Are Women Really Better at Home Decor?
A History of Gendered Spaces and Consumerism
I went to my friend’s apartment that he's been sharing with his girlfriend for more than a year. While entering the flat, the most frequent comment he receives is: ‘are you living at your girlfriend’s house?’ Indeed, he barely participated in the decoration of their home. Not because she’s imposing her style, on the contrary she seems to seek for his contribution, but more because he doesn’t seem to care for it.
As much as this can seem an isolated situation, it isn’t, and in fact memes joking on a single-man’s persist and seem to be shared world-wide, or at least in the west.
But why is it that men appear to not care for the decoration of the house and women the maker of the home? According to coohom.com on “why females excel in interior decorating more than males,” the answer lies in our nature: “women are often socialized from a young age to appreciate aesthetics, colors and harmony in their surroundings. This early exposure fosters a natural inclination toward design and decoration.”
As you may or may not have realized from the blog, the subject of women’s inclination toward consumerism is a trend that fascinates me. And rarely is it justified by “natural inclination.”
So where exactly does this inclination toward home-decor come from?
Since the industrial revolution, and more evidently from the late 18th century, work and home gradually became more distinct spheres. the women of the middle and upper classes started to appropriate these spaces. As the divide between public and private sphere widened, the public sphere came to be associated with men, while the private, domestic sphere, in middle and upper class families, was increasingly linked to women. Moreover, it was during this same period that the concept of the “home,” distinct from the physical structure of the “house,” began to take shape in the English language, as well as the term “domesticity.” Although it has by now been proven by scholars that this dichotomy is not completely binary, and that women did participate in public life in various ways, the domestic sphere nonetheless became strongly identified with women throughout the 19th century.
This growing focus on the home coincided with the rise of consumer culture. Mass production and expanding markets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made decorative goods more accessible than ever in Europe and the U.S. Home décor magazines flourished, offering advice on everything from wallpaper to furniture arrangements.
As historian Frank Trentmann points out in the book The Empire of Things, the accumulation of things became central to middle-class identity. The home became a display of taste, respectability and social standing. Interior décor allowed middle-class families to differentiate themselves from the working class and to project an image of modernity and refinement. For women home decoration became an expectation, shopping for furniture and decorative objects was deeply tied to their role as caretakers of the home. Trentmann views this phenomenon critically, confining the creative aspects of women to consumption and the domestic sphere.
« Shopping and commodities were crucial to wives’ and mothers’ economic and political participation as well as to their artistic expression and identity construction.[...] For many wives and mothers, therefore, consumption was a lifelong activity, one that enabled the survival and well-being of their families. For a few women, too, it offered opportunities for artistic experimentation. Finally, some women turned to consumer culture to construct status. In their attempts to portray themselves as modern, they denigrated other women. »
In this light, women’s taste for home decor isn’t a natural inclination but rooted in almost two centuries of social expectation in which they were positioned as the curators of domestic life, expected to be the creator of the “home.” However, this dynamic is beginning to shift, as more men take an active role in decorating their living spaces. A clear example of this change is the subreddit r/MaleLivingSpace. In the forum men post their apartments and seek advice on how to improve their interiors, challenging the stereotype of the unfurnished, bare apartment with just a mattress on the floor.
