Challenging Domesticity in Britain, 1890-1990

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Housing and the mass provision of homes were central to social reform and cultural change in Britain, 1890-1990. Yet programmes of house building and 'slum' clearance marked cycles of destruction and regeneration in which the notion of 'home' was continually contested by planners, seemingly with minimal input from residents. This has led scholars of the home to focus on the design of new houses, their amenities, living standards, and the implications of slum clearance. Subsequently, much research on the nineteenth and twentieth-century in Britain and beyond emphasises the links between domesticity and the rise of the nuclear family and the idealisation of housewifery. By the mid-twentieth century a domestic ideal dominated western culture wherein the home remained associated with privacy and as a refuge from the dangers and risks of the external world. This Network will challenge these associations and discuss how the home could mask or enable a range of behaviours and activities that seem, on first sight, to be incongruous with the domestic ideal.The purpose of the Research Network is to organise three workshops, through which we will innovate approaches to analysing the home and domesticity. The first examines how the home may have facilitated criminal enterprise; the second addresses the home within the history of activism; and the third discusses how ideas about domesticity contributed to the idea of 'home' as curative, especially as moral treatment for those considered 'deviant' or the poor. The Network will produce a new research methodology that will revitalise the way historians think about the home and domesticity. Research questions include: How far were meanings of 'home' shaped by intersections of class, gender, race, and region? To what extent could individuals subvert the language or materials of domesticity to facilitate a range of behaviours and activities? To what extent did 'home' become a form of treatment for the offenders and the poor? How does looking at different types of domestic spaces, including older types of housing, transform our interpretations? We suggest that the Network's emphasis on employing new sources and methodological frameworks challenges current historiography on domesticity by showing that cultures of domesticity could be subverted and fostered the very kinds of behaviours and activities that 'modern' homes aimed to act as refuges from or treatments against.The Network will forge a new partnership between the University of Manchester and the Pankhurst Centre. The framework of the criminal home, radical home, and curative home will add to our understanding of the importance of the Pankhurst Centre at 60-62 Nelson Street. The house was the setting for the first meeting of the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903, and is central to the history of the militant suffragette movement and women's activism. It might also be understood as a criminal home, being the residence of Christabel Pankhurst who, along with other members of the WSPU, was jailed for violent militancy. It is also a curative home. Standing within the grounds of Saint Mary's NHS Hospital and sharing its premises with Women's Aid, the Centre facilitates a women's centre and provides a therapeutic garden for service users. The partnership will contribute to an exciting phase for the Centre as it embarks on an ambitious period of expansion, fundraising and redevelopment. The Network will assist in training guides and producing materials on the history of the Pankhurst home, public lectures and podcasts aim to attract new audiences and promote the museum, and the PI will contribute to three thematic training projects for volunteers. The shared research priorities indicate potential for a longer-term relationship between the Pankhurst Centre and the University of Manchester and one of the key Network aims is to develop relationships with the Centre and other non-HEI partners for future research collaborations.