Updated: November 22, 2020 1:30:17 pm
How do women navigate in a predominantly “man-made” environment, both inside and outside the home? It is surprising in itself, given that female architecture students outnumber men in contemporary India, although fewer women practice architecture. (Illustration: Suvajit Dey)
Public life, as we knew it, has stagnated without precedent and private life has escalated to the point of tyranny, due to the current health emergency. Even the lines that radically divided unpaid domestic work from “work for wages,” generally outside the home (though only for some classes), have been dramatically redrawn. What better time to critically reexamine and reimagine private life and domesticity, and also reaffirm women’s claims for public space?
To begin with, how do women navigate in a predominantly “man-made” environment, both inside and outside the home? It is surprising given that female architecture students outnumber men in contemporary India, although fewer women practice architecture. How to make architects, urban planners and environmental experts collaborate in a way that extends respect for lived experiences and the challenges faced by women, here so as not to be understood as a homogeneous whole?
Perhaps this is an appropriate time to immerse yourself in a reverie about new ways of life in cities. Let’s start by going back to the dreams of the utopian thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, undoubtedly bourgeois dreamers, who reconceptualized domestic life and space. The main goal was to reduce the repetitive chores of housework – who wanted to produce roughly 1,095 meals a year, plus planning and cleaning after that?
So the response of some utopian planners in the United States, such as Marie Howland in the 1870s and Alice Constance Austin in the 1890s, was to socialize housework and collectivize laundry, cooking, and childcare. This involved designing “no kitchen” houses, although food consumption remained a privatized issue. Freeing women for a more public life was only an implicit goal, as the designs did not necessarily restore gender relations or assign a greater role to men in domestic life. Women remained primarily housewives, albeit with fewer responsibilities. Some thinkers even loathed those women seeking careers abroad. Even the left-wing Bauhaus architects of the early 20th century aimed for greater efficiency in housework, deploying the principles of scientific management to increase the efficiency of the home through the use of more appliances, but only to liberate the women for their work. roles as wives and mothers.
In other cases, women went from being passive clients to active agents, albeit in a low-key and low-key way: the “Vrouwen Adviescomissies” (VACs) started in the immediate post-war years in the Netherlands (in the 1940s and continue to the present day) when there was a severe housing shortage. The public provision of housing was not only for the working class or the urban poor, but also for the middle class. The VACs suggested changes in the plans that were not foreseen by (usually) male builders, “walking” the plans, cutting them and rearranging them from more practical points of use, to the elderly, the physically disabled, the single woman. It was also about largely non-feminist interventions, a search for practical comforts within tightly guarded domestic spaces.
Utopian ideals, meanwhile, changed drastically as a result of war and revolution, driving large numbers of hitherto locked women out of their homes to work in munitions industry / fields / factories, even if only temporarily. Ideas about the collectivization of domestic work took root more strongly only in the socialist world, where (state support for) the socialization of domestic work was tied to the eventual “disappearance” of the family, especially in the 1920s. Collective kitchens and nurseries were bold ideas in their day, and women were an integral part of the workforce. But the Zhenotdel or Women’s Office (the women’s department of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of All Russia) was abolished in 1930 when Joseph Stalin declared that the women’s question had been “answered” (in some accounts, because the potato The peeler was invented!). In its place came an organization of “activist wives”, who now performed what was largely an extension of household chores in the public sphere: controlling the cleanliness of shelters, beautifying gardens, supervising nurseries. Today, women in Indian Resident Welfare Associations play a disproportionate role as “social housekeepers” as well, extending their skills at home to neighborhood life, albeit within a framework of entrenched democracy. .
Housing design in the modern city is becoming increasingly homogenized, driven exclusively by real estate concerns, rather than aesthetics, social justice or obtaining equitable public access, leaving alone the achievement of relative equality of gender. The housing needs of single women, childless couples, the elderly, or the home worker (eg the beedi roller) rarely affect the planning imagination, for whom all solutions can be scaled as “BHK”.
Therefore, it is not a luxury to go back to that previous generation of dreamers who were concerned with reducing the monotony and heavy work of the home. Sometimes they came up with simple solutions, such as round rooms (which didn’t have corners to collect dust) or at least rounded room edges. Given our deep-rooted inequalities, we will have to look closely at spaces and temporalities, far beyond the private / daytime, to generate a “good city shape”. The unfinished project, which took shape after the national protest against the massacre and assassination of December 2012, and continues to generate only the fairly moderate demand for better-lit roads, must be revived. Water pumps, trails, public restrooms, street corners, plus parks, places of worship, and recreational spaces, should be part of the new dream.
(Janaki Nair is Retired Professor, History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
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