Eve’s Eaves: Domestic Architecture in the New Republic, 1790-1840
On November 29, 1792, New York City’s Society of House Carpenters celebrated their first anniversary as a labor union. Reverend John Stanford commemorated the event with his sermon “Sacred Architecture; or the Design of Jehovah in Building the Temple of Solomon,” which draws parallels between the House Carpenters’ trade and the divine work of building a house for God. Through these parallels Stanford elevates home building to a sacred analogy for the human body as a dwelling space for God (16, 31). He introduces his sermon by naming architecture the most “useful and ornamental” of the mechanical arts (5). In his next breath, however, Stanford pronounces architecture “absolutely necessary” because of “the introduction of sin,” which “pierced and impregnated the human breast,” making the body vulnerable to weather, pollution, and all of heaven’s frightful “artillery” (5).
Stanford’s audience perched on a fulcrum between traditional mores and restless anticipation, between colonial America and the toddler years of the new republic. Their particular place in history would have informed their understanding of Stanford’s words to include unstated beliefs about women, sexuality, the growing division of public and private life, and their own civic and domestic responsibilities. The northern city homes of the new republic reflected the period’s upheaval of gender roles and the collective search for national identity. As these roles crystalized, “a split between the public and private spheres came increasingly to shape the lives of women and men, [and] those aspects of culture associated with the private became the domain of women” (Culley, 16). Domestic architecture provides a fluid material archive of this process of redefining women’s roles. Changes in home design mirror the swell of opportunity that could have resulted in greater equality as well as the attitudes and powers that ultimately prevented equal standing with men and propelled society toward Victorian sensibilities.
The feminized language Stanford uses to describe original sin when it “pierced and impregnated the human breast” alludes to Eve’s, and, by common extrapolation, to all women’s role in the fall of humanity. According to Stanford’s Baptist background, the female sex was responsible for bringing sin into the world. When man followed woman in disobeying God, he was cursed with toil (Gen. 3:17-19). Therefore, after a brief moment of praise for the art of domestic architecture, Stanford makes it his first order of business to establish that women are specifically responsible for the necessity of shelter and for the hard work that brought the Society of House Carpenters together. In spite of the woman’s role in affecting this burden on humanity, middle and upper class women rarely had any voice or ownership in the design and construction of their homes. The Society of House Carpenters, and later the Journeymen House Carpenters’ Union, were comprised of husbands and fathers (Greenberg, 1), not wives and mothers. Most building contracts occurred between the builder and the man of the house, only rarely falling to the authority of women. Thus, in most cases, men exercised absolute power over decisions about the spaces in which women were to keep themselves.
The concept of carnal sin linked women and architecture in more physical ways as well. Observers of early American architecture note that while the exterior of the house stood to represent the public, masculine face of the family, the interior of the house became associated with the private, feminine aspect of domesticity. This exterior/interior dynamic reflected not only social norms but also the reproductive anatomy of the sexes. Entering the house, or particular rooms of the house, becomes, by analogy, entering the woman of the house herself.
In Memory’s Daughters, Susan Stabile writes of the pervasiveness of these ideas among English architects and builders who held a small but strong influence over the domestic architecture of the northern colonies from 1703 into the early years of the new nation (25-30). Lynne Walker’s article “Home Making: An Architectural Perspective” discusses the more pervasive use of the masculine/feminine exterior/interior binaries that took hold during the American Victorian era, beginning in 1837 (824-827). Both of these works examine the architecture of upper class homes through a feminist lens, finding that the physical arrangement of the home is a clear map for the roles of women. However, very little work has been done on domestic architecture from a material culture or gender studies perspective during the new republic from 1790-1840.
In 1922 Professor Fiske Kimball published lectures he had given two years earlier in an architectural course at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic Kimball supplements his lectures with many extant primary source materials of floor plans, elevations, and photographs that survived these periods. Kimball’s purpose, though, is to record early American architectural history, not to reinterpret this history in terms of human-to-material relationships. Kimball’s compilation of architectural lectures includes many useful examples of wealthy New England home designs and a discussion of the philosophies that drove the changing landscape of the home. Kimball examines the developing concern with the tension between the spiritual and the civic in home design (145). From a gender studies standpoint, Kimball’s discussion offers important evidence that architects of the new republic often made gendered design secondary to the concept of citizenry.
Jack Larkin’s The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840 offers the most comprehensive look at the material culture of homes in this period. This work, however, does not focus heavily on gender issues. While Larkin does not provide a feminist perspective, he does offer statistical information about homeowners, home design, and domestic material expectations of the new republic. Because of his broad gaze, Larkin is able to include information about the homes of the very poor, who existed in far greater number than those who could afford the kinds of homes that Stabile and Walker assess in their feminist works. His examination of the relationship between families and their homes across all economic strata provides clues as to why many of the gendered attitudes toward the home did not take root as quickly in the new nation as one might assume from the feminist works. Larkin simultaneously justifies the close study of the homes of wealthy New Englanders because of their influence over attitudes toward domestic architecture across the republic, however slowly it may have travelled (130-131).
Because of the paucity of material that synthesizes domestic architecture of the new republic with a feminist perspective, it is necessary to take a bricolage approach to this study. In other words, we must gather from these and other disparate sources to assemble a clear view of domestic architecture in the new republic and how it reflected and reinforced the fluctuating roles of women at that time. A linear approach through time, from Stabile’s work to Walker’s, with interpretations of Larkin and Kimball to bridge the gap, will provide continuity to the feminist material study already existing. A retrospective review of religious and legal paradigms that shaped domestic architectural design and policy will cast light on why women in the end were subjected to Victorian ideals of modesty and submission after being poised to march toward equality on so many fronts.
In Memory’s Daughters, Susan Stabile concentrates on the loss of the childhood home of Deborah Norris Logan, built in 1755 in the Georgian style. Stabile quotes London builder Richard Neve who wrote in 1703, “Pass a running Examination over the whole Edifice, according to the Properties of a well shapen Man; as whether the Walls stand upright, upon a good Foundation; whether the Fabric be of a comely Stature” (26). The Georgian style houses that rose up in England at this time and later in the colonies made strong examples of this proportioned male exterior. The two-story plan involved a centered front door flanked by symmetrical windows. This gave way to an entry hall with a front room and back room on each side and a staircase in the middle, leading to an equivalent layout upstairs (Larkin, 117). According to the science of the European Enlightenment, Stabile observes, that domestic architects saw “interior spaces as expressly feminine” because “a woman’s body was considered naturally weak and her manner passive,” so “she was conveniently confined within the house” (27, 241).
The Georgian, or Federal, as it came to be known in the early republic, style of building perfectly exemplifies the division of masculine public spheres and feminine private spheres. However, those who could afford this British style of home were rare in colonial times and the early years of the nation. Early settlers of the New World often made their first dwellings in caves, or one-room buildings dug half into the ground (Earle, 5). These temporary homes gave way to slightly larger one- or two-room log cabins ranging in size from 12’ x 12’ to 20’ x 24’, also meant to be temporary (Larkin, 112-113). Of the 600,000 homeowners counted for the 1798 tax assessment, only about 60,000 had the resources to hire builders like those of the Society of House Carpenters. Only one percent, or 6,000 homeowners in the nation could afford the complete Georgian floor plan that fully embodied gendered division of exterior and interior (Larkin 113). Deborah Norris Logan’s home would have been counted among the one percent of wealthy American households for the assessment, in which the two most expensive houses in the United States were valued at just over $30,000 (Larkin, 111). Logan’s brothers, who exclusively inherited her childhood home, sold the Norris house for $102,000 twenty years later in 1818 (Stabile, 1).
Poorer women and their families, among the ninety percent of Americans according to the 1798 property tax assessment, were usually still living in the one-story rectangular homes of one or two rooms (Larkin, 111-13). If the family had two rooms, they did divide the space for public and private use, but not so strictly as the wealthy. The “hall,” or public front room functioned as a kitchen, work room, sitting room, and sleeping space for guests or overflow of children. The second room, known as the “parlor,” was primarily for sleeping, often accommodating the entire family. In New England, the parlor contained the family’s “best bed” and most prized possessions and doubled as a chamber for entertaining guests on special occasions (Larkin, 122-3). Clearly, the public and private spaces in the common home of the late 1700’s blended male and female roles in ways that wealthy houses did not.
While the Norris home does not represent a wide cross section of households of its time, the Norris’ family’s connections to many figures in the new government made it an influential structure (Stabile, 6-8). Along with John Stanford’s sermon, the Georgian Norris home typifies attitudes toward women and their connection to the home that pervaded colonial cities. The embedding of Old World these ideals of gendered space did play a role in reinforcing the repression of women’s rights and voices, but not before the experimental architects of the new republic – and the advent of a new empowerment of women – made a strong appearance.
From the 1790’s to 1830, lower classes slowly began to take cues for home design from the northern urban upper class, who were seated geographically and financially closest to the young government (Larkin, 119). By this time, a new philosophical concern preoccupied domestic architects. As Kimball states, “The Revolution… brought a far more fundamental change in American domestic architecture than is generally appreciated” (xx). The new nation, allied now more closely with France than with Britain, sought to develop national identity through the revival of Greek and Roman democratic ideas (Kimball, 145). Even Stanford acknowledged the prominence of this new aim when he exclaimed to the House Carpenters “May that period soon arrive, when the Science of Architecture in America shall rise in superior lustre to that of Greece or Rome!” (29). The classical concepts of the rotunda and the temple trumped the earlier priorities of gendered proportions (Kimball, 145). Homes, which were considered microcosms of the republic, followed the Greek Revival trend.
In practice, this meant the introduction of rotunda, or circular and ovular rooms representing equality in government, into the home. The rotunda brought increasing public involvement into the privacy of the home. In Georgian architecture, the front rooms were for public use and had masculine identity while the back rooms included the kitchen, the woman’s work room, and other private feminine spaces. The rotunda might be located at any orientation to the front of the house. In many plans, symmetry still dominated, but round or octagonal halls, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and even bedrooms pervaded homes of the new republic (Kimball, 147-174). A pragmatic placement of rooms followed: if street frontage was on the north, a “back front” plan would reverse the earlier order of gendered rooms and put traditionally female spaces such as the kitchen at the front of the house, further blending the lines between public and private sectors of the family (Kimball, 156).
The ideal of the temple also took hold in domestic architecture of the early 1800’s. New churches and other public buildings were built with the gable-end facing the road, replacing the stalwart masculinity of the Georgian plan (Larkin, 119). Domestic floor plans soon followed suit. This new Greek Revival plan did away with symmetry as well, locating the door to one side of the gable-end. The door opened to a long hall with rooms on one side, doing away completely with the division of front and back rooms. Most or all of the rooms were on the same side of the house. Fittingly, this new equality of structure modeled itself on ancient temples to Athena, the goddess of wisdom (Larkin, 119-20). Houses built on this plan were called “temple front” homes (Larkin, 120).
The rotunda and the temple front influences had a significantly farther reach than that of the Georgian. Between 1798 and 1850, the number of homes in the United States increased from 600,000 to over 3,000,000 (Larkin 106). Commercial production, infrastructure, and communication across distances also increased over these years, bringing the ideals of New England’s domestic architects across more territory than the colonial wealthy could reach. This new nation and its revolutionary domestic structures brought new implications for the roles of women.
As more families accrued disposable income, the roles of women changed as dramatically as the homes they inhabited. Women spent less time generating food and clothing for their households (Larkin, 131). Boarding schools and women’s academies increased by the hundreds (Kelley, 333). Women who did not attend these institutions often received an informal education at home through semi-public readings and circulating literary works, letters, and diaries. Some of these women went on to have careers as teachers and many more profited from their learning by gaining access to more elite society through marriage (Kelley, 333). Women used their egalitarian-shaped homes to host readings, found boarding schools, run boarding houses, participate in political discussion, and engage in a variety of other publicly significant activities. Women joined civic unions. They recorded family and community histories (Kelley, 333-4). Susannah Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, and others wrote some of the first American novels.
In short, the years between 1790 and 1840 offered upper and middle class American women more public, significant positions of importance than they had ever experienced before. The structures of their homes no longer relegated them to the private realm of the man’s domestic possessions. The energy of birthing a nation could have been the turning point that thrust women toward true equality with their male counterparts.
However, old attitudes and legal practices regarding women and the home remained in play. These aspects of domestic architecture took stronger hold than the new freedoms embodied by the houses themselves. While a woman could now be educated to read widely and write rather than be restricted to learning to read only the bible (Culley, ), her highest calling in her new country was to be wife and mother, birthing new citizens. The home, as a microcosm for the nation, must be kept in perfect order, as must her own physical proportions and emotional state (Stabile, 27). These moral attitudes that tied cleanliness to national righteousness affected multitudes of American women from all economic strata (Larkin 131). The time gained from store-bought clothing and goods was largely spent running the household, which became, as in the Georgian years, the picture of a woman’s worth. But now the picture was more widespread.
Legally, little changed regarding inheritance laws for women during the new republic years. Stabile’s Deborah Norris Logan could not inherit her family home, which went to her brothers on the death of her father. She therefore had no stake or say in its sale in 1818, well into the years of the republican woman. Logan, like many other women, could only stand by as strangers took over and, in her case, leveled the house in order to build the Second Bank of the United States in the Greek Revival style. The new emphasis on the public activity of all citizens was little consolation to Logan, who wrote a history of the house to pass on to her son (Stabile, ).
Many women suffered far worse fates over inheritance laws. The widow’s dower was a traditional law that entitled widows to a portion, usually one third, of the home owned by her husband after his death (Herman, 158). The arrangement resulted in often awkward divisions and sharing of rooms with the adult male children of the family, who were full heirs, or with strangers to whom the full heirs might rent out portions of the home (Herman, ) This alone dramatically reduced the material and moral worth of a woman in a culture that identified her value by the orderliness of her home. The temporary state of the inheritance further reflected the legal lack of recognition the democratic nation had for its female citizens. A widow had use of her portion of the house only until she died or remarried, allowing her no means to will the property to those of her choosing (Herman, 158-9). If a husband’s debts outweighed his assets at death, his widow received no dower and became a transient, living with relatives if lucky, or in the cramped tenements that filled the alleys of the cities (Larkin, ), or simply drifting.
These traditional practices ultimately won the battle for women’s identity. By 1940, a few years into the Victorian era, women and their homes stood newly aligned with the private domestic spheres of society. While they had fashioned themselves an education system during the new republic years, they were denied access to formal universities (Culley, ). Although they were acknowledged as important members of the new nation, important members of their patriotic households, their importance in the final analysis lay in birthing new citizens, educating them to be good citizens, and maintaining an orderly household until their husbands, overtaken by death, no longer had use for them. The homes of the new republic mirror the possibility of equality tasted by women of that era, but did not dissolve women’s identity with the home, and in reference to the male members of her household.
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