Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life
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IDEAL HOMES? Until now, the ‘home’ as a space within which domestic lives are lived out has been largely ignored by sociologists. Yet the ‘home’ as idea, place and object consumes a large proportion of individuals’ incomes, and occupies their dreams and their leisure time while the absence of a physical home presents a major threat to both society and the homeless themselves. This edited collection provides for the first time an analysis of the space of the ‘home’ and the experiences of home life by writers from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, criminology, psychology, social policy and anthropology. It covers a range of subjects, including gender roles, different generations’ relationships to home, the changing nature of the family, transition, risk and alternative visions of home. Ideal Homes? provides a fascinating analysis which reveals how both popular images and experiences of home life can produce vital clues as to how society’s members produce and respond to social change. Tony Chapman is Head of Sociology at the University of Teesside. Jenny Hockey is Senior Lecturer in the School of Comparative and Applied Social Sciences, University of Hull. IDEAL HOMES? Social change and domestic life Edited by Tony Chapman and Jenny Hockey London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 1999 Selection and editorial matter Tony Chapman and Jenny Hockey; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ideal homes?: social change and domestic life/edited by Tony Chapman and Jenny Hockey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Home—Great Britain. 2. Dwellings—Great Britain. 3. Housing— Great Britain. 4. Family—Great Britain. I. Chapman, Tony, 1953– II. Hockey, Jennifer Lorna. HQ613.I34 1999 304.2′3′0941–dc21 98–54119 CIP ISBN 0-203-02913-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-21950-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-17121-0 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-17122-9 (pbk) CONTENTS List of illustrations vii Notes on contributors viii Preface xi 1 The ideal home as it is imagined and as it is lived 1 TONY CHAPMAN AND JENNY HOCKEY PART I Changing images of the ideal home 15 2 Privacy, security and respectability: the ideal Victorian home 17 MIKE HEPWORTH 3 The Modern house in England: an architecture of exclusion 30 TIM BRINDLEY 4 Stage sets for ideal lives: images of home in contemporary show homes 44 TONY CHAPMAN PART II Betwixt and between: homes in transition 59 5 ‘The more we are together’: domestic space, gender and privacy 61 RUTH MADIGAN AND MOIRA MUNRO 6 Travelling makes a home: mobility and identity among West Indians 73 KAREN FOG OLWIG v CONTENTS 7 A home from home: students’ transitional experience of home 84 LIZ KENYON 8 Fitting a quart into a pint pot: making space for older people in sheltered housing 96 EILEEN FAIRHURST 9 The ideal of home: domesticating the institutional space of old age and death 108 JENNY HOCKEY PART III Anxieties and risks: homes in danger 119 10 A haven in a heartless world? Women and domestic violence 121 LAURA GOLDSACK 11 Spoiled home identities: the experience of burglary 133 TONY CHAPMAN 12 Houses of Doom 147 JENNY HOCKEY PART IV Changing perceptions of home 161 13 ‘You’ve got him well trained’: The negotiation of roles in the domestic sphere 163 TONY CHAPMAN 14 The meaning of gardens in an age of risk 181 MARK BHATTI 15 Daring to be different? Choosing an alternative to the ideal home 194 TONY CHAPMAN, JENNY HOCKEY AND MARTIN WOOD Bibliography 210 Index 228 vi ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 5.1 Combined living/dining room design 1980s 64 7.1 The elements of home 87 Tables 4.1 Size of new houses completed in England 1985–1995 46 4.2 Percentage of households with consumer durable products in Britain 1972–1996 47 4.3 Projections on household types 1971–2016 58 11.1 Crimes against property in the UK 1981 and 1995 138 11.2 Fear of property crime in Britain 1996 138 11.3 Relative risk of burglary in England and Wales 1994 145 13.1 Hours spent on household tasks 1996 168 13.2 Domestic work of young people 1996 180 14.1 Garden ownership trends 1985–1996 189 vii CONTRIBUTORS Mark Bhatti is senior lecturer in housing in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton. He has written widely on housing and environmental issues and is currently working on a study of gardening and lay ecological knowledge using the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. Tim Brindley is principal lecturer in the Department of Architecture at De Montfort University. He is a sociologist who specialises in architecture and the built environment, and he convenes the study group of the British Sociological Association in this field. His other publications are on aspects of housing and urban planning. Tony Chapman has taught at the University of Teesside since 1990 across a range of issues including the sociology of consumption, domestic architecture, gender, work and home life, urbanism and sociological theory. He has published widely on women’s and men’s social mobility, gender and graduate employment, family life and careers; and is currently completing a new book on men and domestic life. He is author of Men’s Work, Women’s Work (Information Education, 1987). Eileen Fairhurst is senior lecturer in the Department of Health Care Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. In addition to continuing research on home among older people, she is studying the interface between lay and professional boundaries in health care. Laura Goldsack is senior lecturer in criminology in the School of Social Science at the University of Teesside. She has undertaken a number of research projects on domestic violence in the North East of England, and is currently writing the final report (with Louise Ridley) on the Zero Tolerance campaign in Middlesbrough. Mike Hepworth is reader in sociology at the University of Aberdeen. His interests include the sociology of deviance and the sociology of ageing. His current research includes a study of the role of visual and verbal images in constructing ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’. viii CONTRIBUTORS Jenny Hockey is an anthropologist who teaches health and gender studies at the University of Hull. Her principal research interests are in the anthropology of death, dying and bereavement; she has published widely on this topic, including Experiences of Death: An Anthropological Account (Edinburgh University Press, 1990), Death, Gender and Ethnicity (Routledge 1997, with David Field and Neil Small) and Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity (Routledge, 1999, with Elizabeth Hallam and Glennys Howarth). Liz Kenyon is a research fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Southampton. She was awarded her doctorate in sociology from the University of Lancaster in 1998 and is currently working on an ESRC- funded project on young adults’ experiences of living in non-familiar shared households. Ruth Madigan is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow, where she teaches research methods and urban sociology. Her research interests including housing, domestic architecture and the meaning of home, owner occupation, gender and family. She is currently developing an interest in accessible housing design. Moira Munro has been professor in the School of Planning and Housing at Heriot Watt University/Edinburgh College of Art since 1995. Her research interests are around issues of housing quality and the use of internal space, access to owner occupation and the behaviour of owners and housing finance. She is editor of Housing Studies. Karen Fog Olwig is senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and has done fieldwork in the American Virgin Islands and among people from Nevis, the former British West Indies, living in the USA, Europe and the Caribbean. She is currently doing life-story interviews in three global family networks of Caribbean origin. Martin Wood is assistant director of the Northern Consortium of Housing Associations. At the consortium he has directed and a wide range of projects on social housing. He is currently working on a community study of St Hilda’s in Middlesbrough, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. ix PREFACE Under headings such as social class, work, family and gender, sociology has examined the lives of society’s members. When it comes to the homes within which their domestic lives are lived out, the discipline has remained somewhat silent. It is a domain which has been left largely to housing policy, planning, architecture and, to a limited extent, social anthropology. At best, the home appears as a bit-part player within weightier discussions, a site where more ‘central’ social issues can be addressed. Yet ‘home’ as idea, place and object consumes a significant proportion of individuals’ incomes, preoccupies their day-dreams and their leisure time, and, in its absence, constitutes a major threat both for governments and homeless people themselves. Though we are dealing with the material objects and spaces which most of us inhabit on a day-to-day basis, it is home-based desires, imaginings and aspirations which we prioritise as key aspects of a wider cultural and social nexus.