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This chapter explores whether a domestic religious orientation, engaged with the personal and the particular, can be observed in the context of precolonial South India. It focuses on the period between the 9th to 13th centuries in the part of India known today as Tamilnadu. The chapter draws on the resources provided by the thousands of inscriptions written in the Tamil language and engraved in stone on the walls of Hindu and Jain temples during this period. These inscriptions record actions, particularly the making of gifts to temples by a wide variety of people. It is argued that although men's and women's activities recorded on temple walls had distinctive colorings, the contexts, roles, and motives for these actions were overlapping and often congruent.

This chapter explores the ritual practices of women active in tantric traditions in West Bengal. These female tantrikas tend to reject the traditional domestic values associated with women's householder rituals, emphasizing instead ritual practices allied more closely with renunciation and its goals. In this context, renunciation is highly valued in women, as it is in men, while sexuality returns a woman to the sphere of traditional domesticity where she takes on the role of supporter and helper of a man rather than the role of individual seeker. Hence, the world of female tantric ritual challenges the connection between domesticity and women's ritual practices predominant in other contexts.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of Hindu women's participation in religious practice. Some notes on the scholarly and historical context of the study are presented. This is followed by an overview of the chapters in this volume.

This chapter examines Shakespeare's Hamlet and seeks to understand the Good life. It notes that Prince Hamlet naturally preferred a private life, subordinating himself to the rule of others, and even courted Ophelia, which suggests an opening to domesticity on his part. It further seeks to explore the ultimate dependency of Good on understanding. It notes that in order to be able to conclude that the Good is elusive; one must have a reliable sense of what is truly good. It points out that whatever openness Hamlet had had toward domesticity seems to have been seriously disturbed by what happened to what may have been his model of a good marriage. It notes that his mother need not be considered to have been aware of the murder of her first husband, but her hasty remarriage can arouse suspicions that Gertrude and Claudius had had some “understanding” while King Hamlet was still alive.

The charge of socialism is a conversation-stopper; republicanism offers a native American alternative. To justify his radical widening of the concept of property, Charles Reich, in “The New Property,” mixed the liberal language of privacy with language from the republican egalitarian strain. The mystique of homeownership carries on republican themes, such as the notion that property offers a stable stake in society, and the notion that owners make good citizens. The grip of domesticity is so profound that the only realistic strategy is to transform it from within, to turn arguments for why women should remain in the home into demands to employers and the government to spread the costs of childrearing instead of privatizing them onto the women and children who represent 77 percent of those in poverty. In a culture with few viable redistributive rhetorics, religion has tremendous potential for building cross-class and cross-race coalitions.

This chapter examines the next generation of Anglican women's mission work in Uganda through the growth of the Mothers' Union. Concerns about ‘nominal Christianity’ persisted after the institution of the Church of Uganda, and the MU provided a new way to interrogate the relationship between outward, corporate manifestations of Christianity and inner spiritual life. The fluidity of Christian and non‐Christian parameters and the persistence of polygamy made missionary women confront their prior understandings of marriage, domesticity, ‘progress,’ and national identity. British and African women approached motherhood as a shared medium of religious and social authority, and used prayer and revivals to construct a hybrid discourse of evangelicalism that appropriated male clerical functions. The MU's influence in the mission church and its potential to transgress clerical and social boundaries were revealed by the widespread resistance to the organization by African men.

This chapter explains how the memories of three 20th century Indian women made use of memories of home served as archival sources for the writing of histories that tried to capture the rifts and fissures of modernity in late colonial India. It highlights the importance of home as both a material archive for history and a very real political figure in an extended moment of historical crisis. It discusses that the centrality of domestic space to the rhetoric, ideologies, and practices of Indian feminism in all its diversity during this period is striking. It adds that 20th-century feminists reappropriated the discourses of house and home that had been seized by male Indian nationalists since the nineteenth century, linking domesticity expressly to their own reform agendas in ways that both consolidated that traditional idiom and refigured it as a new subject of public political discourse.

The volume concludes with a return to the discourse of wifehood as celebrated by Jain laywomen through iconic representations of domesticity and pleasure. The majority of Jain wives interviewed and observed in this study have expressed joy in wifehood. They participate in a variety of Jain rituals, which mark wifehood as a special and honored state within Jain discourse. Wifehood carries with it a set of particular pleasures of sensuality and intimacy, which are understood to be the just rewards of marriage and domesticity.

This chapter argues that the potential of the mass media to open a more universal public sphere was by no means linear or straightforward, but was accompanied by a simultaneous process of differentiation that reflected the highly variegated market for entertainment and information. Rather, these processes had a wide range of possible social implications, including the potential to unite or to divide audiences, to weaken or reproduce existing social distinctions and, of course, to create new ones. In addition, it shows that different media exerted quite different effects within the rapidly changing public sphere. In sum, the modern media and commercial entertainment, despite their underlying ‘democratic’ logic, were not the culturally ‘standardizing’ and socially ‘levelling’ forces so often conjured by contemporaries and historians alike.

The Introduction locates the argument within the wider secondary source literature, and reconsiders East German social politics and everyday life through an examination of East German norms and experiences of private life. It focuses on the very interplay of private and public in East Germany, charting the ways in which the domestic sphere in particular emerged as a unique site for the expression of personal liberty and alternative non-communist identities. In so doing it shows how the changing understanding of the private sphere serves as an illuminating case study for reinterpreting East German state and society more generally.

The frequency and ease of divorce became one of the distinguishing traits of GDR socialism. However, this chapter is not a macro-level discussion of the frequency and causes of marital breakdown in the GDR. The focus of this chapter is on the public presentation of private domestic problems in court, based on the analysis of some 1500 never before used East Berlin divorce records. The approach parts company from other studies of East German divorce in allowing those involved – judges and spouses—to articulate their views in court. What makes these divorce court records so valuable is the way in which they cast light on the shifting articulation of the ‘private good,’ showing how the moral sphere of the family served as a crucible for the changing understanding of marriage within socialism.

This chapter moves the discussion in a new direction, exploring how private life was presented in the visual arts and in particular photography. Whereas private life played little role in East German professional photography in the 1950s and early 1960s, the domestic sphere emerged as a new interest in the 1970s and 1980s. By that time a new generation of East German Fotokünstler saw themselves as maverick chroniclers of ‘real existing socialism,’ recording the private lives of ordinary East German citizens. Given the state's embracing of socialist realism as official ideology from the early 1950s on, as well as the much-touted relaxation of the Honecker Era, photographers began to test the meaning of socialist realism from fresh perspectives. This chapter addresses how and why many of them chose to go indoors in the 1970s and 1980s, identifying the private domestic sphere as the authentic register and last outpost of GDR socialism.

Itinerant preachers, the women in this study were literally and figuratively “homeless.” Having abandoned housekeeping to become evangelists, they broke away from the ideology of domesticity and true womanhood that had defined them spatially, socially, and culturally. Of course these “female strangers” knew that she who lost her life—with its familiar patterns and meanings—for the sake of Christ, would find it. Ultimately, and inevitably, however, when they came to write their autobiographies, these female evangelists were lost without some familiar cultural referent that applied specifically to women of nineteenth‐century America. Thus while their unorthodox careers took them far beyond the bounds of home, they found it necessary as writers to make much use of the language of domesticity in their efforts to understand themselves, to justify their lives to an audience that regarded them with suspicion, and to find a “home” in American culture.

This chapter assesses the historiography of childhood, family, masculinity, and femininity where it relates to mothers and fathers. It then sets out a new research agenda intended to open up the world of parents in the long eighteenth century. This takes an updated ‘history of sensibilities’ approach, which recognises that different structures of beliefs, values, feelings, sense and taste mark different eras and peoples. The chapter details the wide array of primary sources used, from print culture, to visual culture to autobiographies and correspondence. It explains that the terms in which literate British parents experienced the world of parenting in the period 1760–1830 were rooted in three cultural frameworks: Christianity, sensibility, and domesticity.

This chapter focuses upon parents’ role in transferring values to their children, a practice that was not gender‐specific. The most frequently mentioned family values were piety, virtue, industriousness, filial duty and domesticity. Parents saw piety as a manner of thinking and living that would bring their offspring happiness in life and after. Industriousness was a means by which the middle‐classes assessed their own worth, thus parents told children it would improve them as individuals. Filial duty was promoted through reciprocity: children owed their support to parents when they were old as gratitude for their care and love. Domesticity was nurtured as a family identity, found in motifs that were symbolic of home and a united family: snug fireside and family circle. Its cultivation helped parents and children communicate with each other about themselves; a family concept that sustained a notion of family, representing safety and security in changing world.