Gender and material culture in modern Britain and beyond1
p. 437-458
Résumé
The material world is often created by gendered power structures and used to express gendered identities. In this paper, I will offer an overview of the historiography of gender and material culture in the modern period. The first half of the paper will focus on studies of modern Britain. I will take a long view of the development of the history of gender, considering its relationship with cultural history, and why the study of material culture is useful to historians working in this area. I will then explore how historians of gender have recently used material culture, focusing on three main areas: gendered responsibility for purchasing goods; the use of material things to shape and create ideas of gender, and in particular new work that focuses on the construction of masculinity through everyday objects and practices; and the way in which historians of the family and emotional life have started to use the material world, especially in work on fatherhood. I will also reflect on recent criticisms of the study of gender and material culture, and how and where the field might usefully develop in the future. The second half of the paper will focus in on the material culture of the home. Narrowing the focus of discussion will allow me to open up the geographical remit of the paper to explore how we might use the study of gender and material culture in a transnational context.
Texte intégral
1The material world around us is a primary means of forging meaning and identities. By looking at its operation, we can see the historical construction of gendered identities in action. When Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby edited their ground-breaking volumes on women in the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the study of material culture in history was relatively unexplored – and although many of the essays touched on the significance of the material world for women – material culture itself was not seen as a primary focus for analysis.2 Since then, new approaches have developed. In recent decades historians have become increasingly aware of the opportunities this offers for telling new stories about the history of gender. This essay offers a historiographical overview of this work in British studies, before considering the value of studying this topic from a transnational perspective. In the first part of the essay I offer some thoughts on the development of studies of women and gender, and studies of material culture and how the two relate to each other. Over the last decade or so, historians of gender in Britain have begun to use material culture as a core analytical tool. I will discuss some of the main themes that have emerged, and how historians are currently using material culture to think about how gender operates in society. The second part of the essay considers how useful it might be to examine gendered material cultures from a comparative or even a transnational perspective.3 Taking the example of the material culture of middle-class homes in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, I will compare and contrast the way that gendered roles and identities were realized through domestic material culture, and consider the value of this for understanding how gender operates across national boundaries.
2It is worth outlining, briefly, how the term ‘material culture’ is understood, as it is not always familiar and is used differently by various disciplines. Here, it is simply used to mean objects or physical structures that had a particular use or meaning, or a set of values attached to them. The study of material culture is not just a matter of using new types of source material (although this is part of it), but it is also about using a range of archival evidence to uncover the cultural role objects played in the past.
Studies of gender and studies of material culture in modern Britain
3Let us begin with the study of gender itself. How has it developed and what does the analysis of material culture have to offer here? When women’s history first emerged in Britain from the 1970s, a central focus was the recovery of women’s stories.4 Yet this new raft of scholarship did little to alter broader currents of historical study, and in reaction to this, historians like Joan Wallach Scott began to promote the study of gender as a social construct.5 She argued that by analysing gender, or the roles women and men were supposed to adhere to, historians would be able to interrogate how gendered power structures operated within culture. One of the first studies in British history to develop this idea was Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s seminal Family Fortunes that looked at how ideas of gender were culturally constructed in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century sermons, novels and poetry, alongside records of lived experience of men and women such as diaries and letters.6 Early studies such as this did not explore the material world in detail – yet we can see how their focus on the construction of cultural ideas in relation to subjective, individual experiences would mean that material culture could be useful to them as it offers a means of seeing cultural processes at work.
4Since gender and cultural history expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, both have developed significantly. In particular, the study of the cultural construction of gender led historians to see that it was necessary to look femininity alongside masculinity, to be able to see how gender operated on a relational basis. Michael Roper and John Tosh led the way in studies of modern masculinity, while Alexandra Shepard and Karen Harvey presented a seminal overview of the evolution of ideas of masculinity from the early modern period.7 Since the 1990s, studies of masculinity have flourished and perhaps even come to dominate the study of gender.8 From the early 2000s, there have been a number of critiques of cultural histories of gender. Michael Roper, for example, criticized the way in which cultural histories focus on representation and cultural codes, arguing that this leads to a failure to really consider the subjective experiences of individual men and women.9 Since then, there has been a shift from a focus on representations towards studies that consider embodied, material experiences alongside their cultural associations. The increasing emphasis that historians place on the nuances of the cultural and the social, and the complexity of our understandings of the cultural construction of gender, renders the study of material culture a particularly apposite tool.10 Cultural historians now suggest that we should try and see how ideas are constructed and used at different cultural levels – so looking at how people in the past used spaces and objects offers historians a means of meeting this challenge. We can look at how the meaning of objects was construed in contemporary culture and how they were used in everyday life.
5As historical studies of gender have grown increasingly complex, material culture has emerged as a significant field in historical research. Of course, this is not really a new area of study. Archaeologists have long been dedicated to the scrutiny of artifacts and anthropologists to the interpretation of the rituals associated with them – in fact, it is with these two fields that the term material culture remains primarily associated.11
6Across the Atlantic, the close relationship between museums and historians has also fostered a longstanding tradition of research into the material world.12 But in British history what has been new in recent years is the attention paid to the material world by scholars working in conventional or ‘mainstream’ history.
7The new focus on material culture in modern British history has been particularly influenced by two quite different historical schools. The first, emerging from women’s history, uses material culture as a means of finding out more about women’s lives.13 Often linked to this are studies of the home and the domestic interior, in which material culture often plays a central role.14 The second school, which has emerged from Foucauldian studies of governmentality, is concerned with material culture as a means of understanding the structures of everyday life. Focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these interpretations argue that new material forms were essential to a new kind of liberal modernity that shaped experience.15 While scholars in these two different schools have not always seen eye to eye,16 they are both testament to a broad, growing interest in the material world amongst historians. Indeed, books that bring together historians working on material culture now occupy an increasing amount of space on library shelves.17
Using material culture to tell stories about gender
8The potential of the material world to reveal gendered ideas in society has certainly not gone unnoticed. In modern British studies, early work emerged from feminist design history in the 1990s, when Penny Sparke, Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham drew scholarly attention to the gendered dimensions of the design and use of things.18 In particular, Sparke’s As Long as It’s Pink traced the history of ideas of masculinity and femininity in design from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.19 In the early 2000s, the AHRC-funded Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior inspired a new wave of research into past material worlds. The project drew on several decades’ work on the history of consumption, but its focus, on domestic interiors that were created and lived in, rather than the acquisition of goods, was novel and transformative.20 Gender was integral to their approach, and Amanda Vickery and John Styles produced the seminal Gender, taste and material culture in eighteenth century Britain in 2006 as a part of the centre’s activities.21 This approach is now an accepted orthodoxy in British history and other areas – its range and scope is indicated by the recent three-volume essay collection published by Ashgate.22 There are three particularly interesting areas that the material world has been used to illuminate, which I will discuss here: firstly, the acquisition of and control of material goods and the operation of gendered power dynamics, particularly between husbands and wives; secondly, the ways in which people constructed identities through the display and use of things; and thirdly the connections between the material world of the home and family relationships and emotional lives.
9Understanding how much power women had in their daily lives has long been a central concern for historians of gender. While women’s property rights and material status were inferior to those of men, meticulous research has shown how entangled material negotiations and gendered relationships were in everyday life. Margot Finn, for instance, has shown how the law of coverture in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England allowed women to run up debts for household purchases in their husband’s names.23 Because the management of the home has been seen as a female role, how much control women had over household budgets could be an indicator of their social power. Ellen Ross, for example, in her study of motherhood and the poor in London, drew attention to women’s plight by examining the common practice of apportioning only a small part of the husband’s salary to the wife for food.24 The most complex consideration of the power dynamics behind household purchases to date is Vickery’s study of eighteenth-century men and women’s accounts. She finds that while accounting practices do confirm male dominance, they also reveal specific male and female terrains, and just how much variation there was within individual couples.25
10There has recently been a lively debate over who was responsible for the decoration of Victorian middle-class homes. While this had long been assumed to be a female prerogative, in line with the classic association between Victorian women and all things domestic, Deborah Cohen’s book Household Gods asserted that middle-class men had a great deal of say in the selection of wallpapers, curtains and so on.26 Cohen argues that there was a sharp shift in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when a new generation of female advice writers deliberately marked out the home as a feminine domain. Other writers, meanwhile, offer a less temporally deterministic picture, suggesting that the way most couples decorated their homes was a matter for negotiation.27 While it remains impossible to decisively answer this question, the amount of ink spilt over this aspect of Victorian material life reveals its potential to illuminate gendered power structures, as well as to explore wider questions of continuity and change that continue to animate historians of women and gender.
11A central part of the study of gender is the exploration of the construction of masculine and feminine identities, and the material world has proved a vital tool for understanding this process. This approach was first used in the British context in relation to the history of consumption in the 1990s – Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace for example identified the strong cultural association between femininity and certain types of eighteenth-century china (fig. 1).28
Fig. 1 – Chinoiserie was strongly associated with femininity in eighteenth-century Britain. Vase. Porcelain painted in underglazed blue. Jingdezhen, China. 1700-10. C.712-1910.

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
12Once again, Vickery was responsible for deepening our understanding of how this operated – as, in her case study of a Lancashire consumer, she suggested that we needed to look at the meanings women invested in material goods across the lifecycle, rather than just focusing on the ‘moment of purchase’.29 More recently, as a part of the drive to write the history of masculinity, new work has emerged on the use of things to create male identity. Karen Harvey has led the way here – revealing how a variety of objects – including tea cups, punch bowls, and male legs – were significant markers of identity.30 The study of the creation of masculinity through everyday practices is in evidence in our recent volume that covers shaving, barbering and male use of make-up.31 When writing the introduction to this volume, we concluded that the most significant contribution of material culture studies to our understandings of gendered identity was the idea that the cultural construction of gender is a process – we never see gender as a finished product – but something that is always in the making. In his ground-breaking analysis of the powder-puff in interwar Britain, Matt Houlbrook shows how the transformation of an object’s meaning at a cultural level – the growing association of the puff with queer identities – led the object itself to exert a new and powerful agency in everyday life – men arrested in certain areas of London with puffs on their person were automatically suspected of sodomy.32 Looking at the puff allows us to see how cultural ideas, the early twentieth century state, and the material world came together to reinforce an idea of sexual identity at a particular cultural moment.
13The history of gender and the history of the family have always been closely intertwined, and recent studies of family relationships have been very much informed by developments in gender studies – this is in evidence in new work on men’s role in the family and fatherhood.33 This is also an area in which histories of material culture are beginning to be deployed with considerable effect – in studies that unite older histories of the family with new concerns, including masculinity and the history of the emotions.34 One of the key advantages of the study of the material world is that it can allow us access to the lives of people who might otherwise fall outside the historical lens.35 Material culture has been at the heart of a number of recent studies of the working-class family, including Megan Doolittle’s examination of the social significance of the grandfather clock,36 Julie-Marie Strange’s analysis of the material composition of working-class kitchen in relation to the father’s role,37 and Vicky Holmes’ analysis of the materiality of sleeping arrangements in families.38 Strange in particular offers a major reworking of our understanding of the father’s physical and emotional place in the working-class home through his spatial and material presence – focusing in on the use and occupation of the father’s chair (fig. 2).39 Female family relationships have received less recent attention, but in my own study of Victorian middle-class families and home material culture, I showed how the spatial arrangement and material culture of the middle-class home played a fundamental role in shaping relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children and also masters and servants who played an important role in middle-class family life.40 Studies of the connections between family relationships, emotional life and the material world are still in their infancy but have a great deal to offer modern British social history.
Fig. 2 – The father’s chair was at the centre of the working-class kitchen and symbolised the father’s emotional role. Windsor Chair, 1780-1800, V & A Image Collection, W.156-1921.

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Gender and material culture in the home in the nineteenth-century West
14As we have seen, material culture offers a means of thinking about the construction of gendered ideas at different levels in society – and of considering how pervasive understandings of gender were in everyday life. We can obviously apply these ideas individually to our various national histories – but what I want to consider here is how useful the study of material culture may be to thinking about how gender moved across or perhaps operated outside national boundaries. This allows us to take a broader view of how gender itself operates, and just how similar or different gendered identities and behaviors were across the West. Looking at the material world, or ‘material life’ as Fernand Braudel puts it, has long allowed historians to take a wide view of long-term change across a broad geographical terrain.41 In recent years, the growth of global histories that move beyond national boundaries has posed new challenges to historians.42 Looking at material culture offers historians of gender a means of responding to this as it allows a consideration of how gender is constructed differently across national cultures, allowing us to ask, how totalizing is gender? Taking the example of nineteenth-century middle-class homes,43 I am now going to briefly consider how far we can identify a shared domestic material culture in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, and what the implications of this are for our understandings of gender. The following discussion compares gender in British homes to other Western European countries, drawing on recent scholarship on these places.
15Getting a sense of similarity and difference in domestic culture across Western Europe in the nineteenth century is not an easy task, as little comparative work has been done on this subject.44 We have Michelle Perrot’s magisterial history of private life, and more recent studies of the family in Europe that have included a material element.45 There are also some cultural histories of Europe.46 But these broad studies do not always drill down to the basic details of domestic life, and are not necessarily focused on home material culture and issues of gender. It is worth noting that there are some basic problems with the idea of a shared domestic material culture of gender across the West. Historically, there were major differences in household formation across Europe and between class and occupational groups, creating different domestic dynamics. Households were not always formed at the same point in the lifecycle and might be composed differently.47 There was also a great variety in the material forms of the built environment, if we take peasant housing, for example, as Martine Segalen shows us, there were many different forms of house across nineteenth-century Europe.48
16That said, in many ways, studying material culture is a useful way of thinking about transnational history, as it shows us how objects, and the people and ideas they were associated with, moved across national boundaries. As Giorgio Riello’s work on the early modern period has shown, looking at how goods were traded across the globe reveals connections and exchanges between past societies.49 Worldwide material exchanges intensified in the nineteenth century and increasingly, it was possible to buy similar or the same goods across the West. New methods of production led to larger numbers of goods being produced at a lower cost.50 So where some historians do think that we may be able to see a shared domestic culture emerging is in the homes of the bourgeoisie or middle classes.51 In addition to the increased availability of standardised goods, shared technological developments and changing scientific ideas in relation to the home had a transnational circulation.52 The middle classes now had the opportunity to buy the same things, but did they use them to mark out space in their homes in the same way? Can we see a shared trend in the creation of gendered spaces and the use of gendered material cultures in the home?
17First, let’s look at the relationship between responsibility for home decoration and the power dynamic in married couples. Across the Western bourgeoisie, there was a basic shared idea that women were responsible for the maintenance of home, in both a moral and a material sense. It is usually argued that this bourgeois gendered division of labour was linked to the emergence of industrial, urban societies in which home and work became increasingly separate, and domestic space a private world maintained by women as a sanctuary from the dirt and chaos outside.53 In the British case, there has been a vociferous debate on how far home and work actually became separate, and to what extent women’s lives were adversely affected by these developments.54 It is also clear that we cannot apply this idea to the whole of Europe uniformly. While England industrialized fastest and first, elsewhere the process gathered speed later on – in Germany urbanisation picked up in the decades after unification and in France, while Paris saw much growth, the rural population remained stable for much of the nineteenth century.55 Sweden, meanwhile, saw these changes in the last decades of the century.56 Yet despite the different levels and rates of urbanization there was a growth, amongst Europeans of the middling sort, in a cultural ideal of the home, which emphasized women’s roles. English culture celebrated the “Angel in the House”, the French spoke of the “Femme de Foyer”, and the Spanish of the “Angel del Hogar”.57
18As we have seen in the British example, how far women were responsible for home decoration is a contested issue and one that has often been related to their level of social power. As noted, Deborah Cohen has argued that men dominated decorative choice until the later decades of the century when a new breed of female professional decorators rebranded the home decoration as a female concern. So there was a decisive shift in the representation of gendered roles in British culture. However, across an international spectrum we can see that these roles were framed and imagined in very different ways. If we look at work on France – a new trajectory emerges. Lisa Tiersten argues that it was in the 1860s that the “femme de goût” superseded the male professional decorator in popular culture, remaining at the heart of consumer debates until the end of the century.58 For Tiersten, however, while women’s roles as decorators in chief allowed them agency as consumers and a certain degree of power, they were never granted the same artistic authority as male ateliers.59 In both cases the female domestic role is used to contain and circumscribe female power, but with different consequences for agency according to the national political context. As Enrica Asquer has recently pointed out, if we take a European perspective on the construction of women’s roles in relation to the public and so-called private sphere, we often see that they were framed differently according to national political context.60 So at the level of cultural representation at least, women’s roles in the home were imagined in subtly different ways across the continent, although in each case their domestic role shaped a framing of their abilities that saw women as less able than men.
19One of the most important ways that the home operates as a gendered system is through the use of space – nineteenth-century middle-class homes were often elaborately organized, with particular spaces associated with each sex. Not only is space a powerful means of shaping gendered identities, but it also allows us to consider the operation of gendered ideas in representation and everyday practice. In Britain there was an increasing identification of different spaces with men and women, a change that is associated with a growing emphasis on privacy and segregation within middle-class homes, in response to the apparent confusion of the industrial world outside. Taking a pan-European view, what we do see is that at a broad and basic level, it became more important to middle-class families in the nineteenth century to associate rooms with gender. In Britain, the ideal for elite homes was that there should be gendered suites of rooms – the dining room, study and billiard room were male spaces and the drawing room, morning room and boudoir were for women.61 Studies of France, Spain and Italy also show that nineteenth-century bourgeois families increasingly divided their homes along gendered lines.62 Interestingly however, there are differences in the way that historians interpret the consequences of sexual segregation. There has been an assumption that the gendering of space was usually an expression of female subordination.63 But if we look at the British example, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, female advice writers increasingly pushed for a separate space for the lady of the house, a morning room in which she could find peace for household management and even her own creative projects.64
20Turning to the question of how gendered spaces were actually realized and used, it is possible to see even more variation. There were differences in building type and plan between Britain and continental Europe, namely the absence of apartment blocks in city centres and the predominance of the terraced house.65 The way in which rooms were planned, and connected, influenced their use in everyday practice. While English billiard rooms were designated as separate masculine spaces, according to Mark Girouard the French “salle de billiard” was not seen as a male space and in French chateaux it usually opened out from the salon.66 In the German bourgeois home, it was common to find a separate music room, where both sexes came together to listen and to experience what was thought of by contemporaries as a uniquely German sensibility.67 In general, the French seem to have been less anxious to maintain spatial boundaries in the home, children being allowed a much freer rein than their English counterparts who were confined to nursery spaces.68 It is also doubtful that most families had the economic and spatial resources to realize sharp gendered divides in their homes. My own analysis of inventories and sale catalogues in Britain shows that in average middle class homes it was difficult to find enough space to implement gendered divisions.69 The study of the everyday use of space is still in its infancy, but this has the potential to reveal more about the construction of gendered identities in the home – and how these differed according to different national domestic practices.
21Across different nations and regions in middle-class homes in the nineteenth century, there was also a new, shared association of certain styles of decoration with certain rooms, linked to ideas of gendered identity. In Britain, middle-class identity was often conveyed through the possession of a drawing room and a dining room, the former usually being decorated in what was considered a light, feminine style and the latter in a heavy masculine one.70 Similar ideas can be seen across Western Europe. Masculine spaces were often decorated in national styles.71 Late nineteenth-century French homes adopted the Ancien Regime style, but as Leora Auslander has shown, this was gendered – the Renaissance as masculine and the late eighteenth century as feminine.72 While these European middle-class households appear to be acting in the same way, the same goods and furnishings would have had subtly different meanings in different national contexts. The English upper classes attempted to decorate in the French style, selecting it for drawing rooms and bedrooms and expressing an English idea of the femininity of the French that would not have been associated with these goods in their home country (fig. 3).73
Fig. 3a – Furnishings for a dining room from H. J. Jennings, Our homes, and how to beautify them (1902).

Fig. 3b – Furnishings for a drawing room, from H. J. Jennings, Our homes, and how to beautify them (1902).

22Despite the existence, across Europe, of particular domestic material cultures that were linked with ideas of masculinity and femininity, we need to be aware of the limits of these associations and the complex meanings of gendered styles in everyday life. Leora Auslander shows this in her analysis of a photograph album produced by a bourgeois German Jewish family around 1910. In this house the dining room was furnished heavily in an almost caricatured version of traditional Bohemian style.74 This dining room makes a strong gendered statement about respectability, but in a later photograph in the album the meaning of the room is transformed by the display of important ritual objects.75 Gendered meaning is present, but it is a small part of the strong identity communicated by the material assemblage in this room.
23It is also worth thinking about what happened to gendered styles and objects in spaces beyond the home.76 In my work on student rooms in late nineteenth-century Britain I have looked closely at photographs to see if male and female students replicated the gendered styles of the home in their own rooms. The example shown here, of rooms belonging to a male and female student, show us how both sexes appear to be comfortable to decorate their rooms with objects associated with the opposite sex. The female student has a large crocodile skin, a classic masculine token of the hunt, where as the male student seems to have been happy with many ornaments and floral decorations. Images like this remind us of the fluidity with which supposedly gendered objects could be used in everyday life, and the agency of contemporary women and men when they used them to create their own meanings (fig. 4).
Concluding points
24In conclusion, this essay has shown that the material world is a particularly useful means of seeing how ideas of gender in culture operate on different levels – how they are imagined and circulated in contemporary texts as well as how they are used within the practices of everyday life. In recent decades, historians of gender have become increasingly conscious of the explanatory power of the material world and are using it as a main focus for their analyses. Three particular themes have emerged in recent works on British history – the question of who had material control of domestic possessions, the way in which objects and spaces construct and create gendered identities, and how the material world can help us understand family relationships and emotional life. There is certainly room for more work here – it is notable that recent efforts have focused on masculine identities and there is a strong need for more investigation of femininity, and indeed a relational approach that considers how the material world constructed these together. Above all, increased attention to how goods were actually used in everyday life can take us towards a more complex history of gender that acknowledges its limitations and the fluidity with which contemporaries deployed gendered ideas.
Fig. 4a – A room belonging to a female student in the late nineteenth century. Miss Owen’s Room, RHC PH/116/31, Archives, Royal Holloway, University of London.

25Perhaps, however, the most exciting new direction such work could take is the use of the material world to think about how gender operated on a transnational basis. Gender in combination with material culture provides a useful approach to understanding transnational histories of home. Taking the two together provides a critical tool for the analysis of society and culture, avoiding simple contrasts between nations and developing, instead, a way of cross-examining the relationships between people, things and gendered power structures. There were marked similarities in the way that industrialised, urbanized middle class groups saw the relationship between women and home and in their ideas about how space should be gendered. Broadly speaking there was a shared emphasis on dividing rooms between the sexes, and decorating them in associated styles. These characteristics were shared between different nations, and might be viewed as transnational in nature. Having said that, there were important but subtle differences in the way that gendered ideas of nation and public as well as privacy and womanhood were framed. Gendered spaces and styles too, still need to be seen in a national context, as they were a part of different forms of building, planning and behaviour that changed the way that they were used. The transnational infusion of domestic material practices with gendered ideals reveals the strength and importance of gender in middle-class cultures across Europe. Yet the national distinctiveness of domestic practices suggests that it remains important to see them in a comparative perspective, if we wish to acquire a deep understanding of the construction of ideas of gender and their implementation in everyday social life.
Fig. 4b – A room belonging to a male student in the late nineteenth century. E6 New Court, Arch IX, St John’s College Library, Cambridge. By Permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 I am grateful to Leonie Hannan for her critical comments on this essay, and to my mother, Jenny Hamlett, for looking after my eighteen-month old daughter while I wrote it.
2 Duby – Perrot 1992-3.
3 While comparative history, which consists of writing about two or more historical phenomena from a comparative perspective (often about different nations or regions) has been an important part of historical writing for some time, there has recently been a move towards studying transnational history. This includes a consideration of how people, ideas and practices move across and beyond national boundaries. For a discussion of these developments see Kocka – Haupt 2009. For discussion of the role of people and communities in sustaining transnationalism see Clavin 2005.
4 Vicinus 1972. The first original works in the field were carried out earlier in the twentieth century by Clark 1919 and Pinchbeck 1930.
5 Scott 1986.
6 Davidoff – Hall 2002. For critique see Vickery 1993.
7 Roper – Tosh 1991; Harvey – Shepard 2005.
8 For discussion see Hamlett – Wiggins 2009.
9 Roper 2005; Tosh 2011.
10 See Delap 2011 and Harvey 2012.
11 Hicks – Beaudry 2010.
12 See the Winterthur Portfolio and Smart Martin – Ritchie Garrison 1997.
13 Vickery 1995.
14 Hamlett 2009.
15 Joyce 2003; Joyce – Bennett 2010. For criticism of this approach see Trentmann 2009.
16 Trentmann 2009, p. 287-288.
17 Harvey 2009; Gerritsen – Riello 2014, Grieg – Hamlett – Hannan 2016; Hannan – Longair 2017.
18 Kirkham 1996.
19 Sparke 1995.
20 Key studies on the history of consumption include McKendrick – Brewer 1982 and Bermingham – Brewer 1995. The new focus on the interior emerged in the Centre’s flagship publication Aynsley – Grant 2006. Vickery, who co-directed the Centre, followed this up this theme in her later work, producing a major study of the eighteenth century home, which paid considerable attention to issues of gender and domestic material culture in lived experience. Vickery 2009.
21 Styles – Vickery 2006.
22 Daly Goggin – Fowkes Tobin 2009.
23 Finn 1996.
24 Ross 1993.
25 Vickery 2006.
26 Cohen 2006.
27 Hamlett 2010.
28 Kowaleski-Wallace 1997.
29 Vickery 1995.
30 Harvey 2015; Harvey 2008; Harvey 2016.
31 Vincent 2016; Clark 2016; Houlbrook 2016.
32 Houlbrook 2016.
33 Tosh 1999; Rogers – Lynn Broughton 2007; Olsen 2014; King 2015; Strange 2015.
34 See Olsen 2014.
35 Grieg – Hamlett – Hannan 2016.
36 Doolittle 2011.
37 Strange 2015, p. 85-93.
38 Holmes 2017.
39 Strange 2015, p. 92-96.
40 Hamlett 2010.
41 Braudel 1981.
42 See Riello 2013.
43 Historians of Britain tend to use the term ‘middle class’ whereas scholars writing about Europe are more likely to use the word ‘bourgeois’ to describe the middling sort. See Kocka – Mitchell 1993, p. ix-xi. This essay uses ‘middle class’ as in the English usage this includes a wider social range than ‘bourgeois’.
44 My own survey is limited to work published in English.
45 Perrot 1990; Segalen 2002.
46 Salmi 2008; Oldenziel – Hård 2013.
47 Laslett 1983.
48 Segalen 2002.
49 Gerritsen – Riello 2015.
50 Benson 1994.
51 Rich 2011, p. 11; Cruz 2011, p. 5-6; Salmi 2008, p. 76.
52 Neiswander 2008, p. 64-67; Cruz 2011, p. 66; Oldenziel - Hård 2013, p. 65.
53 Donald 1999, p. 102-120.
54 Davidoff – Hall 2002; Vickery 1993; Gordon – Nair 2003.
55 Hamerow 1983.
56 Löfgren 2003.
57 For a critique of the term see Jeanne Peterson 1984. For a discussion of the “Angel del Hogar” see Nash 1999, p. 8.
58 Tiersten 2001, p. 152-4.
59 Tiersten 2001, p. 178-182.
60 Asquer 2012.
61 Girouard 1978.
62 Auslander 1996, p. 280-281, Cruz 2011, p. 89, Hallamore Caesar 2004, p. 105.
63 See for example, Spain 1992, p. xiv and Cruz 2011, p. 89.
64 Hamlett 2009.
65 Muthesius 1982, p. 3.
66 Girouard 2000, p. 311.
67 Umbach 2007.
68 Robertson 1991, p. 424.
69 Hamlett 2009.
70 Kinchin 1996; Hamlett 2009.
71 Auslander 2015, p. 311.
72 Auslander 2015, p. 286.
73 Muthesius 2007 (1904), p. 191.
74 Auslander 2015, p. 311-312.
75 Auslander 2015, p. 313.
76 Hamlett 2015.
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