Homes and Homecomings: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return

Feminist historians have long analysed the constructions and meanings of home, whether as domestic space or the place of belonging and longing. This book brings together these dimensions, and in doing so, provides inspiring new historical perspectives on the politics of homes and homecomings.

Original research from a group of international scholars explores the gendered dynamics of both the home and movement away from home. This is explored within the realms of the literal and ideological construction of many homes – twentieth–century homes in capitalist and socialist societies, or the corporate domesticity of shipboard homes. Contributions also examine the history of masculinity and domesticity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the intersection of race, gender and class in policies of repatriation.

Using innovative methodological and theoretical approaches, Homes and Homecomings provides case studies from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, as well as discussing movements across the globe. The book contains original illustrations, and provides an important reference for historians and scholars across a broad range of disciplines.

Introduction: Gendering Histories of Homes and Homecomings (K. H. Adler).

1. Communist Comfort: Socialist Modernism and the Making of Cosy Homes in the Khrushchev Era (Susan E. Reid).

2. Corporate Domesticity and Idealised Masculinity: Royal Naval Officers and their Shipboard Homes, 1918 39 (Quintin Colville).

3. Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth–Century Britain (Karen Harvey).

4. ′Who Should Be the Author of a Dwelling?′ Architects versus Housewives in 1950s France (Nicole Rudolph).

5. Ideal Homes and the Gender Politics of Consumerism in Postcolonial Ghana, 1960 70 (Bianca Murillo).

6. ′The Dining Room Should Be the Man′s Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman′s′: Gender and Middle–Class Domestic Space in England, 1850 1910 (Jane Hamlett).

7. ′There Is Graite Odds between A Mans being At Home And A Broad′: Deborah Read Franklin and the Eighteenth–Century Home (Vivian Bruce Conger).

8. Sexual Politics and Socialist Housing: Building Homes in Revolutionary Cuba (Carrie Hamilton).

9. ′The White Wife Problem′: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa (Carina E. Ray).

10. From Husbands and Housewives to Suckers and Whores: Marital–Political Anxieties in the ′House of Egypt′, 1919 48 (Lisa Pollard).

11. Double Displacement: Western Women′s Return Home from Japanese Internment in the Second World War (Christina Twomey).

Notes on Contributors.

Index.

K. H. Adler lectures in history at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Jews and Gender in Liberation France (2003), and the editor of Gender & History. She is currently working on a book about post–war homecomings in twentieth–century France.

Carrie Hamilton lectures in History at Roehampton University, London, where she is also Director of the Centre for Research in Sex, Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Women and ETA: The Gender Politics of Radical Basque Nationalism (2007), and is currently writing a book on sexuality and the Cuban Revolution.

This book is of value to students and scholars in social sciences and the humanities interested in gendered perspectives on home and domestic life.   (International Journal of Housing Policy, 21 June 2013)