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ch a pter 3 Homes from the Inside I n June 1866, a new weekly publication called El Hogar appeared in Madrid. It was presented to the public as a periodical “on the advances in domestic living, hygiene, culinary arts, magazines, poetry, stories, anecdotes, novelties, fashion, advertisements, and public spectacles.” More than a fashionable magazine, El Hogar was also a newsletter. Its editor, Don José Ferrer y González, was both founder and owner of an agency that helped people hire domestic servants. This agency sought to guarantee the quality of maids and butlers and contribute to the “improvement of life in the middle class home.” Don José wrote for a clearly defined audience. El Hogar was for that social segment “that enjoys an honest well-being, those who Horace defined as the golden middle ground; who manage to live in a shelter protected from life’s hardships, who enjoy the flow of a tranquil existence adorned by simple and honest pleasures . . . and acquire their social prestige on the basis of talent and merit.”1 Don José’s agency not only connected servants and families; it also helped households maintain the quality of their staff by providing the “means to improve the education of maids and butlers.” Domestic servants were required to study “specific readings that contribute to work habits and moral formation, as well as other qualities essential for good servants such as fidelity, prudence, and circumspection.”2 Don José maintained a personnel archive to make the selection process easier and more efficient, and the agency also offered periodic visits to supervise households using their services. While it was not the first Spanish publication dedicated to the interests of the bourgeois family, El Hogar incorporated the most innovative aspects of what would come to be known in Spain as economía doméstica (domestic economy).3 Since the 1830s, authors writing about the family in Spanish periodicals had Homes from the Inside • 53 focused their attention on issues of morality and religiosity. El Hogar broke with that tradition by transplanting family life into the context of modern consumerism. Many of its articles depicted the home as a place where scientific and technological innovations converged. In a sense, it reconfigured the home as a central component of capitalism, although El Hogar presented domestic space as a sacred domain. In this vision, the home was a haven, fostering practices of privacy, individuality, and intimacy. Attention to domestic life became a manifestation of respect to the main principles of the bourgeois spirit, with ordered domestic life being the very foundation of social order. This connection that El Hogar presented—between the home and technology, science, consumerism, privacy, and social peace—was innovative, and it exemplifies the manner in which the culture of nineteenth-century bourgeois domesticity took root in Spain. This chapter analyzes the different elements that merged to form the ideal of the bourgeois home in Spain, how that ideal was created, and its historical evolution in theory and reality. To examine the making of the ideal home we will look at a variety of literary and periodical sources—mainly conduct literature. For the study of the bourgeois home as a material reality we will examine a sample of probate inventories from Madrid’s notarial archives. In her recent study of the Victorian home in England, Judith Flanders writes that “political and social history, both encompass the one thing we all share: that at the end of the day, after ruling empires or finishing the last shift at the factory, we all go back to our homes.”4 While this statement might apply to any age, the Victorians brought the ideology of “home” to the fore in a way that was new. That idea of el hogar was a fundamental component of nineteenthcentury Western bourgeois identity. It embodied the main symbolic elements of bourgeois lifestyle: family life and material refinement. The family provided individual fulfillment and a basis for collective order, while the bourgeois house, its abundant material culture indicating social position, served as an expression of the right of privacy and a foundation for a new capitalist economy based on consumption. In western Europe, the home-centered culture of domesticity became a perfect instrument for the construction of bourgeois group identity. A developing culture of domesticity has often been interpreted as a sign of a country’s modernization. Since the 1980s, there has been increasing interest in the study of domesticity from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and geographic contexts...

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