Patriarchy and Place-Making: Joanna Gaines’ Cult of Domesticity
By: Lydia Kulina
Tags: Urbanism, History, Feminism, Home, Design

Purveyor of the term “living room”, Edward Bok was the editor of Ladies Home Journal for over 30 years. Under his leadership, the magazine changed the relationship between advertisers and the consumer market by creating content based on advertiser’s wares for the new emerging suburban nation — new ovens, refrigerators, and an occasional rouge lipstick. Unknown to many readers, Bok was a social conservative who believed in the joys of motherhood and domesticity. Equipped with spreads on the latest in bathroom and kitchen technology (sound familiar?), his magazine placated not only what women should desire but how women should physically structure their lives in a place. Bok’s floor spreads are now credited with the plethora of bungalow style housings. that have dashed the suburban landscape. Their suburban one-story successors such as ranchers and Cape Cod’s with enlarged living room and kitchens continue to skirt our national landscape are a frequent feature of Gaines’ real estate business, and publications. Bok was not alone — his contemporary, writer Elizabeth Gordon encouraged. middle-class consumption in her book “House Beautiful” as means to individualism and even protection against communism. Following Henri Lefebvre, if the creation of space is ideological and political, our fascination with the world of Joanna Gaines suggests perhaps our ideologies have not changed much either. What ideologies are underlying the place-making that Gaines imagines?

First, just like Bok, Gaines imagines and markets place-making in the confines of suburbia that was built on the idea of spatial separation. This is evident in everything from the remoteness of Gaines’ personal residence to the spatially isolated rehabbed homes that are the cornerstone of her reality television show. This isolationist design was conceived by thought-leaders such as Catharine Beecher (sister of Harriet Beech Stowe who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) whose popular books encouraged women to commit their lives to the upkeep of the suburban home and family, calling it the “home church of Jesus Christ”. In her quite detailed home manuals with diagrams for everything from kitchens to gardens, Beecher described household and familial work as “women’s true profession”. She not only advocated for women’s physical separation from secular social and political spheres but insisted that women’s home consumption patterns would promote capitalism. This patriarchal separateness became structurally fortified by state and private place-maker such as Bok. Decades later, in. “The Life and Death of the Great American City”, Jane Jacobs would observe, “Curiously, [male architectural designers and planners] design and plan to exclude normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies. The idea of a matriarchy inevitably accompanies all planning in which residences are isolated from other parts of life”. Suburban women (it should be duly noted that due to red-lining and FHA loan guidelines, minority women were barred from buying in these new neighborhoods) became cut off from indiscriminate sources of interaction necessary to procure social capital. This decrease in civic, political, associational, and political life, which has been well documented in “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam, led to a decrease of social power for many suburban women. Following the spatial isolation of the family, women became were reconsigned to the role of a Victorian “Home Body”, aptly the name of Gaines’ book, where fulfillment was found in one’s identity as a wife and homemaker.

Following Gaine’s suburban placemaking imagination, there is an implicit suggestion amidst the juxtaposed articles on raising chickens, eco-cleaning, and organizing, that purpose, and meaning for women, the majority of Magnolia’s readership, is found in the mystique of Bok’s and Beecher’s domesticity. It is the same old monster with new clothes — cherry pies have turned into raspberry brownie cheesecake, Old English Scratch Cover is now a green eco-friendly surface cleaner with organic neroli oil. “As she made the beds,” writes Betty Friedan in “Feminine Mystique” of the suburban housewife, “shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?” Ironically, Gaines herself realizes the error of her own dogma, noting that, “It was important I kept myself creatively fed [when staying home], so I never let myself be filled with feelings of discontent,” in this last year’s Mother’s Day blog post. Following, there is the implicit belief that by creatively “redesigning” (code word for consuming) patriarchal space, one can experience a better lifestyle. This is the same ideology that drove the success of Bok’s magazine through advertising and Beecher’s housing manuals for the suburban “home minister”. Not only does one need to consume the goods of advertisers but one can consume symbols of Joanna’s lifestyle herself — conveniently located at your local Home Depot, Target, or if you make it out to Waco, Texas, The Magnolia Store

Let me be clear, the problem is not with Joana’s individual lifestyle choices. The problem with our fascination with the Gaines is how those individual choices have been marketed, just like Bok did 70 years before, to women by a woman for capitalist gain. While Gaines fans would retort that she is an “entrepreneur”, her ideology still implicitly influences the place-making practices that have great bearing on the way we live our lives. Ultimately, the way we create place will shape how we live in it. The suburbs have certainly transformed since their inception but there are some lingering familiar themes that continue to be persuasive in the creation of space. Does Gaines’ ideology regarding the construction of space represent our desires or even the changing desired lifestyles of millions of women? “Suburban women” implores Kim England, author of “Changing Suburbs; Changing Women”, “must be acknowledged as being able to plan and learn new ways of acting and possibly change their sociopolitical system to better suit their needs”. How then should we reimagine space if we are going to maintain horizontal, non-patriarchal relationships? It is not a new issue — experiments in the Soviet Union or World War I workforce housing are a distant memory to many. However, momentum is growing behind Women-centric spaces such as The Wing, an urban co-working space whose mission is to provide professional, civic, social, and economic advancement of women through community. Similarly, Meegan Denenberg and Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman’s organization Women-Led Spaces has sought to unite women in the field to create strategic plans for contemporary urban planning issues. Ironically, in the words of Gaines herself, perhaps we need “fresh inspiration for life and home in each new season. . . to create or improve the space — and the life — they love.” Let’s allow function follow form — perhaps then, we’ll have one less macrame throw pillow.