UC Berkeley

The following work of cultural history traces aspects of American domesticity by focusing on those putatively domestic spaces that do not act the way one expects them to, as well as those supposed public spaces that function suspiciously similarly to private homes. This project explores how congregate living spaces such as brothels not only contained traces of idealized interior design, but may have set popular fashion; how ideas of hominess and its relationship to gendered labor-ways took root in the first women’s prisons; the therapeutic uses to which domesticity was put in asylums; and how evolving trends in advertising converged with the emergent media of film to forward stubbornly conservative precepts of homemaking in the wake of the Great War. This project revolves around a central research question that asks how the feminine underclasses of America were conscripted into coercive domestic ideology— a phenomenon that only gained momentum over the duration of the 1800s. This study first fixes its gaze upon the congregate living space of the brothel—a living space that was also a site of productive labor. Then, the study follows its main subjects—the feminine underclasses— to the carceral, corrective, and coercive institutional spaces that often interceded in the lives of women who violated the norms that governed proper social and sexual behavior. Only after analyzing how domesticity kept cropping up in weird places throughout the long nineteenth century does this text return, if only partially, to the site of the working-class home in order to understand how, rather than being the source from which domesticity flows, the private home in fact acted as yet another site that was influenced, informed, and reactive to external ideologies that circulated in the new media environments of early cinema. Overall, the following dissertation traces domestic ideology’s wake through environments that contoured the lives of people— usually women and girls—as they bore the cultural and social changes that unfolded over the course of the long nineteenth century.