F
Feminist Perspectives on Home
R Longhurst, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
ª 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Feminism Broadly speaking, feminism refers to the
advocacy of the rights of women. There is no single
accepted definition or unified feminist movement, but
most would agree that feminism is a social movement
for change regardless of whether it goes under the label
suffragette, women’s liberation, radical feminism, or
something else. Many of these various movements have
addressed home as an important topic in addressing the
rights of women.
Gender Refers to the socially created distinction
between men and women. People are born a particular
sex (although sometimes this is ambiguous), but the
meanings of bodies are constructed as people interact
with family, school, peers, the media, and so on. Over
the past decade, however, this distinction between sex
and gender has been critiqued on the grounds that it is
not possible to easily separate sex from gender.
Housework After 1945, many women left paid work
and returned home. They quickly assumed the
management of homes and all the affairs that took
place within them. Housework became coded as
Introduction
Gender is integral to the way people live in and imagine
home mainly because although there are diverse under-
standings of home, Cartesian thinking has firmly
associated women with the private sphere and men with
the public sphere. Home has been characterised, espe-
cially by social conservatives, as a ‘woman’s place’.
Women have traditionally been responsible for making
and looking after homes. In 1963, American feminist
writer Betty Friedan published what was to become a
well-known book The Feminine Mystique in which she
cast light on the lack of fulfillment experienced by many
women. Friedan linked this lack of fulfillment, in part at
158
‘women’s work’ and as such remained largely
invisible and undervalued. In the 1960s, housework
became a source of political tension as women
began to point out that they wanted more in life than
shopping, cooking, cleaning, and tending to the
needs of men and children.
Patriarchy Feminists in the 1960s used this term as an
analytic category and explanatory concept to argue that
the relations between men and women are organised
hierarchically and in all areas of social, cultural, and
political life, men dominate women.
Queer In the 1970s and 1980s, this was used as a term
of abuse to refer to lesbians and gay men, but in the
early 1990s it began to take on other meanings. It began
to be used as an inclusive term that referred to a wide
range of people deemed to be sexual Others or
dissidents. The term is most commonly situated within
postmodernist and/or poststructuralist frameworks. A
key concern of queer theory and politics is the
deconstruction of binary oppositions such as
heterosexual/homosexual, gender/sex, and man/
woman.
least, to women’s confinement to the domestic sphere,
namely to home. The women’s liberation moment of the
1960s and 1970s was an important precursor to much
feminist geographical work on home. After 1945, many
women in several countries who had been involved in war
work were persuaded to leave paid jobs and return home.
At this time, home was understood to be the ‘proper’ place
for women, a notion Friedan argues, that was perpetuated
by patriarchy. Friedan’s work prompted others to also
focus attention on home and women’s roles both within
and outside of home.
Traditionally, then, home has been tied to femininity,
intimacy, familial and affective relations, and domesticity.
This association between women and home has meant that
HOME/HOMELESSNESS

some scholars have ignored home, relegated it to the
margins as a topic that is not worthy of serious academic
attention. This has not been the case, however, for feminist
scholars and practitioners. Feminist perspectives have been
vitally important in developing geographical thinking on
home. Some of the issues addressed by feminists over the
past two decades include access to housing, housing as a
consumer good, domestic work, paid and unpaid labour,
the division between private and public space, nurturing,
suburbanisation, homelessness, the design of houses, ideal
homes, the constitution of families within homes, home as a
matrix of social and gendered relations, violence within the
home, female-headed households, and transnational
homes. Clearly, this represents a wide array of topics.
Also, feminist scholars have used a wide array of theoretical
lenses through which to view these topics.
In the early 1980s liberal feminism succeeded in rais-
ing awareness about the lack of attention paid to women
and their lived experiences of home. In the mid-1980s,
feminist scholars began to employ socialist, radical, and
postcolonial approaches to understand housing and gen-
der relations. In the 1990s and 2000s, queer and
poststructuralist approaches became increasingly popular
as feminist scholars turned their attention to the relation-
ships between home, identity, meanings, and
representation. These approaches employed at various
times do not represent discrete intellectual spaces but
overlap and inform each other. Considering different
feminist perspectives on home provides a useful way of
examining the rich body of research on home that has
emerged over the past four decades.
Liberal Feminism: Putting Home on the
Geographical Agenda
In the 1970s and early 1980s, geographers began to docu-
ment the absence of women in the discipline of
geography. They also argued that by omitting women,
most geographic research was in effect sexist. By way of a
specific example, in 1982, Janice Monk and Susan Hanson
in an article titled ‘On Not Excluding Half of the Human
in Human Geography’ discussed the sexist bias in the
content, method, and purpose of geographic research. In
relation to content, they drew attention to suburbanisa-
tion and urban travel, which they noted did not consider
women’s experiences. They found that activities com-
monly associated with women, often carried out at
home, such as childcare and unpaid work, were deemed
insignificant in the discipline and not researched. Where
there was research on women, it tended to assume tradi-
tional gender roles and relations. Although it could be
argued that research such as Monk and Hanson’s did not
go far in unraveling many of the complexities surround-
ing gender and home, its importance in putting topics
Feminist Perspectives on Home 159
such as women’s experiences of home, suburbs, childcare,
and housework on the geographic agenda cannot be
underestimated. It indicated that the discipline was
becoming increasingly sensitised to gender and that
home was a topic worthy of serious consideration.
Socialist Feminism: Homes as Sites of
Reproduction
By the mid-1980s, feminist geographers interested in
home were looking to do more than simply put it on the
agenda. Some saw Marxism as offering possibilities for
understanding women’s relationship with home.
Capitalism is after all not just a set of productive but
also of reproductive relations. Others were less keen on
Karl Marx’s ideas arguing that his notion of class derived
from male experiences of paid labour that depended on
the invisible reproductive labour performed in the home.
Marx, they argued, did not appear to incorporate home-
based women into his class analysis. Despite the many
difficulties of applying Marxist theory to analyses of
women and home, many socialist feminists attempted to
use it to address feminist concerns.
Dolores Hayden, for example, produced a large corpus
of socialist-inspired work on home that made a huge
contribution to understanding the relationship between
home, gender relations, production, and reproduction.
Suburban homes, argued Hayden, require cleaning and
maintaining. They exacerbate the work because labour is
individualised, repeated by women in each separate
house. Suburban homes do not allow women to share
domestic tasks or create economies of scale through the
communal pooling of resources. Cooking, cleaning, laun-
dry, child-minding are all carried out individually, and
invisibly, in each separate home.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, feminists such as Hayden
began to look for and articulate alternative ways of
designing and living in homes. Some, including Hayden,
built on the work of nineteenth-century, middle-class
feminists such as Melusina Fay Peirce and Charlotte
Perkins Gilman who critiqued home from both a spatial
and economic perspective. These nineteenth-century
feminists highlighted that traditional ways of carrying
out domestic tasks meant that women were isolated and
carried a ‘double burden’, that is, they were in paid work
but also had to carry out another shift at home. They
commented not just on housing but also on urban plan-
ning more generally arguing that one of the reasons for
the high cost of housing was because each house had to
contain an entire workplace in which all domestic chores
could be carried out. These nineteenth-century women
called for a ‘grand domestic revolution’ – a complete
transformation of the economic base of housework and
of the spatial design and material culture of American
160 Feminist Perspectives on Home
society. They envisaged women organising cooperative
associations that would allow them to carry out domestic
work collectively and charge their husbands for these
services. This would open up the possibility of having
kitchenless houses and cooperative neighbourhoods.
These challenges to housing design and urban form,
however, are not confined to the nineteenth century. Still
today feminists in a range of spatial disciplines such as
architecture and planning question how different spatial
forms might facilitate different social relations. To return
to Dolores Hayden’s work, she proposed a scheme for the
development of small cooperative groups of houses. Each
group of about 40 houses would be made up of private
dwelling units which would have private, fenced, outdoor
spaces, but also collective spaces such as a children’s
daycare centre, laundromat, kitchen that provided
lunches for the daycare centre, takeaway evening meals,
a meals-on-wheels service, vegetable plot, and home-help
office providing assistance for the elderly and the sick.
Jacqueline Leavitt, an urban planner from the United
States, also argues that the time has come to rethink
housing because developers have been unsuccessful in
meeting the needs of half their clients, especially single
parents and predominantly female-headed households.
Leavitt conducted a survey in the United States from
which she received 6000 responses and 800 drawings of
ideal houses. She found that most people wanted the
following in houses (in order of priority): affordability,
private places (not open plan), safe areas for children,
rooms that offer flexibility, and accessibility to services.
The nineteenth-century feminists, Hayden’s and Leavitt’s
research all illustrate that women are not simply ‘victims’
of ‘bad’ design but the spatial and social arrangements that
permeate domestic space result from structural inequal-
ities that can be contested. It is possible to conceptualise
and devise new ways of living.
Radical Perspectives: Patriarchal Homes
Alongside this socialist-inspired work on home, more
radical analyses of gender relations within the home
were being carried out. The core concept of radical fem-
inism is patriarchy. Radical feminism for the most part has
not had a large impact on geography, but its influence can
be seen in at least some thinking on home, namely
research on domestic or family violence. Although home
is a word that is laden with positive associations – suppo-
sedly, it represents shelter, sanctuary, hearth, heart, and
somewhere where we can be ourselves – not all homes
take on these meanings. Domestic or family violence
encompasses a variety of acts including physical harass-
ment, assault, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, intimidation,
and sexual abuse. It occurs across all countries, social
classes, ethnic groups, and ages. For some, especially
women, home is not a space of belonging and intimacy
but of alienation and violence. Home takes on very dif-
ferent meanings, when it is the site for battery, abuse,
and/or rape, away from the scrutiny of others. Each
year, in countries all over the world, many people, mainly
women and children, are forced to leave their homes to
find a place of safety away from a male perpetrator.
Geographies of home change for women and children
when they feel unsafe in their own private space. Often
violence is represented as something that women and
children are subject to outside rather than inside the
home. Ironically, though, the biggest threat of violence
comes not from a stranger outside the home but from
someone intimate inside the home. Women and children
often find it difficult to leave home to escape violence
because there are few places of refuge and resources upon
which women are able to draw. Economic dependence on
male partners means it is not always easy for women and
children to find a place of escape from domestic or family
violence. The structure of home ownership often acts to
exclude many women as owners reinforcing their depen-
dence on male partners. It is not only materially that the
dominant gender order is reproduced through home but
also symbolically. The powerful rhetoric of those who
argue for ‘family values’ can also make it difficult for
women to leave a violent relationship. Women are led
to believe that families need to stay together no matter the
emotional cost. The Women’s Refuge Movement, there-
fore, plays an important role in challenging the ‘privacy’
of the home, ‘male power’ within the home, and in pro-
viding a safe space for women and children, helping them
to leave and still have a roof over their heads.
Postcolonial Studies of Home
While many liberal, socialist, and radical feminists (who
were for the most part white, western, and middle-class)
were arguing that home was an oppressive space in which
it was impossible for women to realise their potential
because of inequality, capitalism, and/or patriarchy, a
number of African American feminists were critiquing
the presumed universality of these statements. In the
1980s, scholars and activists such as Patricia Hill Collins
and bell hooks began to argue convincingly that racism,
whether it is through slavery and/or segregation, pro-
duces a very different sense of home for people of
colour. hooks is well known for her statement that
‘homeplace’ can be a site of resistance. She argued that
‘homeplaces’, more often than not tended to by black
women, provide African Americans with an opportunity
to grow and nurture their spirits. Assumptions about
public and private spheres being discrete do not hold in
many African American communities. This kind of think-
ing about home as public and private, fixed and fluid, as

nowhere and everywhere, as a site of repression and
resistance at different times for different people made an
incredibly powerful contribution to the discipline of geo-
graphy and beyond and greatly influenced queer-inspired
and feminist poststructuralist work that began to emerge
in the 1990s.
Queering Home
In the 1990s feminist and/or queer scholars began to
study home through the lens of sexuality. They examined
the lives of people often deemed to be sexual Others or
dissidents (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and
queer) including their experiences of home in relation
to mobility, notions of a ‘queer homeland’, and ‘queer
diasporas’. Geographer Andrew Gorman-Murray, for
example, argued that the design, structure, and layout of
homes reflects and reinforces notions not just of men’s,
women’s, and children’s gendered roles and relations but
also of hegemonic heterosexuality. Men’s identities at
home are often assumed to be ‘breadwinner’ and ‘master
of the house’. In most three- or four-bedroom homes, the
comparatively larger bedroom is referred to as the ‘mas-
ter’ bedroom; it is designed and imagined for a
heterosexual couple. The other smaller bedrooms are
designed for children. Real estate advertisements provide
a useful example of this valourisation referring to ‘family
homes’, having lots of space for the kids, a great kitchen
for mum, and spacious garaging for dad. Obviously,
assumptions such as these about the use of different
areas of the home for different people do not always
hold true. In many countries, figures on household com-
position indicate that over the past few decades fewer and
fewer households conform to the traditional two parent
families with children model.
Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine examine New
Zealand and English lesbians’ experiences of living in
and visiting parental homes. They found, amongst other
things, that parental homes for lesbians are not always
conducive to establishing a core or roots especially if they
are not ‘out’ to family. Sue Kentlyn found in her
Australian-based research that queer homes can provide
a safe space where lesbians and gay men can cast off the
constraints of heteronormativity. They can be subversive
spaces, although sometimes gendered divisions of domes-
tic labour are still produced but not in the form of what
might be understood as conventional understandings of
femininity and masculinity. Gay men seemed happy to
engage in domestic chores, yet, some lesbian couples had
a strong aversion to housework. Although home is
valourised as a site of heterosexual family relations,
other social relations are also constituted within this
space. Queer perspectives on home are increasingly
Feminist Perspectives on Home 161
being used to highlight home as a site of resistance in
the face of heteronormativity.
Poststructuralist Feminism:
Deconstructing Home
In the 1990s and 2000s, not only did queer approaches to
home become popular but feminists also began to exam-
ine home using a poststructuralist lens. One line of
enquiry focused on deconstructing the binary divisions
between private and public, local and global, and homed
and homeless. It was argued that home is not a separate
sphere – it is both public and private. Home gardens are a
useful example of this because they are private spaces that
tend to be subject to public scrutiny from neighbours and
passers-by. In gardens, especially front gardens, it is often
possible to interact with neighbours and strangers. Also,
private gardens are subject to public governance.
Numerous council regulations and bylaws preside over
gardens and gardening practices. Like other spaces at
home, gardens are structured by gender relations. On
the basis of a British survey, Mark Bhatti and Andrew
Church suggest men and women are likely to be involved
in different types of gardening. For example, women
more than men are likely to gather ideas about gardening
and to be interested in organic gardening. Women are less
likely than men to be ‘investor gardeners’, that is, to
garden with the purpose of adding value to their homes.
Influenced by poststructuralist thinking, home has
increasingly come to be seen as existing at multiple scales
and as ever-changing. Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling
argue that home as a place is a porous, open intersection
of social relations and emotions. It is a place where senses
of belonging and alienation are constructed across diverse
scales ranging from the body, to the household, city,
nation, and globe. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore,
over the past few years a rich body of work has begun to
emerge of the ways in which transnational and diasporic
imaginaries create (and are themselves created by)
domestic practices. Questions about not only what home
might represent but also where it might be located are
now on the agenda. Scholars have begun to argue that
diasporic identities are mapped onto different gendered
geographies of home. Diasporic women often find them-
selves in a paradoxical relationship to home, experiencing
it as contained, traditional, and mundane as well as open,
new, and transformative as cultures are mixed. To return
to gardens, migrants’ gardens are often places of connec-
tion not only to one’s homeland but also to one’s new
home. The growing, shopping for, preparing, cooking,
and consuming of food are all important practices of
diasporic homemaking and illustrate clearly the rework-
ing of traditions and cultures.
162 Feminist Perspectives on Home
Yet another binary that has been deconstructed in
recent feminist poststructuralist research on home is
the binary between having a home and being homeless.
Early research on homelessness tended to define it as the
absence of a place to sleep and receive mail. More
recently, however, it has been recognised that this defi-
nition is far too simplistic. Homelessness might not only
mean the absence of a house or somewhere to sleep but
also lack of an environment that feels like home. There
are multiple continuums between having a house/home
and being houseless/homeless. People living in tempor-
ary, insecure, mobile, or substandard housing, or who
sometimes feel at home in a space but other times feel
threatened, alienated, and violated fall somewhere in the
middle of this continuum. Feminist geographers and
other social scientists have also argued that there is a
gendered dimension to homelessness. Given that women
often experience more financial hardship than men (they
are likely to have a lower income and more dependents),
there are millions of women across the globe who
experience episodes interspersed with extended periods
of houselessness and homelessness. Women are also
more likely to be made homeless as a result of domestic
violence.
Conclusion
Over the past three or four decades feminist scholarship
has contributed greatly towards understanding home. It
has offered both a spatialised and gendered understanding
of home. Liberal feminism put home of the map while
socialist feminism offered a more in-depth analysis of
home as a gendered and capitalist space of production
and reproduction. Radical feminism pointed to the
patriarchal relations as constituted within home, while
black women and women of colour countered these
claims arguing that home can also offer a reprieve
from racism. Finally, queer and poststructuralist femin-
ism pointed to a range of more fluid understandings of
multiple experiences of home that are shaped by gender
and sexuality and a number of other axes of embodied
subjectivity such as ethnicity, nationality, age, and
social class.
See also: Domestic Violence; Experiencing Home:
Sexuality; Gender Divisions in the Home; Meanings of
Home.
Further Reading
Bhatti M and Church A (2000) ‘I never promised you a rose garden’:
Gender, leisure and home-making. Leisure Studies 19: 183–197.
Blunt A (2005) Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the
Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell.
Blunt A and Dowling R (2006) Home. London: Routledge.
Gorman-Murray A (2008) Masculinity and the home: A critical review
and conceptual framework. Australian Geographer
39(3): 367–379.
Hayden D (1980) Melusina Fay Peirce and cooperative housekeeping.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2(3): 404–420.
Hooks B (1991) Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. London:
Turnaround.
Johnston L and Valentine G (1995) Wherever I lay my girlfriend, that’s my
home: The performance and surveillance of lesbian identities in
domestic environments. In: Bell D and Valentine G (eds.) Mapping
Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, pp. 99–113. London: Routledge.
Johnson LC (2006) Browsing the modern kitchen – a feast of gender,
place and culture (Part 1). Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of
Feminist Geography 13(2): 123–132.
Kentlyn S (2008) The radically subversive space of the queer home:
‘Safety house’ and ‘neighbourhood watch’. Australian Geographer
39(3): 327–337.
Monk J and Hanson S (1982) On not excluding half of the human in
human geography. Professional Geographer 34(1): 11–23.
Radley A, Hodgetts D, and Cullen A (2006) Fear, romance and
transience in the lives of homeless women. Social & Cultural
Geography 7(3): 437–461.
Sahil R (2002) Shifting meanings of home: Consumption and identity in
Moroccan women’s transnational practices between Italy and
Morocco. In: Al-Ali N and Koser K (eds.) New Approaches to
Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of
Home, pp. 51–67. London: Routledge.
Relevant Websites
http://hfw.org.uk/ – Housing for Women. Keys to a Better Life
www.khuthaza.org.za/ – Khuthaza