American domesticity

the long version

From the "cult of domesticity" to the Semiotics of the Kitchen, housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing "woman" to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that down-play race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts.