Thread by @alevin

In 1920 the NBER when it was chartered made a fateful decision to exclude women's household labor from economic statistics (Redesigning the American Dream, Hayden, p. 125)

after WW1, the labor "family wage" campaign was intended to help returning veterans displace women who had entered the workforce during the war, by providing men enough money for their wives to return home (49)

and business and labor leaders agreed on a strategy to promote suburban home ownership, in the interest of contented workers with economic stability, wives to manage the home, consumption to drive the economy (p.50)

ideas of "separate spheres" contributed to spacial land use patterns separating homes from workplaces, contributing to the difficult childcare commutes experienced by working parents (128)

economist Ann Markusen hypothesized back in 1980 that trends toward gentrification and revival of small cities were influenced by 2-earner households choosing locations requiring less travel time. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10…

more women use transit than men in the US, and just over 50% of transit trips are non-work trips; the focus of transport data on journey to work hides opportunities to improve travel patterns common to women: apta.com/resources/repo…

apparently the reason for built-in TV cabinets in Levittown houses was that this enabled the TV to be sold as an integral part of the house and financed with the mortgage. (p. 149).

"Apartments are a sign of deterioration. It takes the sparkle out of the American Dream just knowing there are apartments on the block" - a resident in 1981 opposed to a proposal to legalize subdividing large houses in Springdale CT, quoted by Hayden p. 194

Hayden supports more flexibility to modify suburban houses and neighborhoods for different needs, household types, stages of life. She cites large older houses turned into apartments for younger people, assisted living for older...

the book has interesting and examples of programs in Switzerland to carve out common public space by sharing formerly private back yards p.207

... in line with the philosophy expressed in Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn. If learning is good, do overly restrictive rules against change make buildings, places, and communities stupid? amazon.com/How-Buildings-…

"Redesigning the American Dream" starts with a case study of a shipbuilding "company town" rapidly assembled during WW2 for "Rosie the Riveter" with 24-hour childcare centers and take-out food service on a straight line connecting homes and ship-building sites...

Vanport City, Oregon, housed 40,000 people at its peak, offered affordable housing for a variety of household types, and was integrated with 40% African-American residents. Reading this case study, I couldn't tell if it was real or science fiction. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanport,_…

part of Vanport city was dismantled after the war - it was built under the Lanham Act which allowed publicly subsidized housing for the wartime emergency under the condition that the program would be temporary
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_H…

1-family detached houses "encode Victorian stereotypes about a woman's place, while 1-family neighborhoods sustain the separation of the household from the world of jobs & public life. Together, houses & neighborhoods form an architecture of gender unsuited to 21st century life."

Hayden uses (creates?) an analytical framework with three types of housing, the "haven", US-style suburban detached houses, the "industrial" strategy of large apartment blocks, and the "neighborhood" strategy with medium-density housing and common space...

Catharine Beecher (sister of the abolitionist) designed prototype suburban houses in the 1840s, designed to create a haven where women would nurture children and men, far from the competitive arena of urban workplaces

Melusina Pierce and the "material feminist" movement advocated for day care, public kitchens, and communal dining spaces that would enable women to be active participants in public life (p. 44). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melusina_…

@stewartbrand

Americans often say "There aren't enough ours in the day" rather than "I'm frantic because the distance between my home and my workplace is too great. (p. 57).. we think of our miseries as being caused by personal problems rather than social problems.

"Dream houses... carried unacknowledged costs: they wasted available land; they required large amounts of energy consumption; and they demanded a great deal of unpaid female labor." p. 60

August Bebel, a German Marxist, advocated in favor of industrializing household work: cooking, laundry, childcare; freeing women to work in factories; people would live in large apartments with dining halls and childcare centers (p. 89)

In the Soviet Union, childcare was provided and 90% of women were in the paid workforce, but housing had neither Bebel's imagined industrial-scale services nor American-style appliances, so women still worked 17 hours per week more than men

"in both cultures (US and Soviet), the majority of married women had 2 jobs, worked 17-21 hours per week more than men and earned about 60-75% of what men earned" p. 105

@weel this is the thesis statement of the book; the thread before and after this tweet has more