Domestic spaces

Abstract

Domestic space in the singular has become a generic term for the private space of the house, the household, or the home as opposed to the public space of the street or the urban space of the city as a whole. Yet, the domestic space concept has only a short scholarly history, especially in its opposition to public space. In the late 1970s the duality of domestic versus public space was criticized by feminist scholars for the patriarchal dominance of the public, male domain of the street over the secluded female domain of the house. This gendered opposition also paralleled an important economic schism in industrial, or so-called capitalist, societies of the unpaid domestic labor of women versus the wage labor of male breadwinners performed outside the domestic domain. The terminology of domestic spaces in the plural is even more recent and implicitly criticizes the bipolarity of the domestic/public opposition. As such, the plural acknowledges not only the internal zoning of domestic space according to usage, age, and gender, but also a more gradual transition of public and private spaces in modern domestic architecture.