June 2012 GLS Symposium
Jennifer Chutter—SFU
Is the kitchen still the hearth of the home?
I hate cheesy kitsch with sayings like “home is where the heart is,” “home, sweet,
home,” or “If you don’t like the fire, stay outta the kitchen.” If the slogan is crossstitched in peach and blue and mounted in a tacky bronze painted frame with a
white ribbon adhered to the back in order to hang it from, I feel particularly ill.
These overly romanticized notions of home have nauseated me since early
adolescence. Rather than explore my possible dysfunctional notions of home and
some hidden trauma attached to it during hours of therapy, I decided to become an
academic instead.
I started with the question “is the kitchen still the hearth of the home” because I am
intrigued by the amount of money people are putting into their kitchen and how
infrequently people seem to be cooking from scratch. Do you need a $3000 oven to
warm up a frozen pizza? Have we somehow become a nation obsessed with shiny
new appliances that we have forgot what the actual purpose of them is? Are kitchen
appliances the new status symbol? Has the kitchen become the new Victorian
parlour, a room to display our wealth and values?
As I began my research, I came to realize there are distinct differences, between
American and European values embodied in kitchen design; Canada falls
somewhere in the middle. “The modern kitchen in America was shaped by the
commercial circle of consumers, journalists, manufacturers, and advertisers rather
than a critical architectural avant-garde” like it was in Europe.1 For the purposes of
this presentation, I have decided to only discuss changes to American kitchens in the
last one hundred years and how it relates to the notion of hearth.
A hearth is the floor of a fireplace, and by its very nature is messy, covered in ash,
soot and partially charred pieces of wood. The hearth stimulated the senses with
the hiss and crackle of wood burning, the smell of bread baking and a stew
simmering in a pot over an open flame. Since the need for warmth and food is
continual, the kitchen, the room that grew around the hearth, was the warmest
room in the house and also the best lit. As a result the idea of hearth is often
synonymous with household and family and is viewed as the center of home life
because it was the one place the entire family would gather. Eating, socializing and
sleeping often took place in this room. In many pre-twentieth century homes,
especially in rural areas, the kitchen was the largest and central room in the house.
I argue that no other room in the house has been so strongly influenced by changes
in technology, science, moral values, consumerism, class, family values and
feminism in the last one hundred years. All of these shifting ideals are reflected in
Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of
Waster: A Process of Elimination (Dalton, MA: Studley Press, 1992), 48.
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June 2012 GLS Symposium
Jennifer Chutter—SFU
Is the kitchen still the hearth of the home?
the design and function of the kitchen space and in turn has challenged our view of
the kitchen embodying the ideas of hearth. I question the movement towards clean
lines, stainless steel appliances and the use of expensive materials as to whether it is
slowly eroding the idea of hearth because cost of the kitchen renovations does not
seem to correlate with an increased cooking or socializing at home. In At Home: An
Anthropology of Domestic Space, Irene Cierraad argues “there has never been a
period in Western urban history where people spent so little time at home.”2 In
order to simplify my approach, I looked at the average middle class kitchen and the
changes that ensued within that space.
The shift towards the modern day kitchen, as we know it, began before the
twentieth century and this shift was more prominent in the United States than in
Europe. Catherine Beecher, an American, who published The American Woman’s
Home, On Principles of Domestic Science in 1869, sought to make kitchens more
efficient by reducing the number of steps between cooking, preparing and washing.
She argued that women were not sufficiently prepared for their “life work” in the
way men were and just as efficiency models had improved industry, so could
increased efficiency in the kitchen improve the “work life” of women. Subtly, the
Puritanical ideas of order and cleanliness were applied to kitchen design because
Beecher felt that true happiness could only be achieved by devoting oneself, as a
wife and a mother, to the improvement of family life, just as God had intended. Her
work was one of the first texts to apply scientific language to domestic space. “Her
efficiency studies determined that the traditional freestanding tables and dressers
should be replaced by compact work surfaces with shelves and drawers beneath
them.”3 This idea of making kitchens more efficient was precipitated by two
changes. Firstly, in the United States there was a shortage of domestic help. Women
were responsible for care of their entire household and secondly, with the rise of
industrialization; scientific principles were applied to all aspects of society.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, changes to the kitchen began as a result of
infrastructure changes as urban environments became more developed. The kitchen
became connected to the wider world as it was the first room to be wired for
electricity and the advent of running water and a sewer system changed how the
room was constructed because of the need for it to be attached to urban
infrastructure. As a result, by the 1920s most urban homes had either a gas or an
electric stove rather wood or coal burning stove and the fireplace was moved to the
living room.
Irene Cieraad. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1999), 11.
3 Akiko Busch, The Geography of the Home: Writings on Where We Live (NY:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 42.
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June 2012 GLS Symposium
Jennifer Chutter—SFU
Is the kitchen still the hearth of the home?
Christine Frederick, also an American, further developed Catherine Beecher’s ideas,
fifty years later, by applying scientific management principles, or what was known
as Taylorism, to kitchen design in her work Household Engineering: Scientific
Management in the Home published in 1919. She argued that kitchens should more
closely resemble scientific laboratories. Similar cooking ‘tools’ should be clustered
together and the heights of counters should be standardized in order to reinforce
the idea of orderliness and cleanliness. However, domestic anthropologist, Judy
Attfield points out that Frederick’s flaw in her argument is that the kitchen is
designed for one worker to carry out many tasks whereas a factory functions on the
division of labour and therefore Taylorism could not be adequately applied to the
functioning of the kitchen.4 Similar to a factory where a single task is located in a
specific area, activities such as eating, socializing and sleeping were moved to their
own separate rooms as the physical shape of the kitchen became smaller and closed
off from the rest of the house in an effort to minimize the number of steps taken to
complete a task.
Beecher’s and Frederick’s arguments dramatically shifted the appearance of
kitchens. Rather than mismatched pieces of furniture holding various cooking items
around the room, with a possible separate pantry and washing area, cupboards
started to come in standard sizes and fit around the appliances. While domestic
scientists purported the kitchen was becoming more functional with uniform
counter heights and standard sized cupboards, the actual functionalism of the
kitchen was beginning to be eroded. The height of the surface for baking needs to be
much lower than it is for chopping. In order to prepare baked goods, the surface
needs to be lower so you can see in the bowl to check the consistency and to knead
and roll out dough. Ranges were designed to be at the same height as the
countertops with the oven below, which meant that women were bending over
lower in order to take things in and out of the oven, a design feature many women
complained about. While several models were developed with the oven raised and
the cooking surface beside, they did not catch on because the desire for clean lines
and uniformity in the kitchen was seen as being more important than the actual ease
in which cooking tasks could be undertaken.
Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky, a German architect, further refined Beecher and
Frederick’s ideas of efficiency and scientific management. In 1926, she developed
the galley kitchen, which came to be known as the Frankfurt kitchen. Rather than
free-standing cupboards and shelves, cabinets became fixtures permanently
adhered to the walls and built around appliances. This marked a significant shift in
kitchen design because the space went from being highly individual full of furniture
to suit the needs of the family to permanent standardized height and depth of
Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg,
2000), 251.
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June 2012 GLS Symposium
Jennifer Chutter—SFU
Is the kitchen still the hearth of the home?
cupboards and work surface in the name of efficiency. It also reinforced the idea
that kitchens should be kept orderly and clean. The narrow galley kitchen further
strengthened the idea that the only activity to take place in the kitchen is cooking, as
there was no room for a table to be placed in the room. One of the main criticisms of
her design was that the kitchen was so small only one person could cook there.
Schutte-Lihotsky believed that an efficient kitchen would release women to work
outside the home because the tasks required to care for the family could be done in
a shorter amount of time. This view contrasts sharply with the American idea that
an efficient kitchen would allow women with more time to be better wives and
mothers.
By shrinking the square footage of the kitchen in order to maximize efficiency
between work areas, by closing it off from the rest of the house and by limiting the
room to a single function, the kitchen began to resemble the aspects of a laboratory
rather than a hearth. The laboratory aspect became further supported as new forms
of technology entered the home designed to make cooking more precise combined
with recipes becoming standardized with specific weights and measures. Cooking
became an exact science with pounds, cups, and teaspoons quantifying ingredients
rather than relying on recipes passed down generations with dashes of spices, a
handful of raisins and two teacups of flour. The appearance of the room also became
standardized with white tiles, white walls and white cupboards dominated because
the dirt could easily be seen and removed further reinforcing the laboratory
aesthetic for American kitchens. Steven Gdula argues in his work, The Warmest
Room in the House, that in the early twentieth century, “individuality was something
to be sanitized and, along with the germs, food contaminants, and unhealthy
lifestyles, removed from the kitchen.”5 However, the scientific approach to kitchen
design began to be challenged in the 1950s.
Kitchens took on a renewed significance in the post-WWII period and throughout
the cold war as a way of strengthening the ideals of home and nation. Firstly, there
was a glorification of domestic duties and the importance of women carrying out
their work at home was emphasized because with men returning from the war
women needed to leave the workforce. Beecher’s idea of a more efficient kitchen as
a way to grant women more time to be better wives and mothers was reclaimed as a
goal for a modern society. The goal was not to release a homemaker from the
drudgery of kitchen chores, but to ensure that she was better able to fulfill her
domestic duties. The rise in the number of household appliances did not release her
from the amount of time she was spending on housework, but merely increased the
expectations placed on her to keep the house clean. Secondly, in an attempt to
showcase all the positives of industrial development to a nation shattered by the
Steven Gdula, The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen became the heart of
the twentieth-century American Home (NY: Bloomsbury, 2008), 7.
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June 2012 GLS Symposium
Jennifer Chutter—SFU
Is the kitchen still the hearth of the home?
destructiveness of war, the kitchen and the related gadgetry became important. The
practical purpose of the advancements in technology as a result of the war was
emphasized. Rather than factories laying in waste after the need for munitions
declined they were converted to mass-producing stoves, fridges, dishwashers and
washing machines. The push for consumer goods had a two-fold purpose, one to
boost the economy and the second to define Americans as progressive and entering
into the age of modernity. Americans reinforced these ideas by displaying model
kitchens publicly at home in shopping malls and abroad at Fairs and Expos in order
to encourage consumer spending on kitchens. Advertising images relied on nostalgic
ideas of hearth; many images had a woman in her much larger kitchen with children
underfoot joyous cooking on her new electric range. Modern American society was
moving away from the tiny Frankfurt kitchen and white was slowly abandoned as a
dominant colour scheme as appliances began to be manufactured in a variety of
colours in an attempt to remove the sterility of the laboratory kitchen aesthetic. As
Cristina Carbone argues in Cold War Kitchen, coloured appliances “were meant to be
understood as a celebration of the freedom of choice of American homeowners and
housewives (even if fictitious) and of their ability to individualize their kitchen and
separate it from the countless other suburban kitchens of their neighbours.”6
The ideal of Americans celebrating their individuality and freedom dominated cold
war politics. Developments in kitchen design were seen as a way to promote the
significance of American technological innovation to combat the technological feats
of the Russians entering space first. In 1959, Nixon met with Khruschev in the
kitchen at the model home at “America’s national exhibition in Moscow.”7 They
debated American and Soviet rockets and appliances with equal seriousness. Nixon
stressed the importance of having an abundance of choices in technology is what
was making the United States strong whereas Khruschev thought the collective
energy of the nation towards the specific goal of space exploration was of greater
national importance. However, in both countries the idea of home and especially the
kitchen came to be closely allied with ideas of nationalism and national identity.
New homes built in the post-war period, in both Europe and the United States,
needed to embody the ideas of home and a progressive modern nation.
Shute-Lihotsky’s standard efficient kitchen resting on mass produced pre-fabricated
materials became the fastest way to achieve the goal of building adequate housing
quickly in post-war Europe. The United States, also adopted the pre-fab efficient
kitchen with the construction of suburbs. The increased standardization in
materials and appliances allowed for homes to be produced quickly as cabinet sizes
Christina Carbone, “staging the Kitchen Debate: How Sputnik got normalized in the
United States” in Cold War Kitchen, ed. Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 70.
7 Ibid., 60.
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June 2012 GLS Symposium
Jennifer Chutter—SFU
Is the kitchen still the hearth of the home?
and countertops became standardized. Over the last fifty years kitchens have
become larger and more open to the rest of the house moving away from the tiny
closed off room the kitchen once was; however, the motivations behind the design
changes are varied. Some argue that the kitchen became open to the rest of the
house to allow the person in the kitchen to still view the television, the new hearth
of the home, while others argue it is based on a desire to be closer to family life
while preparing food. Still others argue that by opening the kitchen up women are
less segregated away from the rest of the house and it allows for a greater sense of
equality.
I think there is still the push for the idea of hearth and an attempt to create some
sense of individuality in our kitchens. We put pictures on the fridge and clutter the
counter with personal knick-knacks in order to mark the territory as our own. We
are wiling to spend money to change the kitchen to suit our own personal
preferences, whether it is the colour of the walls or the tiles, the knobs and drawer
pulls or the mouldings. Yet, as Friedman and Krawitz argue, “the attachment to
home appears to be more an attachment to the concept of home than to the actual
home itself.”8 We are willing to spend a large sum of money renovating so the space
is exactly the way we want it, but we are quick to move and start the process again
in a new house. In many newer homes, the kitchens are becoming larger with spaces
for eating, lounging or carrying on a variety of activities. It has moved away from the
singular purpose of the mid-20th century design. However, we are still caught in this
interesting dichotomy where we have a renewed sense of hearth in one sense with
multiple people and multiple purposes taking place in the same room, but with
central heating the room itself is not a space that generates actual physical warmth
and fewer people are actually cooking from scratch which eliminates much of the
sensory experience of hearth. I believe that the kitchen itself has become the
showpiece of the home more than its actual hearth.
We are a generation brought up watching television and consuming processed
foods, yet the past ten years has seen a proliferation of cooking shows enter the
airwaves. I believe that these shows would not be popular if we were not nostalgic
for a sense of hearth; however, I believe that the television is the center of family life
and not cooking in the kitchen. Increasingly, our kitchens also resemble the kitchens
on television shows, “today in many houses the kitchen has become the grandest
interior, stainless steel theatres where guests congregate to admire gleaming
industrial equipment and the culinary feats of the host or hostess.”9 This creates a
show atmosphere where there is a separation between chef and recipients of the
Avi Friedman and David Krawitz. Peeking Through the Keyhole (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002), 166.
9 Akiko Busch. Geography of Home: Writings on where we live (NY: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1999), 43.
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June 2012 GLS Symposium
Jennifer Chutter—SFU
Is the kitchen still the hearth of the home?
meal. Akiko Busch argues in her work, Geography of Home: Writings on Where We
Live, that we have a reluctance to give up domestic rituals in the name of modern
efficiency; however, rather than reverting to traditional cooking methods of a simple
tool preparing a simple meal we are relying increasingly on smaller appliances and
other kitchen tools to support our domestic desires. Busch furthers her argument by
stating that we cultivate sensory experiences to counteract the “increasing
engagement with the electronic realm.”10 I think the only was we can create a sense
of hearth in the kitchen is by cooking from scratch and that means letting go of the
laboratory aspect of kitchens. By turning the preparation of food into a science and
by stressing the importance of cleanliness, we have lost the sense of play in the
kitchen. Hearths, by their very nature are messy, but create a sensory experience of
home and belonging. This process of perpetual generation and consumption mimics
the life cycle process and one, I believe, gives our soul rest.
10
Ibid., 44.
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