A Quest for Life: An Autobiography: An Autobiography Book

This book came out in 1981, so it's surprising that I don't remember reading it. I feel fortunate that I read it now, after decades of developing a context for it. Yet I also feel sorry that my understanding of architecture is not even at the level of amateur. It's an excellent, well-organized overview of the history of materialist feminism, a first-wave feminist ideology that emphasized women's economic independence and the importance of gendered work.

Hayden's first book was on the architecture of communitarian socialist projects, and she shows the reader the continuity between such projects (including the Shaker, the Oneida community, the Bruderhof, and various Owenite and Fourierist communes) and the work of feminist activists to ameliorate the burden and the isolation of 19th century housekeeping. The first section of the book establishes this continuity. One piece that interested me: many common household gadgets were invented in these communities where household work was shared.

In the second section of the book, Hayden shows the gradual development of ideas of cooperative housekeeping among self-identified feminists. Her fourth chapter is devoted to the ideas of Melusina Fay Peirce, a Cambridge, Massachusetts activist whose co-operative housekeeping project failed. Her ideas succeeded and spread, however. The fifth chapter, devoted to utopian feminists who believed in free love and cooperative living, is mainly focused on the work of Marie Howland, whose cooperative housekeeping and especially early childhood daycare projects were successful. The sixth chapter on materialist feminism among suffrage, women's club and temperance feminists is mainly about the suffrage speaker Mary Livermore.

The third section of the book is on the spread of ideas of reform. Chapter seven is on fictional socialist cities, with special emphasis on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and the people it influenced. (I have not read Looking Backward, but it's always mentioned in the same breath with William Morris' The News from Nowhere, which I loved.)

The eighth chapter is on settlement houses and actual attempts to provide food to low-income city dwellers. Hayden covers Jane Addams and Ellen Swallow Richards. I liked the way Hayden contrasted top-down attempts of wealthier women to help poorer women with socialist ideas of women organizing. Hayden doesn't neglect issues of class throughout the book.

Chapters 9-12 of this book were about Charlotte Perkins Gillman. That should surprise no one who is familiar with the history of the feminist movement. Because I am familiar with this history, I skimmed this section. I think I probably need to go back and reread it. The chapters aren't only about Gillman, but about the people she influenced, even very indirectly. For some reason this is the section where the famous co-op apartments of the early 20th century, set up mainly by Jewish socialists, was mentioned. I would like to go back to the book and scope out the footnotes for this section.

The last two chapters of the book are on the backlash against feminism and against materialist feminist ideas of cooperative housing and community planning, with a final chapter reflecting on the issue in the present. (Of course this is the present in 1981, when I was starting high school!) The backlash of the 1920s makes a lot more sense to me nearly 100 years later than it did when I first learned about it. You would think that, in the aftermath of WWI, with women getting the vote for the first time in so many countries, that it would be difficult to discredit feminism. It was specifically household operations that red baiters and corporate interests feared, however. The apparent success of the Russian Revolution, which motivated many countries to give women the vote as a calming influence, definitely had an impact. This was also the period in which the idea of companionate marriage became mainstream. The promotion of homeownership as a way to pacify the workforce is an important factor in this backlash also. I would say that without consideration of the technological improvements in home life, none of this could have happened.

I was simultaneously saddened and delighted that Hayden takes an opportunity to trash Lilian Moller Gibreth in this chapter. Saddened because Cheaper by the Dozen was my favorite book as a child, delighted because Hayden is reclaiming the importance of women even in the backlash against feminism. She shows how Gilbreth and especially with Christine Frederick, highly educated women, pushed home economics not as a way for women to be engaged and less isolated, but again to be the angel of the hearth and the engine of a culture of consumption. Also in this section, almost as a throwaway, Hayden mentions a black women's group, the National Association of Wage Earners, and its leader Nannie Burroughs. I want to return to that organization and to her.

I've now read two books about utopian architecture, and I could see in both of them the implicit ideas about the role of women and cooking. It feels like we swing between two extremes. On the one hand is the home as homestead model, where the family can have its own kitchen and garden and laundry, and on the other, a model where there's no room to cook or do laundry, but either a communal laundry and dining hall or commercial laundries and restaurant kitchens make up the difference. I wonder how Hayden thinks of the boxed meal services that come as ingredients with recipes--sparing the householder the chore of shopping and planning, but not of cooking and cleaning up. Such services did not exist in 1981, when many families relied on frozen dinners so they wouldn't have to shop as often, and television so they could get their kids ready for daycare.