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The grand domestic revolution: a history of feminist design for American homes, neighbourhoods in cities
not expecting a very formal, deeply researched lecture'. Those who were heard him reminisce about his war service and a couple of jaunts to Sweden. He has very little to say about Swedish furniture, which makes me wonder why the editor bothered to include his piece in the publication. By contrast, the paper by Arthur Hald on Gustavsberg, the ceramics firm of which he is the Design Director, is very informative. The company, owned by the Swedish Coop, manufactures a wide range of ceramic and plastic goods for the home, but serves a much wider clientele through its sanitary ware in public conveniences. Hald is disarming in his frankness. He tells us that Gustavsberg owes its initial commercial success to copying English designs and just to rub it in, informs us that one of these copies, a bone-china coffee service first made in the 1870s, is still in production. Bayley's paper, 'Buik by craftsmen who made the jets', deals with car design at SAAB, a change from crockery and furniture. Bayley is informative on the origins of the
firm and its early models, and bravely attempts to present some shaky evidence on the relationships between the firm's industrial designers and engineers. The best paper is that by Sven Thiberg, Chairman of the Swedish Society of Industrial Design. It is good reading for those interested in design policy-making at national level or at the level of the firm. Thiberg sees the need to link a national design policy to Sweden's existing national consumer policy and describes experimental design programmes based on this idea operated jointly by the Swedish So~ety of Industrial Design and the Swedish Co-op. He outlines 'work environment programmes' based on new Swedish legislation giving employees the right to influence their working environment. He describes public iniatives in the use of exhibitions to educate consumers about design in the home and shows that advocating simplicity, free Space, and freedom from material goods sometimes contradicts the argument for good design.
Figure 2. Design with a social purpose from Sweden. These scissors, designed by G~ran Ygfors and manufactured by Skandinavska Telekompaniet AB, work on the principle that it is easier to squeeze together the fingers and thumb than to open them apart
He outlines a six-point design policy for a post-industrial market economy, giving as its goal a good life based on freedom, equality and social responsibility. (See Figures 1 and 2 ). Here is someone who can spell out what he means by the social role of design. But is there a design fraternity anywhere equal to his challenge ?
Stanley Moody City of Birmingham Polytechnic
A woman's place Dolores Hayden The grand domestic revolution: a history of feminist design for American homes, neighbourhoods andcities MIT Press (1981) 367 pp, $19.95
Hayden quotes the husband of a feminist theoretician commenting in 1970: 'Housework? Oh my god how trivial can you get. A paper on housework.' (p 290) I wonder how many Desiqn S t u d i e s readers would be less dismissive in 1982. Yet the organization of domestic work to correspond to particular ideas on the 'place' of women in the family and in society has given rise to buik forms (the separate dwelling, residential suburbs and so on) which make it difficult for women to break away from these stereotyped roles. While the campaigns for women's suffrage and for women's participation in the labour market and in public life have been the subject of recent attention by historians, the theory and practice of domestic organization has been comparatively neglected. It is this issue, actively debated in the USA from the 1820s onwards, which Hayden has retrieved. This attrac-
vol 3 no 2 april 1982
tively produced and copiously illustrated book will interest not only committed feminists but anyone concerned about the impact of environmental design of human potential. The protagonists and intellectual positions in the debate are surprisingly diverse. There is a shared assumption that 'women's isolation in the home and confinement to domestic life [are] the basic cause of their unequal position in society' (from the blurb), but beyond that, views range from those of former mill girl Marie Stevens Howland, who believed in sexual freedom and economic independence, with well equipped collective nurseries and kitchenless houses served from a central kitchen and laundry, to Mary Livermore, a preacher's wife, temperance campaigner and suffragist who advocated efficiently organized laundries and cooked food delivery services run on commercial lines bY trained women, but had conservative views on the family. The contradictions in some of this thinking are not ducked: married feminists in professional jobs might attempt to avoid domestic work by
the creation of apartment hotels or Cooperative Housekeeping Societies but they generally ignored the problems of the working class women, many of them black, who were to do their domestic labour for them. Attempts to involve men in domestic labour (currently assumed by most feminists living with men to be the way forward, but scarcely more successful than the failed experiments chronicled by Hayden) could mean that women lose 'workers' control' over one of the few spheres of work where they are relatively autonomous at present. Hayden describes the transparent objectives of those who promoted low density suburban single family housing: to foster industrial peace and to sell household goods. Capitalism appears as joint villain with male domination. That established interests were threatened by the campaigners for a domestic revolution is evident in the persistent attempts to discredit them by implying association with communists and free-lovers. One debate is not fully explored or even mentioned in the book but is implicit in its arguments:
111
that on environmental determinism. There is no critical examination of the assumption that spatial arrangements, from the design of homes or kitchens to the layout o f cities, are a major cause o f women's inferior position in society, with the corollary that this position could be significantly improved through design. I am sceptical whether environmental change can have such power. However, this b o o k is welcome for providing a scholarly historical perspective to the problems of domestic organization, which are still as urgent as they were when Melusina Fay Peirce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were working, and no nearer a solution.
Jane Darke, University o f Sheffield
The Banham view Reyner Banham Design by choice Academy Editions, London (1981) 152 pp, £9.50 Let's face it: there aren't many books about design that make you laugh out loud when you're reading them on the train. This one does. This book is a collection of 31 articles by Reyner Banham, representing less than one-tenth of his prolific journalistic output of the last 30 years. They have been selected b y the design historian Penny Sparke, but how she made the difficult choices of what to include and what to leave out is not clear. We can only be grateful to her for having done the job at all, since it gives us at least some of Banham's enjoyable journalism in a more durable format. Banham himself says, in a foreword, that 'this is her anthology, not-mine . . . . it is one woman's Banham, and I have no doubt that other women, men, persons and creatures, could construct their own, absolutely true and documented, but totally different Banhams.' This suggests that, although she dosn't attempt to give much of an overview in her introduction, there is a hidden agenda behind Penny Sparke's selection. He says that it is her view of Banham, but she says that she is only collating h/s view of the world: 'In the end it's his version that counts. His often utopian, always humanistic commitment to a world o f equal opportunities, where
112
the imagination defeats dry rationalism, points the way to a freer society and a new liberated role for the arts within it'. She has divided her selection into two parts. The first is supposed to be devoted to history, theory and criticism o f twentieth century architecture, and the second is supposed to be about the theory and design o f pop culture. But it's not all that easy to identify the one section from the other: b o t h sections contain serious articles about throw-away design, and throw-away articles about serious design. What every article has is Banham's unique view of the world of architecture, design and the popular arts, his insight, his wit, and his incessant cross-cultural fertilization. Who else's index would start with Abdullah cigarettes and run through to Z-cars, put the Beatles next to the Beaux Arts, Kenneth Clark next to a Clark Cortez camper, Charles Darwin next to Robin Day, The Mikado next to miniaturization, Herbert Read next to Ready, Steady, Go, and Yogi Bear
next to York, Rosenberg and Mardall ? What emerges from this catholic serendipity, though,/s a consistent view, perhaps summed-up in an article about car design from the New Statesman in 1960, in which Banham says: 'The concept o f good design as a form o f aesthetic charity done on the labouring poor from a great height is incompatible with democracy as I see it. We need, instead, a concept of good design as the radical solution to the problems of satisfying consumer needs. We need an end to insolence on the part o f our pundits.' It may be that Penny Sparke has very carefully and cleverly selected from Banham's outpouring so as to give us this consistent view, but I certainly wouldn't accuse her o f any sleight of hand. Her Banham is very close to what I remember m y Banham being. My only regret is that this b o o k isn't twice its size, so that it might have included more of my favourite Banham memorabilia.
Nigel Cross
Brief reviews Alan Cottrell How safe is nuclear energy ? Heineman, London (1981) 124 pp Highly authorative run-down on nuclear safety for the general reader. This covers fear o f the unknown, what happens in nuclear reactors, how radiation affects us, is there a safe level? Then are considered the various ways o f operating and controlling plants with considerable emphasis on avoiding the.various kinds of error. Reference is made to the principle known cases of major accidents. Vexed questions such as the plutonium economy are discussed. This b o o k is obviously a first source of reference.
S Gee Technology transfer, innovation, and international competitiveness John Wiley and Sons (1981) 228 pp, £15.00 This is part of the growing literature which describes the fall-off in innovation in the USA and specuhates on possible ways of changing the decline. He suggests a way of measuring the effectiveness of an economy or a company by using
'average innovation period'. His favoured recipe is greater importation of foreign technology b y the USA. This is because it is the least used o f four principal elements of economic growth in a model he uses. Why it should work is not made clear.
H Skolimowsk i Eco-philosophy Marion Boyars, Boston, MA, USA (1981) 117 pp, £2.95, £6.95 This philosopher, one o f the few known to have looked at technology in some depth, is concerned with the separation o f knowledge and values. He proposes a way o f re-integration, providing at the same time a brief run-down on the sheep and the goats. His new imperative concerns spiritual values, human life, and the environment. Interestingly he links theory with practice b y way of architecture. Towards the end of the brief b o o k he discusses quality in a rather technical way, managing to link London's South Bank National Theatre with Zen and the art o f motorcycle maintenance. Is Skolimowski going to appear in those future reference lists ?
DESIGN STUDIES
firm and its early models, and bravely attempts to present some shaky evidence on the relationships between the firm's industrial designers and engineers. The best paper is that by Sven Thiberg, Chairman of the Swedish Society of Industrial Design. It is good reading for those interested in design policy-making at national level or at the level of the firm. Thiberg sees the need to link a national design policy to Sweden's existing national consumer policy and describes experimental design programmes based on this idea operated jointly by the Swedish So~ety of Industrial Design and the Swedish Co-op. He outlines 'work environment programmes' based on new Swedish legislation giving employees the right to influence their working environment. He describes public iniatives in the use of exhibitions to educate consumers about design in the home and shows that advocating simplicity, free Space, and freedom from material goods sometimes contradicts the argument for good design.
Figure 2. Design with a social purpose from Sweden. These scissors, designed by G~ran Ygfors and manufactured by Skandinavska Telekompaniet AB, work on the principle that it is easier to squeeze together the fingers and thumb than to open them apart
He outlines a six-point design policy for a post-industrial market economy, giving as its goal a good life based on freedom, equality and social responsibility. (See Figures 1 and 2 ). Here is someone who can spell out what he means by the social role of design. But is there a design fraternity anywhere equal to his challenge ?
Stanley Moody City of Birmingham Polytechnic
A woman's place Dolores Hayden The grand domestic revolution: a history of feminist design for American homes, neighbourhoods andcities MIT Press (1981) 367 pp, $19.95
Hayden quotes the husband of a feminist theoretician commenting in 1970: 'Housework? Oh my god how trivial can you get. A paper on housework.' (p 290) I wonder how many Desiqn S t u d i e s readers would be less dismissive in 1982. Yet the organization of domestic work to correspond to particular ideas on the 'place' of women in the family and in society has given rise to buik forms (the separate dwelling, residential suburbs and so on) which make it difficult for women to break away from these stereotyped roles. While the campaigns for women's suffrage and for women's participation in the labour market and in public life have been the subject of recent attention by historians, the theory and practice of domestic organization has been comparatively neglected. It is this issue, actively debated in the USA from the 1820s onwards, which Hayden has retrieved. This attrac-
vol 3 no 2 april 1982
tively produced and copiously illustrated book will interest not only committed feminists but anyone concerned about the impact of environmental design of human potential. The protagonists and intellectual positions in the debate are surprisingly diverse. There is a shared assumption that 'women's isolation in the home and confinement to domestic life [are] the basic cause of their unequal position in society' (from the blurb), but beyond that, views range from those of former mill girl Marie Stevens Howland, who believed in sexual freedom and economic independence, with well equipped collective nurseries and kitchenless houses served from a central kitchen and laundry, to Mary Livermore, a preacher's wife, temperance campaigner and suffragist who advocated efficiently organized laundries and cooked food delivery services run on commercial lines bY trained women, but had conservative views on the family. The contradictions in some of this thinking are not ducked: married feminists in professional jobs might attempt to avoid domestic work by
the creation of apartment hotels or Cooperative Housekeeping Societies but they generally ignored the problems of the working class women, many of them black, who were to do their domestic labour for them. Attempts to involve men in domestic labour (currently assumed by most feminists living with men to be the way forward, but scarcely more successful than the failed experiments chronicled by Hayden) could mean that women lose 'workers' control' over one of the few spheres of work where they are relatively autonomous at present. Hayden describes the transparent objectives of those who promoted low density suburban single family housing: to foster industrial peace and to sell household goods. Capitalism appears as joint villain with male domination. That established interests were threatened by the campaigners for a domestic revolution is evident in the persistent attempts to discredit them by implying association with communists and free-lovers. One debate is not fully explored or even mentioned in the book but is implicit in its arguments:
111
that on environmental determinism. There is no critical examination of the assumption that spatial arrangements, from the design of homes or kitchens to the layout o f cities, are a major cause o f women's inferior position in society, with the corollary that this position could be significantly improved through design. I am sceptical whether environmental change can have such power. However, this b o o k is welcome for providing a scholarly historical perspective to the problems of domestic organization, which are still as urgent as they were when Melusina Fay Peirce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were working, and no nearer a solution.
Jane Darke, University o f Sheffield
The Banham view Reyner Banham Design by choice Academy Editions, London (1981) 152 pp, £9.50 Let's face it: there aren't many books about design that make you laugh out loud when you're reading them on the train. This one does. This book is a collection of 31 articles by Reyner Banham, representing less than one-tenth of his prolific journalistic output of the last 30 years. They have been selected b y the design historian Penny Sparke, but how she made the difficult choices of what to include and what to leave out is not clear. We can only be grateful to her for having done the job at all, since it gives us at least some of Banham's enjoyable journalism in a more durable format. Banham himself says, in a foreword, that 'this is her anthology, not-mine . . . . it is one woman's Banham, and I have no doubt that other women, men, persons and creatures, could construct their own, absolutely true and documented, but totally different Banhams.' This suggests that, although she dosn't attempt to give much of an overview in her introduction, there is a hidden agenda behind Penny Sparke's selection. He says that it is her view of Banham, but she says that she is only collating h/s view of the world: 'In the end it's his version that counts. His often utopian, always humanistic commitment to a world o f equal opportunities, where
112
the imagination defeats dry rationalism, points the way to a freer society and a new liberated role for the arts within it'. She has divided her selection into two parts. The first is supposed to be devoted to history, theory and criticism o f twentieth century architecture, and the second is supposed to be about the theory and design o f pop culture. But it's not all that easy to identify the one section from the other: b o t h sections contain serious articles about throw-away design, and throw-away articles about serious design. What every article has is Banham's unique view of the world of architecture, design and the popular arts, his insight, his wit, and his incessant cross-cultural fertilization. Who else's index would start with Abdullah cigarettes and run through to Z-cars, put the Beatles next to the Beaux Arts, Kenneth Clark next to a Clark Cortez camper, Charles Darwin next to Robin Day, The Mikado next to miniaturization, Herbert Read next to Ready, Steady, Go, and Yogi Bear
next to York, Rosenberg and Mardall ? What emerges from this catholic serendipity, though,/s a consistent view, perhaps summed-up in an article about car design from the New Statesman in 1960, in which Banham says: 'The concept o f good design as a form o f aesthetic charity done on the labouring poor from a great height is incompatible with democracy as I see it. We need, instead, a concept of good design as the radical solution to the problems of satisfying consumer needs. We need an end to insolence on the part o f our pundits.' It may be that Penny Sparke has very carefully and cleverly selected from Banham's outpouring so as to give us this consistent view, but I certainly wouldn't accuse her o f any sleight of hand. Her Banham is very close to what I remember m y Banham being. My only regret is that this b o o k isn't twice its size, so that it might have included more of my favourite Banham memorabilia.
Nigel Cross
Brief reviews Alan Cottrell How safe is nuclear energy ? Heineman, London (1981) 124 pp Highly authorative run-down on nuclear safety for the general reader. This covers fear o f the unknown, what happens in nuclear reactors, how radiation affects us, is there a safe level? Then are considered the various ways o f operating and controlling plants with considerable emphasis on avoiding the.various kinds of error. Reference is made to the principle known cases of major accidents. Vexed questions such as the plutonium economy are discussed. This b o o k is obviously a first source of reference.
S Gee Technology transfer, innovation, and international competitiveness John Wiley and Sons (1981) 228 pp, £15.00 This is part of the growing literature which describes the fall-off in innovation in the USA and specuhates on possible ways of changing the decline. He suggests a way of measuring the effectiveness of an economy or a company by using
'average innovation period'. His favoured recipe is greater importation of foreign technology b y the USA. This is because it is the least used o f four principal elements of economic growth in a model he uses. Why it should work is not made clear.
H Skolimowsk i Eco-philosophy Marion Boyars, Boston, MA, USA (1981) 117 pp, £2.95, £6.95 This philosopher, one o f the few known to have looked at technology in some depth, is concerned with the separation o f knowledge and values. He proposes a way o f re-integration, providing at the same time a brief run-down on the sheep and the goats. His new imperative concerns spiritual values, human life, and the environment. Interestingly he links theory with practice b y way of architecture. Towards the end of the brief b o o k he discusses quality in a rather technical way, managing to link London's South Bank National Theatre with Zen and the art o f motorcycle maintenance. Is Skolimowski going to appear in those future reference lists ?
DESIGN STUDIES