What! Is This the Kitchen?: Domestic Advice and the Market for a Model Kitchen, 1841-1959

What! Is this The Kitchen? asesses the American middle-class kitchen and its association with domestic advisors, advertisers, and magazine editors at three pivotal moments in its history from 1841-1959. Most importantly, the thesis analyzes how the user, whom these parties assumed was a white housewife with some access to domestic servants or labor-saving devices, related to the sources she used and likely trusted to guide her decision-making in the kitchen. In the middle of the 19th century and just after the Civil War, this source was Catherine Beecher, a domestic advice expert and public writer and educator who endeavored to enable these women to function in their space with patriotism and Christian grace. In the early 20th century, Christine Frederick wrote domestic advice guided not by religious morality, but by secular zeal for the new field of scientific management, which she adapted to the home and helped to sell to housewives vis a vis the Hoosier Manufacturing Company, for whom she was a spokesperson. Finally, in the 1950s, shelter magazines took the singular figure of a domestic advisor and spread it over editors and periodicals bolstered by home research institutes. Anne Sonopol Anderson, one of these editors, was the spokeswoman for this process on the international stage, appearing as the demonstration housewife in the RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen at the 1959 American Exhibition in Moscow. As a corollary to exhibition kitchens, the thesis also examines Levittown, itself an internal model of American identity. These women were engaged in defining, sharing, and shaping the habitus of the middle class as it grew and coalesced into the largest bloc of the American public. At stake in their efforts is the increased understanding of white middle class American life through its women and their life at home, in both the magazines they read and the kitchens they used.