupy the same space while the women were working, and even the new dining room increased their sense of isolation. The kitchens were also planned for electricity, even though many who lived in the buildings that housed these new kitchens could not afford such a luxury. The rooms were long and narrow, with little exterior lighting, and women therefore found themselves spending many hours every day in the near dark.
In the USA, despite first Beecher’s, then Frederick’s pioneering work, changes to kitchens revolved more around technology than ergonomics or time-and-motion planning. Until the twentieth century, much of what is now regarded as basic equipment was entirely lacking. As late as 1881, manuals made no mention of dish-racks to drain dishes, while soap, by then available in bars, still had to be grated for dishwashing; detergents and steel-wool for scouring had yet to be invented. Yet only forty years later, the amount of time US housewives spent on housework had dropped by a fifth. In the quarter century after 1905, when the first electric iron was marketed,* American housewives gained the tools of modern housekeeping: vacuum cleaners, thermostatically controlled gas ranges, electric sewing machines, washing machines, ice-boxes, even dishwashers. Meanwhile, the availability of tinned, dried and prepared foods had reduced the time spent cooking; and the new technologies of detergents, gas and electricity had similarly reduced the time spent cleaning up. By 1926, three out of four working-class houses in one Ohio town had electricity, 60 per cent had an indoor lavatory and bathtub, while more than nine in ten households had running water and piped gas. Even some of the poorer houses had hot and cold running water.
As we have seen, even small technological developments can make a substantial difference to the way people live. In this period, minor changes to cleaning technologies produced a marked shift in attitudes to what constituted ‘dirt’. For centuries, floors in many home countries had been plain wood, or stone, or brick. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch commonly scattered sand across brick or tile floors, as did the British on their wood floors into the eighteenth century in less urban areas. In the USA floors were sanded in a house’s public rooms into the nineteenth century. The sand soaked up grease from open-fire cooking, as well as wax and oil from lighting, and was easily replaced. (Sawdust was scattered on the floors of butchers’ shops to soak up the fat and blood; it can still occasionally be seen today, although now it is merely a nostalgic flourish.) Most u
sed twig brooms to sweep away the dirtied sand; then fresh sand was scattered either from a sieve or by hand; for holidays, or in the best room, a decorative pattern might be traced out using a special hair broom. Twig brooms were unable to collect the finest dust and silt, which was allowed to remain – it was not considered to be dirt. Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, industrially manufactured corn-straw brooms appeared, quickly replacing hand-tied twig ones: by 1833 half a million were being sold annually in the USA, and by the end of the century they were so common that even prairie homes had a ‘boughten’ broom. These corn-straw brooms swept up more, and more efficiently. Now the silt and dust residue that they were able to gather, but that twig brooms were not, was no longer something that could be overlooked. It had become dirt. Equally, houses in the USA were once filled with insects, flying and crawling, covering food, eating utensils and chamber-pots. At mealtimes a child or, in the south, a slave, was told to ‘mind … the flies’ when the food was set out on the table, but apart from this the clouds of insects were little remarked. Once relatively inexpensive screens became available, from the 1870s, insects swiftly came to be considered not merely inconvenient, but unhygienic.
Dirt has memorably been defined as ‘matter in the wrong place’.* What constitutes dirt is frequently a cultural matter, decided by mutually agreed views of what is ‘wrong’. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the most vivid descriptions of waste and dirt come, not from residents in any society, but from visitors to that society, bringing with them different expectations. They notice the dirt because it appears in unexpected places, or there is more, or it is of a type with which they are unfamiliar; at home, the same levels of dirt, in familiar form, or in familiar locations, pass without comment. Our dirt is the way things are; their dirt is filth. It takes extraordinary circumstances for people to notice, and to comment on, their own dirt. As a result, it is all too easy to assume that the norms of any given period also applied in the past.
In 1666, Charles II’s court took refuge in Oxford, hoping to evade the plague then raging across the country. On their departure from their temporary accommodation, piles of faeces were found in every room and on the landings of every staircase. Even contemporaries were horrified, and a range of suggestions looked at ways to avoid such situations in future. Most of the proposed solutions were architectural, in particular concentrating on the shape of staircases. If there were no landings, ran the irrefutable logic, people would not be able to defecate on them. That people might simply not defecate in public areas was not at the time obvious to all, or possibly even to anyone. The situation in Oxford had been exacerbated by circumstances – a large court based in a small town for months on end – but otherwise it was unusual only in degree. At the same date, as Dutch Golden Age artists lovingly painted maids scouring already-gleaming floors, local legislation outlined the levels of compensation to be paid to pedestrians whose clothes were soiled when human waste was thrown out of windows. Again, there was no sense of the possibility of a society in which human waste was not thrown out of windows.
These were the very streets that the English admired as ‘wonderfull Nett and cleane’, but it was where they expected to see waste, and so it was effectively invisible to them. As late as the eighteenth century, the English regarded as unclean the Scottish custom of keeping chamber-pots in every room; better, they thought, was the southern English usage, where chamber-pots were confined to the bedrooms and dining rooms (where they were stored in sideboards, for use during after-dinner drinking sessions). Visitors from cities were similarly shocked by conditions in agricultural districts, where animals were housed cheek by jowl with humans. A Swedish proverb from the 1770s commented wryly on this urban distaste: ‘He who scorns the pig-dung smell, can live without the pork as well.’ It was not, however, only a matter of pig dung. A Swedish stonecutter’s daughter remembered her rural childhood as late as 1910, where chamber-pots sat under beds, and ‘little heaps’ formed outside the door: these mostly consisted of refuse, but the children used them for their own waste, and adult men urinated there too.* In Skåne, in Sweden’s south, farms were built around a courtyard where the animals were penned at night, ensuring that visitors and residents alike walked through manure before entering the house, while further north, in Dalarna, manure was also disregarded when women did their spinning in stables and barns to benefit from the animal warmth.
Until the twentieth century for the most part, hygiene was not primarily a matter of removing waste products. It was, instead, largely an aspect of personal appearance, presentation of self: for people and their clothing to make a fine show was more important than that they, or their owners, or their houses, were what today we think of as clean. Before the seventeenth century, clothes for all but the highest in society were mostly dark-coloured, and made of wool or leather. They lasted for decades, and were handed down the generations. The expansion of the linen industry in the seventeenth century introduced white items – shirts, collars, cuffs, petticoats, caps, handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs – into daily use for the prosperous. As more became available, the marker of status was now less a matter of owning such garments, than it was in keeping them white – that is, visibly clean. And visible hygiene was not merely an indicator of rank, or cash. It had become yet another way of distinguishing public and private. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, La Rochefoucauld, visiting Britain, observed that while the public areas of the houses he visited were ‘constantly washed’, the behind-the-scenes areas such as the kitchens were ‘indescribably’ dirty. The spread of industrialization made cleanliness a more pressing concern, as more crowded cities made access to water more difficult. Many no longer lived near the springs, rivers or wells that had previously supplied smaller communities, and were forced instead to rely on rainwater, and on piped water, which until the twentieth century was variable in both availability and quality.
The Netherlands was particularly poorly served. Geographically much of the country was below sea-level. In addition, it was the first country where the majority of the population lived in urban rather than agricultural communities, and so had few precedents to guide it. Dutch cities, as well as agricultural land, largely relied on rainwater and communal wells, neither of which were fully adequate. In France, among the nobility and the very wealthiest, some new buildings had piped water in the following century, and newer Parisian mansions occasionally had rainwater cisterns. A French engraving from 1732 shows a bathtub connected to two small tanks of water (hot and cold, the hot heated by a fireplace). Architectural treatises might grandly present arrangements for separate rooms for a water-heater, an airing-room, a room for the bathtub, a room for attendant servants and more, but it is doubtful that more than a handful of houses boasted such luxuries. The ideas were present, but the reality was very different.
In England, the first civic system of piped water was built in Derby in 1692, but it was limited in its reach. A painting from c.1720 of a family and servants eating dinner, by a Dutch painter living in England, shows, at the very top of the chimney-breast, what looks like a water pipe bringing water into this rather spartan house (see plate section, no. 21). There is no way of knowing if the image represents a reality, or is a painterly improvement on life: given the lack of other evidence, it is impossible to judge. The wooden pipes that existed at the time were both inefficient and expensive. At their widest, the pipes measured around 20 centimetres in diameter, and so a single pump or tap required dozens to supply it; the wood decayed rapidly, with pipes having to be replaced every two or three years. There was thus little reason for the experiment to be repeated elsewhere. It was only towards the end of the eighteenth century, with the arrival of cast-iron pipes, that piped water became a practical proposition. Cast-iron pipes could be wider, so fewer were needed, even as they lasted years longer than wood, all of which made them less expensive to install. As with heating, though, a constant water supply was regarded as a luxury, not a necessity, and irregular daily supply was
typical until the twentieth century. Prosperous households had cisterns that filled every time the water company turned on the mains, but even these were rarely sufficient, and most households that could afford it also routinely supplemented their piped water by buying water from water-carriers, who walked the streets selling from barrels, or hiring caddies, as they were known in Scotland, people who were paid to wait at street pumps.
Although regular supplies of piped water were not to become standard until the twentieth century, over the course of the nineteenth century campaigners had persuaded the British government that sanitary reform was not a luxury. Cleaner cities, they urged, would lead to a reduction in epidemic disease, which would benefit the economy as a whole. Hygiene was a civic good, and water and sewage should therefore be regulated by legislation and paid for out of taxes. The industrial heartlands, with their fast-growing populations, were among the first to turn their attention to this problem. At mid-century, half of the households in Manchester were found to be using water contaminated by waste. The local government established rates to be levied to finance the cost of reservoirs and pipes, and within twenty-five years, 80 per cent of households in that city had piped water. New filtration plants also ensured the water was cleaner than it had ever been. Yet still there was no sense that access to clean water was in any way a universal right. It was, instead, a commodity, like any other, to be bought and sold by private firms. And as is so often still the case, those who could buy in bulk, via pipes into their houses, paid much less for their supply than those who could not afford to do so: at mid-century 36 gallons of piped water cost less than a quarter of a penny; the same quantity of river-water, brought by water-carriers, cost 4d; and well-water was even more, at 8d.
The Making of Home Page 23