Amy G. Richter
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814769133
- eISBN:
- 9780814769157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814769133.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
The domestic ideal that emerged in the 1820s rested on distinctions between marketplace and home, male and female, public and private. At the end of the nineteenth century, changes in American urban ...
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The domestic ideal that emerged in the 1820s rested on distinctions between marketplace and home, male and female, public and private. At the end of the nineteenth century, changes in American urban life seemed to threaten these distinctions, testing the resilience and adaptability of domesticity in the modern industrial city. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which city living challenged Victorian notions of domestic privacy and considers the range of cultural and spatial responses to this challenge. Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and Edith Wharton highlight the perceived loss of privacy, respectability, family feeling, and refinement in urban homes—especially in tenements and apartment houses. Documents by Frederick Law Olmstead, Jane Addams, and Eliza Chester depict new public spaces—public parks, settlement houses, and women’s hotels—designed to serve previously domestic functions.Less
The domestic ideal that emerged in the 1820s rested on distinctions between marketplace and home, male and female, public and private. At the end of the nineteenth century, changes in American urban life seemed to threaten these distinctions, testing the resilience and adaptability of domesticity in the modern industrial city. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which city living challenged Victorian notions of domestic privacy and considers the range of cultural and spatial responses to this challenge. Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and Edith Wharton highlight the perceived loss of privacy, respectability, family feeling, and refinement in urban homes—especially in tenements and apartment houses. Documents by Frederick Law Olmstead, Jane Addams, and Eliza Chester depict new public spaces—public parks, settlement houses, and women’s hotels—designed to serve previously domestic functions.
