Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Acts
Cynthia Wall, Vassar College
Volume 5, no. 4, July 1993
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ABSTRACT
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the fashionable architects Robert and James Adam articulated and affirmed a social as well as structural change in the interiors of upper and middle-class English houses. The dining-room had become the explicit territory of men, the space for political and other kinds of discourse; the drawing-room came under the supervision of women. But where the dining-room had dominated the floorplan in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when men and women tended to co-occupy its space in shared entertainment, by the end of the eighteenth century the division into gendered space between the dining and drawing-rooms corresponded to altered proportions: the drawing-room became the usually symmetrical counterpart to the dining-room, both architecturally and socially. It would appear that a bargain of sorts had been struck, consciously or unconsciously: in exchange for increasing exclusion from formerly shared space, women were given or (assumed) a separate (but equal?) space of their own.
PDF file, free to read, of the ECF article.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Architecture Design” include:
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by SANDRO JUNG (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
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by RACHEL RAMSEY (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
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