Home Economics in the 21st Century

History and Science of Dwelling

Home Economics

The home is a remarkable tool for living on earth. Like most of our tools, the home facilitates our relationship with the elements, making possible the most basic functions of living. It facilitates our ability to eat, sleep, cook, socialize, study, play, make love, work, and carry out many of the other activities that make human life both possible and bearable. They are like extensions of our own selves, projecting the limits of our bodies into the space around us and acting as another layer of our being to keep us safe in a world that might otherwise end us. We use them to regulate our temperature, engage in metabolic exchange with the earth, and wrap ourselves in them as cocoons to undergo changes in our being throughout the years. Our homes give us the capacity to keep ourselves clean, and to store our wardrobes, that set of skins that we wrap ourselves in before we wander into the external world, clothes that allow us to take our homes with us. Our homes allow us to light up the world in our immediate environment in order to extend the day, or to turn back the morning light when we need more sleep. That is, to radically alter the conditions of our existence to fit our forms of life. They shut out the wind and the rain and the cold, and create spaces of not just survival, but enjoyment. They are often the only places in this world that allow us the capacity to exert some kind of control over the conditions of our lives, and have since antiquity been understood to be the greatest tools we have for securing our own happiness.

To call the home a tool, of course, risks reducing it to one instrument among others, putting it on the same ontological register as hammers and computers and compasses, when really it is much more than that. Our homes go much further than most other tools used by humans because of the way that they reconfigure the topology of the cosmos itself, creating a metaphysical difference between the interior and exterior, creating an ‘inside’ set over and against the ‘outdoors’. For philosopher Emanuele Coccia, the home is the very principle that creates identity, “the archetype of the border” between what is within and what is without, going so far as to say that “it is thanks to the home that there exists a ‘me and you’.” This is the case because the home creates our essential sense of interiority and exteriority, the condition for the concepts of similarity and difference. The home, in other words, is the condition for identity, and acts as the site where we are able to articulate a sense of our own self. We have very little say in the biological processes which create the limits of our physical bodies and generate the interiority that we hold sacred as the domain of our selfhood. In the body, the creation of our insides is an automatic process, just part of the package deal of being a creature on earth. The build of our bodies are, for the most part, given to us by genetics and the early conditions of life, an inheritance that we receive as both a blessing and a curse. But with the home, we actively produce interiority, creating the inner world that holds our identity, the space in which we dream, both figuratively and literally. Unlike the inner world of our unconscious, the space of the home is not hidden from us. It is an external interior, the projection of our inner life onto the walls and furniture and knick-knacks that make up our dwelling place. A space that allows us to experience the topologies of our soul in sensuousness, the smells of our childhood, the taste of our loved ones, the art that moves us, the sounds which quicken our blood.

Tools are things that we use to achieve our ends and purposes in the world. They are instruments for carrying out some predetermined goal. A hammer is a means for driving nails, a saw cuts up wood, a compass points us in the right direction, a chef’s knife breaks our vegetables and proteins into smaller pieces, a phone allows us to communicate with others across the world. This is to say that tools are useful, they are characterized by the virtue of utility. The home is a generalized tool for living in that it allows us to achieve the end of living well through the intermediate ends of eating, sleeping, etc. It is at once a tool box and a swiss army knife, a container for all of the machines, furniture, and utensils we use in our everyday life, as well as the tool itself with gadgets designed to carry out all the purposes of the domestic sphere.

And yet, tools are not just merely means to an end. Many of them act on us in some form or another as well: a compass alters our relation to the space around us through orientation within a landscape; a smartphone affects our memory, alters our social relations, causes knowledge to be externalized; tools become part of our psyches as much as they act as extensions of our flesh. Further, the existence of a tool does not always come after the setting of an end. Some tools affect us by suggesting certain ends to us, acting on us by making certain ends more possible, making us into means to achieve the ends of the tool. A weapon, for example, tends to increase our hostility toward others, and books are not just a means of gaining knowledge, but can be understood as using us to spread their contents like a mind virus. This is all to say that tools, to some degree or another, have a certain degree of agency, and cannot be so easily reduced to instrumentality and utility. That is, tools are always more than mere tools. The home is exemplary in this regard. It acts upon us in a hundred ways: by affecting our bodily temperature, altering our psychic states by putting us in a variety of moods, poisoning us when they grow mold, compelling us to keep them clean, suggesting a range of social, familial, and amorous relations through the arrangement of its space, and so on. 

Before modernity swept the spiritual elements of the cosmos out of the world into the dustbin of history, most cultures had a sense that there was a household deity that either watched over the house or was the spirit of the house itself. The Greeks called her Hestia, a name derived from the word ἑστία, a word meaning the hearth, the central, essential kernel of a home in which food is prepared and around which sociality occurs. And even more essentially than that, ἑστία is nearly identical to the Greek verb ἐστι, to be. It points to the fundamental relationship between being and dwelling, the home as existence. Our homes, like all instruments, are more than ‘mere tools’ for living. They have a heart, a voice, an agency that affects us, and we live alongside them as much as we live inside of them. It might be better to say we live with/in them. 

Ancient Texts of Oikonomia

The art of putting the home to good use is called “home economics.” This phrase is a bit like ATM machine, Queso cheese, or Chai Tea, terms where words within them are redundant. The word ‘economics’ comes from the Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia), itself a combination of the words οἶκος (oikos) and νόμος (nomos), meaning “home” and “law/rule”, respectively, so that in the Greek context, οἰκονομία referred to the art of managing the household. Which is to say, that speaking of home economics is like saying domestic home management, as opposed to political economy/home management. Aristotle, in the Politics, describes this science as the acquisition and disposition of property, or of acquiring what we need to live, putting it to use, and directing the labor within the household in order to achieve the happiness and health of everyone dwelling therein.

Texts on οἰκονομία in the Mediterranean world emerged in the fifth century BCE and remained popular until the third century CE. They offer both practical advice on the proper management of the household, as well as reflection on the proper ends of wealth acquisition and household management which allow their reader to live a good life. That is, they are both instruction manuals and works of practical philosophy, or ethics. The genre has its roots in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which describes the proper management of the home, as well as advice on agricultural production. Leshem argues, however, that the term oikonomia does not arise in Hesiod, or in many texts before the fifth century, because in the eighth to sixth centuries, when most Greeks lived in dispersed, loosely linked estates, it was tacitly assumed “that all of life that mattered took place within the bounds of one’s oikos,” and so there was no need for a term specific to domestic matters. As the city, or polis, began to replace the oikos as the center of life in the transition from the archaic to classical age, it became necessary to distinguish between affairs pertaining to the household and those of the city. Consequently, the term began to appear in passing in plays and speeches of the era, such as Socrates’ mention of it in his defense before the people of Athens, and Sophocles’ use in his play, Electra. 

The first full text concerning the topic of Oikonomia, according to Diogenes Laertius, was written by Antisthenes, although this text has been lost. But after Antisthenes’ example, the genre became popular and would remain so for nearly five centuries. Every major philosophical school produced at least one text on the topic in the course of this period, including the Epicurean Philodemus, the Stoic Hierocles, and at least three texts from the Peripatetic school. A handful of texts from the Pythagoreans, including Callitacridas and Bryson, as well as from a number of women such as Theano, Perictione I, Phyntis, Myia, Aesara, have survived in fragments, and some are distinctive in their connection of economic issues to those of the health of the body. Finally, Trever refers to works by Xenocrates, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, and Dio Chrysostom which we only know about through references of other writers. The large number of these works, all written during the long transition from a home-estate to city-state based sense of existence, point to the importance of thinking critically about the relationship between domesticity, politics, and ethics, in the Classical and Hellenistic eras.

The first part of these texts included practical descriptions, such as Xenophon’s writing on agriculture and how to make money; Theophrastus’ recommendations on farming, cooking, and cleaning; and Aristotle’s description of how to direct servants efficiently within the household. The second part of these texts was typically about the higher purposes of household management. These parts of the text were concerned not just with how to most efficiently or successfully put the home to work, but the parts of the soul that were involved in this work, the virtues that accompanied the person who lived well, and the happiness that comes from knowing the arts of “home ec”. For these authors, the home was seen as perhaps the most important site for practicing the habits of virtue besides the public forum. The home, in this view, is a tool not just for living, but for living well. For the Greeks, this ‘living well’ was synonymous with eudaimonia, or happiness, blessedness, well-being. 

The Formalization of Home Economics

The history of modern home economics begins in 1842 with Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, For the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and At School. This text, like those of the ancient Greeks, is both a practical text with chapters on “healthful food”, “healthful drinks” (these two have their own entire supplemental text called The American House Keeper’s Receipt [or Recipe] Book), “washing,” and “starching, ironing, and cleansing”; economic chapters on “charitable giving,” “economy of time and expenses,” gardening advice such as “the propagation of plants,” and the “cultivation of fruit”; while also being a theoretical work with chapters such as her long reflection on de Tocqueville in the “peculiar responsibilities of American women,” reflections on enjoyment in “on domestic amusements and social duties,” and the meta-text “on domestic economy as a branch of study.” In this text, as in any reflection on οἰκονομία, the line between the practical and the theoretical is blurry at best. They are texts in which the issues at hand are human-scaled. In them, the size of the questions we ask about the world and our place in it are commensurate with that of our own bodies.

Think with me for just a moment. Outside the walls of the home, the scale at which we think and work is so vast that sometimes our body can feel as if it is located at a very different place than the mind. While my soul is thinking at the level of the state in political issues, for example, my flesh is always right here; or at work, perhaps, I engage with the law, whose proportions stretch back in time hundreds or thousands of years, taking place at the scale of states or nations, while the bodies that are affected by them are present here in this time; outside of the home, again, the astronomer’s psyche is ballooned to the size of the cosmos itself, the biologist’s mind distilled to the scale of the cell, while their bodies are both seated in a lab behind a desk. In all these cases, work outside of the home dilates the self, for better or worse, both allowing for insight that far exceeds the limits of the individual, and at the same time allowing for a slippage between the idea and the lived experience of the self. Within the walls of the home, on the other hand, the body and the spirit are close enough to one another that the latter is never far from the former. Here, they are aligned because the scale of every problem is more or less equal to the measurements of the flesh. Like all good books of home economy, Beecher’s work is a weaving of the ideal and the real, the mental and the physical, the spiritual and the bodily, or at the very least a reminder that the two are not in fact as separate as the sciences outside of the home would like to suggest. 

Her text, and others, began to subject home economics to the same development that all of the sciences underwent in the 19th century: specialization and formalization. It was in this century that the study of life became biology, the study of environments became ecology, the study of society became sociology, and so on. At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the crown jewel of 19th-century innovation and culture, home economics had a strong showing: the world’s first electric kitchen was on display alongside lessons on kitchen gardens, talks on “how a working man and his family could live on an income of $500 a year,” and a whole exhibit on the many uses of corn, a staple grain at the beginning of its long ascent in the 20th century. The interest in the more formal and scientific approach taken at the fair generated enough attention to occasion a push for more specialization in the field, so at the turn of the century, the Lake Placid Conferences sought to formalize the study of domestic economics. The purpose of the conferences, which occurred between 1899 and 1909, was to gather experts in the field in order to introduce it as a science of formal study in high schools and colleges in the United States. 

At the fourth meeting, they defined the “science” of home economics with two attributes: “1) Home economics in its most comprehensive sense is the study of the laws, conditions, principles and ideals which are concerned on one hand with man's immediate physical environment and on the other hand with his nature as a social being, and is the study specially of the relation between those two factors; 2) In a narrow sense the term is given to the study of the empirical sciences with special reference to the practical problems of housework, cooking, etc.” That is, it was defined as a blending of the theoretical and practical issues pertaining to the wellbeing of human life, understood as a question of the relationship that exists between the living being and its environment and society, mediated through the tool we call the home. This definition shows that home ec is a study of a relation between relations, the art and science proper to this mediatory tool, the home as a mode of relating our existence as ecological beings with that of our social being. In the home, all of these relations, between self and environment, self and other, self and self, and the relation between these relations, take place on a scale and within limits that disallow the separation of body and idea, matter and mind.

Home Economics in the 21st Century

In these texts, as well as in those of the Greeks, these reflections are caught up in whole systems of power relations that are not addressed in the texts themselves. Specifically, gender and sexual relations. In both the Greek and American context, home economics and the working of the home is a women’s science, and these texts (as well as the discipline of home ec as a mode of formal education) are designed specifically to facilitate the traditional roles that women play in heterosexual relationships within patriarchal social structures. While the Greek texts were often predicated on the existence of slavery, modern approaches to the topic are also conditioned in many ways by unspoken racial norms and relations of power which place white, Christian familial structures and ideals at the hearth in these reflections. Additionally, these texts are often written without reference to the capitalist economies which so deeply structure our relationship to the environment and one another in the 21st century. This is the price that home economics texts often pay for the proximity of the theoretical and the practical, the way they think at the scale of the body without the tools necessary to approach these topics at the scale of international markets, social systems of oppression, or within a broad historical context. As Emanuele Coccia writes in his Philosophy of the Home, “the home has become a place in which prejudice, oppression, injustice, and inequality have remained hidden, forgotten, and reproduced mechanically and unconsciously through the ages,” where both sexism and speciesism have been “produced, affirmed, and justified.” By deliberately forgetting about the home in most of the western tradition, critical thought has abandoned everything within it to “the forces of genealogy and private property,” and in effect “rendered happiness unthinkable.” The contemporary home, Coccia writes, is like a “kind of Platonic cave, the ruins left over from an older age of humanity,” constructed around ideals of past centuries–both materially, in the way they are constructed, and conceptually, in the ways that we inhabit them spiritually–rather than one that is appropriate to the present. Home economics, for better or worse, often presents itself as a set of ahistorical arts and sciences, forgetting its place in the grand scheme of things.

There is often a sense in home economics texts and studies, in which the home exists as a separate realm (the realm of the “private”, from the latin privus, or individual, a withdrawnness from the social world), meaning there is a kind of categorical difference between the interiority of the home and the visible exteriority of the state and market which exists outside the door. But as we will see in the sections that follow, the home is never as perfectly insular as many authors would like to suggest. The public world – the world of markets and states and laws – sets the conditions for the kinds of homes that can exist, the kind of interiors that are possible. But at the same time, the ways that we live, the manners of existing within the domestic sphere, the modes of private life that we cultivate within the laboratories of the home, all of this also has the capacity to affect the public world and its perceptions of what is possible, what is real. Communes, collective living experiments, polyamorous families, and other queer homes are spaces in which publicly impossible lives can be cultivated, protected, nurtured, and generally given space. In this way, the home is as much a site of resistance, experimentation, and imagination as the political rally, the art festival, the burn.

This book is not an attempt to fully analyze the power relations that condition the existence of the home in their entirety. That is the work of sociologists, historians, anthropologists. The scope of that investigation in a full, objective sense takes place at the scale of the nation, the state, the market, the international community, and the environment of the globe. That is an epistemological approach that exceeds the limits of the domestic sphere, stretching the domestic into forms that resemble state and market-based ways of knowing. As I argued in my dissertation, Autotrophy of the Other, one of the foundational moments of the development of philosophy was the invention of the state mindset and the logics which accompany it. These ways of thinking suppressed in any way possible approaches to understanding the world which begin with the domestic, rather than political, sphere. The contention of this book is that many of these issues, however, can be approached at the scale of the life of an individual in their communities of human and non-human relations as part of the theoretical and practical exploration of the home. Each chapter functions as a kind of micro-ontology, micro-history, micro-epistemology that situates a particular approach to the domestic sphere within the particular time and place through which we are living here and now in the first quarter of the 21st century. They speak from a situatedness within time and space, a material embodiment which allows us to see the world in which we live from the threshold of our dwelling place. Like the Greek texts of Oikonomia and the 19th and 20th century texts which formalized Home Ec in the modern era, this book aims to present both practical and theoretical reflections on the home, blending the two in a way that attempts to make dinner preparation philosophical, dish-washing a radical act, food preservation a hope for the future, and philosophy a discipline that flourishes in the living room.