From Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (review)

Leavitt, a Stewart fan, maps the roots of Stewart's popularity to create a "genealogy of domestic advice." Arguing that domestic advisors produced "domestic fantasy" underwritten by the "ultimate fantasy"—that by choices and actions within the home American women could reform American society—she has produced a wide-ranging intellectual, as well as cultural and professional history of domestic advice.

Morality, sanitation, Americanization, and modernity through home décor and design were topics that concerned advisors over time. Domestic advisors carved a niche for themselves to guide women in selecting their furniture, promoting simplicity of design to secure a moral citizenry. By 1900, they hoped that, via scientifically informed "home protection," women could assume a public role in ridding their homes of dust and germs. If housewives did not do so, the advisors—women forging the profession of home economics—did, carving out a new field of expertise and a new capacity as conduits between corporations and consumers.

Domestic advisors instructed immigrants to eliminate the artifacts of life in the old country to Americanize and also chastised native-born Americans for their attachment to displaying bric-a-brac. Already enamored of simplicity of form and function, domestic educators in the early twentieth century became keen advocates of modernism, repackaging it as practical homemaking. Borrowing from psychology to influence women's choices of color, they linked proper gender identity with a well-designed home environment. Advisors also borrowed from other cultures those elements that symbolized simplicity. They were enamored of Japanese style and Native American artifacts but celebrated colonial Americana for its association with democratic values.

Colonial or modern furnishings might be displayed in the popular split-level suburban home of the 1950s, a design that advisors and consumers embraced. They praised the open kitchen for allowing women to cook and be a part of the family, creating "togetherness." In one of her strongest chapters, Leavitt discusses alternative female voices that critiqued the lack of privacy that the open kitchen meant for women in reality, a look at the possible results of following domestic advice. Concluding her study in the 1950s, Leavitt does not address one key difference between Stewart and her predecessors. Stewart's focus is on time- and effort-consuming interior projects to enhance the domestic realm, whereas the advisors that Leavitt surveys are primarily concerned with the design and furnishing of that realm.

Although she does not fully answer the question that she raises—"Why is domestic advice so compelling to American women?"— because the answer lies not in the pages of domestic manuals but with women consumers and readers themselves, Leavitt advances our understanding of domesticity (7). She situates women as creators of "domesticity," making it impossible to discuss the concept without reference to historically grounded ideas about the physical environment to which domestic ideology pertains. Drawing on advice manuals, professional journals, design guides, women's magazines, and trade catalogs; including photos, sketches, and floor plans; and having decoded the culturally constructed meanings of furnishings and decor, Leavitt shows that in the home "national ideologies of class, race and gender are expressed in things" and that ideas about the home are intricately connected to the nation's cultural history (206).