Abstract

Within much of the existing literature the idea of modernity and the modern has often focused on the public world associated with masculinity and politics, while the private sphere of the home has symbolised a gendered feminine space not linked with modernity. The influence of feminist writings in the 1960s and 1970s have for a long time cast a shadow on the domestic as something negative and oppressive, a place that has to be rejected by women in their quest to become modern. Women’s relationship to modernity has therefore been left in the periphery as something that can not be found in their private lives. In The Parlour and The Suburb. Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity, Judy Giles challenges these ideas and demonstrates that the home and the domestic can be seen as something positive, giving women in the first part of the twentieth century a sense and experience of modernity.

How to Cite:

Skoog, K., (2017) “Book Review: Giles, Judy, The Parlour and The Suburb. Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity, 2004, Oxford: Berg. ISBN - 1859737021”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 4(4), 124-126. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.117