A place for everything: The influence of storage innovations on modern American domesticity (1900--1955)

This study articulates an intersection within middle-class American culture between 1900 and 1955. It investigates the evolution of domestic storage elements including manufactured cabinets for the kitchen and bathroom, clothing and linen closets, the basement, attic, garage, and garden shed. It is also an inquiry into the transition of middle-class domestic interior space from a status often understood as private and sheltering to a condition perceived as exposed and permeable.; Popular shelter magazines and women's journals, building trade literature and catalogs from the late nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century formed the majority of the study material. They included House Beautiful, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, American Carpenter and Builder, and Keith's Beautiful Homes Magazine. The research specifically relied on a content analysis of advertisements, the proposed designs of houses and of particular storage elements, and dialogues that focused on the role of storage in the facilitation of “modern living,” such as the 1954 House Beautiful essay by Lewis Mumford entitled “A Philosophy of Storage.”; The findings of this study establish that although nineteenth century middle-class houses frequently did include closets, pantries, and dedicated storage rooms, such spaces usually occupied areas that were leftover after the active living zones were defined. This contrasts with twentieth century approaches to modern domestic storage design that deliberately created space for storage and increasingly relied on manufactured components to occupy it.; This research also establishes that the intersection of domestic storage and domestic privacy occurs on two levels. First, the concentration of modern storage in internal “storage walls” and consolidating cabinets located away from the exterior walls allowed for dramatic increases in the transparency of the barrier that separated outside from inside, thus exposing aspects of previously private domestic life. Secondly, an increasing reliance on storage systems that modeled those used in commercial operations created the impression of a domestic realm that mimicked public commercial environment such as offices and stores. Women, whose increasing exposure to and knowledge of environments of commerce, cultivated this shift by becoming increasingly managerial and organizational in their approach to domestic work.