Eve's Eaves: Fluctuating Architectural Identities of New Republic Women

The final result of our research projects for Dr. Logan's class will involve a collaborative conference in which we each present and discuss our papers. In keeping with the spirit of academic conference, here is my paper proposal.

Feminist scholars recognize separate social spheres between early American men and women, noting male domination of public space and female dominion over private, domestic space. Susan Stabile and Lynn Walker apply this concept to the gendered nature of domestic architecture with two resounding dualities, identifying exterior design as male and interior decor as female, and identifying public space within the home as male and private space as female. Both authors note such parallels as the physical anatomy of the genders aligning with this exterior/interior metaphor, as well as the hierarchical implications of the location of women's rooms proximity to the rear of the house. However, little discussion has focused on the transient state of these architectural paradigms during the New Republic era and the implications this had for women's fluctuating position in society. Fisk Kimball's Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic reveals significant transformation in the arrangement of gendered domestic architecture in a period when the new nation sought to redefine identity collectively and in family units. My paper will examine the period between Colonialism and the Victorian Age when women's roles, while maintaining domestic obligation, increasingly became a merging of public and private responsibility in the New Republic citizenry and the reflection of these changes in the design and arrangement of the home, as well as the attitudes and beliefs that subverted further movement toward equality for women, evident in the legal practices and religious thinking specific to domestic architecture of the time.

Using work by Stabile, Walker, and Kimball, I will expose contrasts and similarities between domestic architectural designs of the New Republic and those more clearly delineated by gender associations. I will show that the focus for home designs shifted from a tension between gendered arrangement to the interplay between the religious and the political implications of space, upending the traditional gendered hierarchy of public and private rooms. The paper will highlight parallels between this new spatial dynamic and the new public presence of an increasingly literate and political female population, eventually resulting in the paradigm of the Republican Mother. A discussion of the limits of this paradigm in terms of John Stanford’s 1792 sermon on domestic architecture in which he identifies women’s introduction of sin as the origin of the art of architecture and in terms of the widow’s dower, a legal practice which fixed a woman’s marginal identity after the death of her husband, will clarify the cultural attitudes that restricted further elevation of women’s status as this new role solidified.

Feminist critique of architecture does the important work of reinterpreting how the spaces women inhabit have reinforced their roles, but sometimes fails to recognized pockets of progress toward more equal status. This paper will show that it is necessary to distinguish the material culture of domestic architectural during the New Republic from architecture with more rigidly gendered space in the eras that bookend it.