‘As housewives we are worms’: Women, modernity and the home question

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of a feminist understanding of the concept of home. It begins with an analysis of the way in which a number of feminist scholars utilize a concept of home that retains the gendered dichotomies characteristic of modernism. The writings of feminists as diverse as Betty Friedan and Teresa de Lauretis are examined to indicate the pervasiveness of this tendency. The paper then goes on to argue that an historical investigation of women's experience of modernity provides a way of rethinking the concept of home and its place in the modern world. It discusses the different meanings given to one particular image of the home in Australia in the first decade after the Second World War. This material demonstrates the historical and contested nature of our understandings of both home and modernity. But more importantly, it points to an understanding among women, and in some of the discourses through which they were addressed in the popular press at this time, of home as an active creating of place. As such, this space was not seen as opposed to or a place to retreat from the modern world. On the contrary, it represented a different vision of what modernity should be about. A rethinking of home and its relationship to modernity is necessary, it is suggested, if feminism is to destabilize those very oppositions that have been central to how womanhood has been defined in Western cultural traditions.