PLATFORM: Homing Devices: Women’s Home Planning Scrapbooks, 1920s

Jul 22

Jul 22 Homing Devices: Women’s Home Planning Scrapbooks, 1920s—1950s

It’s 1943, and your husband has just gone off to war, leaving you on the homefront with two children, a new job in a munitions factory, and a run-down rental house with a peeling paintjob from 1929 and lacking a single modern appliance. Ice is delivered for your ice box, coal for your stove. Until the war, the Great Depression was the single most important event of your lifetime; it was, in fact, the lens through which you saw so much of the world. But the deferred dreams of the Depression quickly turned into the deferred dreams of the war. Wartime rationing and restrictions on non-military building has made it difficult to behave like an ordinary consumer. The deprivations of the homefront, moreover, impose different restraints than the Depression had. For the first time, you recycle metals, avoid unnecessary travel in order to conserve rubber and gasoline, and plant a victory garden in order to increase the food supply, and, in the context of all of these contributions to the war, you are asked to begin planning your post-war house. An unusual genre of architectural literature appears to help you do so. Popular magazines and corporations in the building industry offer free or inexpensive scrapbooks for women to collect ideas and clippings about postwar houses.

Houses were absorbed into a Clausewitz-like argument about war by other means. While housers continued earnest New Deal arguments about the importance of healthful housing for the masses, advertisers, magazines, and builders turned homefront house planning into a patriotic act. To plan a postwar house, the pitch went, would not only contribute to national well-being, it would eventually pay dividends, much in the way war bonds would transform wartime investment into an era of postwar abundance.

Ready plans for new homes would boost the American economy when it needed it most. They would save the nation from falling into depression by absorbing the excess labor of returning troops and speeding reconversion to the peacetime economy. The stakes were enormous. An acute housing shortage had followed World War I and experts anticipated the largest building boom in American history. As corporations jockeyed for position, articles and advertisements promoting the postwar house inundated the popular and architectural press.

Alongside visions of a world transformed by pre-fabrication, as Joseph Hudnut predicted in “The Post-Modern House,” the scrapbooks promised a house planned through consumption in the guise of a well-known craft activity.[1] Parents’ Magazine provided an “Idea File” with empty folders for the “raw material” supplied by the articles and advertisements found in the magazine. It used an icon of its Idea File on notable articles. A scissors shows readers exactly how the editors imagined their magazine being used.

“The wartime scrapbooks were homing devices” for women… As instruments of consumption, design, and fantasy, they shaped consciousness about the home, offered instruction in gender roles vis-à-vis the house, and deferred the displacements and difficulties of life on the homefront to a future domesticity.”

The building and house furnishing industries self-consciously pitched promotional materials with scrapbooks like this in mind, and a burst of wartime advertising campaigns provided a ready forum for the planning of post-war homes. Manufacturers of building materials, appliance companies, and home furnishing corporations used advertisements to stay in the public eye while their products were restricted. In this moment of deferred consumption, images of women sorting through magazines and promotional pamphlets became stock features of advertisements, and the scrapbook, as an assemblage of advertisements and ideas culled from magazines, became a medium of consumer design, linking homespun craft with architectural images and ideas, consumer culture, and wartime propaganda. In the General Electric advertisement below, two women on a lunch break from their factory work talk about their future kitchen, replete with plan and specifications. This is how Rosie the Riveter was transformed back into a housewife.

These scrapbooks are part of a wider tradition of pattern books and plan books, women’s magazines and promotional literature, but the homefront redirected them to new ends. Only then did home economics become vitally linked to the restrictions and rationing of national planning. In fact, consumer culture borrowed the very idea of keeping a scrapbook of house ideas from a long-established home economics assignment. In this once common assignment, high school students were taught how to think about how to plan a house by assembling scraps cut from magazines and catalogs. The scrapbooks range from casual folios of clippings to deeply studied and meticulously organized portfolios replete with plans and technical information. See gallery of images below.

The scrapbooks from both eras reveal an overlooked encounter between women and architecture. They doubled as practical tools and play-landscapes in which people could act out their aspirations, a form of organized and acceptable fantasy. This made them a desirable focus for advertisements, which were in effect tipped into that fantasy. The pedagogical assignment was both serious and romantic, allowing women to imagine their domestic future. In turn, the wartime scrapbooks were “homing devices” for women whose lives had been uprooted or put on hold as they waited for the end of the war. As instruments of consumption, design, and fantasy, they shaped consciousness about the home, offered instruction in gender roles vis-à-vis the house, and deferred the displacements and difficulties of life on the homefront to a future domesticity. They also allowed women to be adjacent to a field long resistant to women. Finally, they are vivid evidence of the consummation of the transformation of the house from a place of production to a place of consumption.