Mrs Home: the moral and cultural construction of domesticity and respectability between the wars

Abstract

This article uncovers archive material from the Foundations of Sociology archive: the output of the Institute of Sociology (Le Play House), exploring the cultural constructions of gendered domesticity and respectability among the lives of the poor and poorly housed in Chester in the interwar period. Focusing on a discursive re-analysis of original photographs and research notes recording the interior material cultures of home, hygiene, and decor, the article demonstrates that the characterization of the poor as morally and decoratively “failing” was embedded even in those “action researchers” of the Institute who sought direct social change. Depicting household interior photographs, plans, handwritten commentary, and personal material, the archive reveals another dimension of what is also a familiar, contemporary trope: the unwitting but damaging construction of the poor as Other.

Keywords:

• home
• Institute of Sociology
• Le Play House
• poverty
• domesticity
• respectability
• interiors
• Chester
• 1919–39

Acknowledgement

I am particularly grateful to the Keele University archivist Helen Burton, for her interest in and help with this research

Notes

1. Throughout this article, I use the term Institute of Sociology (IoS) to describe the organizational group conducting this research. The original research was carried out during a period just on the cusp of a change in organisational structure, from the Sociological Society/Le Play House, to the establishment of the IoS in 1930. Because the Chester study was published formally after the establishment of the IoS, I use this term throughout for convenience.

2. All images are owned by the Foundations of British Sociology Archive, and reproduced here with permission of Special Collections and Archives, Keele University.

3. Farquharson was the last in a line of intellectuals who managed the Institute of Sociology from the end of the nineteenth century until its demise in 1951. With his wife, Dorothea, they ran the model “local social survey” method, combined with “field visit” travels from the Institute’s base, latterly in Ledbury. Their activities used “activist volunteers,” usually women (social workers or teachers) to marshal qualitative and quantitative data about localities. This particular survey was commissioned by the Chester Board of Social Welfare in the spirit of wider social reform in this period, in particular to address poverty and housing need. The history and background to the IoS can be found in Evans (1986) and Scott and Bromley (2013), and the emergent history of UK social work as a voluntaristic rather than state practice is documented in Burt (2008).

4. The captions referred to are notes by the IoS researchers, accompanying the original photographs. They are included in the analysis along with the visual images. The full image—with original photograph and handwritten original notes are included here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Leach

Rebecca Leach is a senior lecturer in Sociology at in the School of Social Science & Public Policy, Keele University. She has worked on various dimensions of the sociology of consumption and material culture for many years. In particular, she has been interested in the “work done” by consumers and their objects (and narratives/discourses surrounding them) in order to make meaning from consumption. This has been particularly focused on domestic consumption, the cultural construction of notions of home and belonging through the consumption of home objects, and the general material culture of belonging.

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