Why Do Kitchens Look The Way They Do

Hint: It’s all about putting women in their place.

Over on Apartment Therapy, Nancy Mitchell is doing a wonderful series on the history of the kitchen, and in her latest episode looks at the introduction of the “fitted kitchen” in the 1930s. She notes the work of Christine Frederick:

She then describes the work of German designers, including Margarete Schutte Lihotzky, designer of the Frankfurt Kitchen.

What I believe she misses in all of this is the question of what drove these smart women, from Catharine Beecher to Christine Frederick to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, to redesign the kitchen? In fact, it is all about politics, about the role of women in our homes and in society. It’s a really important part of the kitchen story because it shows how design really can change lives, and in this case the lives of women.

The American Woman’s Home/ Christine Beecher/Public Domain

In 1869, Catharine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, thought about redesigning the kitchen for the era after slavery, which is as political as you can get. She wrote:

Christine Frederick/ Ladies Home Journal/Public Domain

In 1919, Christine Frederick applied the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor on time and motion to the kitchen in her book, ‘Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home.’ She wanted to make life easier and more efficient for women to run the kitchen, the way Taylor made it easier for men to shovel coal.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen 1926/CC BY 2.0

I wrote about this earlier:

The whole idea of all of these designs was to get women OUT of the kitchen, to make it smaller, more efficient, to let women have other opportunities. Paul Overy wrote:

Xray-delta/CC BY 2.0

Of course in the fifties, it was back to putting the woman in the kitchen baking cakes and roasts to please the man coming home from work. I wrote:

Now, of course, the dream is the big open kitchen with commercial grade appliances sitting on vast archipelagos of kitchen Islands, most of which never gets used because it smokes up the house and it’s too hard to clean so why don’t we just order in. The kitchen becomes an exhibit demonstrating how much money the working man and woman have, a place to put on a show on weekends, often by the man who likes the showy stuff. They even now have separate “messy kitchens” for the messy coffee machine and toaster.

Kitchen design, like every other kind of design, is not just about how things look; it is political. It is social. In kitchen design, it is all about the role of women in society. You can’t look at kitchen design without looking at sexual politics.