Kirke Elsass, "Getting Comfortable in the Basement: Children’s Health, Women’s Work, and Respectability in the Domestic Subterranean, 1850-1930"
Abstract: Throughout the nineteenth century, American social reformers sharply distinguished between above-ground and below-ground living spaces. They decried cellar dwelling, associating underground apartments with economic and moral poverty as well as serious health risks to young children. Basements were assumed inevitably dark, damp, cramped, ill-ventilated, and infested by rodents and bugs. By the late 1920s, rigid anti-basement thinking had completely given way and a new type of underground living space was an aspiration of the American middle class. Parents integrated the underground into existing concepts of the single-family home as a retreat from the exterior chaos of industrialized society. White middle-class mothers embraced basements as comfortable spaces for domestic work and as beneficial to children’s healthy development. This chapter examines how increased use of a material technology, cement, factored into this reversal. Cement helped exclude enough rainwater, sewage, pests, and earthy stink to allow new definitions and imaginations of the basement’s place in a respectable home. The chapter is part of a dissertation on the adoption and development of modern cement technology in the United States and the material’s participation in twentieth-century American cultures.
Comment: Conevery Bolton Valencius, Boston College
Date
-