E.C. Gardener, The House that Jill Built

In 1892, the architect, E.C. Gardner, wrote The House that Jill Built: After Jack's Proved a Failure, a fictional work about a bride-to-be who demands a better home than the one her fiance promises to bring to the marriage. Throughout the book, she establishes herself as an expert on domestic architecture (an idea that later gets translated into 'home economics').

What is interesting about the book is the way that it, in 1892 (prior to probably any debates over feminist epistemology), proposes a uniquely female way of knowing. This knowledge is based on the woman as a consumer of the household, who then becomes an expert in the necessary structures and materials to keep the home in order. We can say all kinds of things about the assumptions underlying such a project, but it is really amazing how much technical and material knowledge is contained in the book (meant to be a kind of how-to guide for architects).

Framed, as it is, by the story of Jill, who has rejected Jack's proposed marital home, it at once recognizes a particular kind of power exercised by a bride-to-be in a position to negotiate the kind of home she wants to live in, while also privileging the control over that space because it is one that will serve as a container for her life.

If we compare Jill's design practice (which we could characterize as feminist in some ways though not in others) to more contemporary examples, including our own in-class design competition, what do we find? In Jill, space is deterministic. She refuses to allow certain types of furniture or room relationships lest her husband "laps[e] into barbarism." The home is a space defined by materials--leather, tile, shades, verandas, sunlight, windows. Relatedly, we find an extended meditation on landscape and place as locales for the ideal country home. At times, the narrative collapses into the tedium of details, with Jill rattling off demands and Jack acting bored or clueless. What did Gardner mean by this representation? Clearly the book has an agenda of promoting shifts in home design, but its tone toward gender is also curious, portraying Jill as dominant and Jack as helpless.

This is hardly the collaborative feminist design process inaugurated in the 1970's. It does, however, speak to a certain kind of enfranchisement related to gender and space that pre-cedes suffrage by almost 30 years. Unlike contemporary feminist designers, however, space, in Jill's case, is not associated with freedom but with temperance, morality, and the preservation of the home. This complicates ideas about female designers and architects producing different kinds of space. Not in a way that would downplay the need for more women in the profession, but it does ask us to re-evaluate the "so what?" question of gender and space. Or at least to wonder whether the narrative is not a little bit altered by the narration of a male intermediary architect.