2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Feminist historians introduced the history of the household into the historiography of North America and Europe, arguing that interrogating “domesticity” inside the home was integrally embedded in histories of capitalism and industrial labor outside the house. The historians featured in this forum expand and exceed previous investigations by exploring domesticity through consumerism, labor migration, colonialism, and political economy. In a conversation facilitated by Antoinette Burton, the authors will discuss how home and family have unified the human experience, and examine the limits and possibilities of “domesticity” as a shared category of historical analysis.

We use “domesticity” to refer to the ideologies and ideals that define and describe the spaces and practices of home and family. This roundtable puts multiple case studies in conversation. Julie Hardwick pinpoints contradictions between historians’ ideal of a sentimental domesticity shaped by the consumer revolution and actual lived experiences in 18^th-century France. Eileen Findlay and Victoria Haskins describe how modern states in the Americas and Australia constructed a normative ideology of domesticity to control and reform migrant families and Indigenous women. Elizabeth LaCouture and Annelise Heinz look at how popular culture shaped the global domestic ideal in 1920s China and the American postwar domestic revival. Kathryn Kish Sklar examines how especially the histories of labor, consumer culture, and empire have reframed the historical context of domesticity. The conversation between these case studies suggests that the power of domesticity has been to attempt to stabilize and define a space that was always porous, fluid and changing.