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Journal of Design History 2005 18(1):81-97; doi:10.1093/jdh/epi007
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© The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.

Articles

Home-builder or Home-maker?

Reader Presence in Articles on Home-building in Commercial Women's Magazines in 1920s' Japan

Sarah Teasley

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

This article considers ways in which articles on home design in commercial women's magazines in inter-war Japan invited women to participate in architectural practice and public discourse as designers, consumers and users. Analysis of model home plans and articles on interior decoration and home-building published between 1916 and 1931 in four popular magazines demonstrates that magazines offered women a highly ambivalent way of relating to the home. First-hand accounts of women's experiences with home-building and renovation and architects' prescriptive model plans encouraged readers to take the initiative in creating an ideal dwelling space for their family, both as designers and as consumers of the newly commodified home and its furnishings. At the same time, voyeuristic travelogues of visits to the homes of élite households offered readers spaces and lifestyles to desire while marking these objects as unattainable. Articles enabled women's participation in architecture whilst limiting that participation to the space of the home. This editorial strategy strengthened women's identification as housewives and encouraged them to participate as consumers who, even when kept from actual consumption by economic and gender limitations, would at least know what to desire.

Key Words: 1920s—domestic space—home-building and renovation—Japan—representation—women


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