American Domesticity

From How-to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama

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by Kathleen Anne McHugh

Type: Studies
Subject: Sociology
Keywords: United States, family
Publishing date: 1999
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 248 pages
6 ½ x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm)

ISBN-10 ISBN-13

0-19-512261-5
978-0-19-512261-9

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Book Presentation:
From the cult of domesticity to the Semiotics of the Kitchen, housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing woman to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that downplay race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts. While the domestic is usually conceived of as the antithesis of the public, economical, and political, Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how domestic discourse established the terms within which the most crucial national issues--the market economy, universal white male suffrage, slavery, the construction of racial difference, consumerism, spectatorship, desire, and even feminism--were conceived, assimilated, and understood. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the book investigates the historical roots of domestic labors invisibility in widely circulated didactic housekeeping manuals written by Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher, Mary Pattison, and Christine Frederick. It then considers how pedagogical discourses became entertainment discourses, their focus shifting from the silent era of film to the twilight of the classical period. The book concludes with an examination of the return of a pedagogical impulse within feminist film production concerning domesticity, comparing it to the concurrent rise of feminist film theory in the academy. Looking at this wide range of print and film texts, McHugh traces the outlines of a discourse of domesticity that claims to be private and universal but instead brokers difference within the public sphere.

About the Author:
Kathleen Anne McHugh is at University of California at Riverside.

Press Reviews:
"Kathleen McHugh's generous, big-hearted work on the construction and representation of domestic labor in American culture offers an original look at the intersection of class, race, and gender in domestic ideals. Combining study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century didactic studies of popular melodramatic films and recent avant-garde films by women, American Domesticity is much more than a book about cinema. For that very reason, however, it is a better book about cinema than most others. In fact, it is the best study of American melodrama I have read."--Linda Williams, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Hard Core.

"The strength of Kathleen McHugh's fine book lies in the connection she establishes between the classic texts of nineteenth-century domesticity and a number of twentieth-century films--important cultural manifestations that have rarely been discussed in the same work. American Domesticity is original, sophisticated, and provocative in its placement of women's work close to the heart of our national identity."--Glenna Mathews, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Just a Housewife (Oxford, 1989).

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press

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