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Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity.

Article Excerpt
Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford and New York: Berg 2004)

IN WESTERN THOUGHT, modernity has long been associated with masculinity. According to such major writers as Marshall Berman, George Orwell, and even Virginia Woolf, a modern subjectivity is only achieved once one leaves behind one's domestic, feminine safe haven and strikes out into the urban unknown. In this conception of modernity, to be feminine is to be outside modernity. It is to be irrational, overly-nurturing, and conformist.

It is now time, suggests Judy Giles in The Parlour and the Suburb, to challenge modernity's masculinity. Instead of contending--as do some recent theorists--that we must move beyond the male-centric modern paradigm toward a more multi-gendered postmodernity, Giles argues that we must look at how women experienced modernization. Between 1900 and 1960 white middle- and working-class women in Britain formed modern subjectivities, just as much as did their male counterparts. Yet because many of these women experienced modernization in the domestic sphere rather than in the world of waged labour, their transformation has been overlooked.

Arguing that intellectuals' disdain for the suburbs is predicated on a masculine desire to escape what is perceived as cloying domestic femininity, Giles states that scholars must probe the realities behind the stereotypes of suburbia. Whereas such thinkers as Stephen Taylor and George Orwell portrayed suburban women as "slovenly" and "lump[s] of pudding," respectively,...