DOMESTIC INTERIORS

Rineke van Daalen

Houses and their interiors provide a rich picture of the lifestyles of their inhabitants. They also represent and objectify the social relations of the people that designed them, built them, and used them. At the French court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, typically the king and his wife each had separate sleeping apartments, an arrangement suggestive of their affective relationship. Nineteenth-century Londoners built their family residences away from business and pleasure, aspiring to privacy and safety from the cares and worries of the outside world within the impregnable castle of the home. Parisians on the contrary felt more attracted to life outside the home, in the streets, gardens, theaters, and restaurants. Viennese townspeople were more engaged in consumption than production. Both bourgeois and aristocrats relied on their luxurious houses as public representations of their status.

Houses, as the examples suggest, reflect the means of subsistence of their inhabitants, their affective relations and power relations, their family systems, marriage customs, laws of succession, and the composition of their households. Changes in these respects, such as the death of a parent or the formation of a new household, are reflected in changes in dwelling spaces. Houses also reveal the social relations between their inhabitants and the outside world. In small-scale, traditional socities there is no distinction between a public and a private domain and houses are more accessible than in differentiated societies. This contrast roughly corresponds to the dichotomy between countryside and city.

The social history of houses and domestic interiors may be told as a story of increasing differentiation: between home and work, between life in the household and in the extended family, between the community and the neighborhood, between different generations and sexes. During the Middle Ages, all-purpose rooms were characteristic of aristocratic, peasant, and artisan dwellings alike, but as people's daily pursuits became more varied and differences between people increased, the configurations of their houses also changed. The function of domestic interiors as a display of status became more important as affluence increased, differences in power decreased, and status rivalry intensified.

Emulation and competition are driving forces in the development and spread of styles and fashions. Those to whom it mattered lost no time in acquiring the most up-to-date designs and fashions, and the rest followed slowly. Architects, designers, upholsterers, and later professional decorators were unfettered by national boundaries. Nevertheless, within Europe enduring regional building styles evolved as expressions of national and local qualities. General developments that affected Europe as a whole, such as industrialization, urbanization, and population growth, offer only a limited perspective on building styles. Local traditions, including those affecting homes and their design and decor, remained embedded in regional and national patterns of stratification and political organization. Taste in domestic interiors reveals not only people's actual social position, as notions of taste are usually acquired early and subconsciously, they also reveal people's deep-rooted dispositions. Thus the study of housing and domestic interiors opens the door on several areas of social-historical interest. This article, relying on several studies, sketches the history of housing in western European countries. More research on other parts of Europe is necessary, especially from a comparative perspective combining social history, sociology, and the history of art.

THE DIFFERENTIATION OF SOCIETY AND THE SUBDIVISION OF DOMESTIC SPACE

In his landmark work The World We Have Lost (1971), Peter Laslett drew attention to the scale of life in the preindustrial world. Nearly all people spent all their lives in small groups. Apart from going to church, people attended only gatherings that could assemble in ordinary houses, which were also the scenes of labor. The mean size of households was related to the status of their inhabitants: the laboring poor had few children, their life expectancy was low, and they sent their children at the age of ten as working servants to richer people. In England this group, the poor laborers, accounted for as many as two-thirds of the population. They lived in humble cottages whose construction cost less than three years' income. By contrast, members of the English gentry often had more than one mansion—some had as many as twelve seats—in various spots in the countryside; in their absence the houses were maintained by tenants. At the end of the preindustrial era, roughly three-quarters of the English still lived in villages and hamlets.

Although they do not supplant written materials, paintings and pictures offer glimpses of the simple lodgings of the majority, their interiors and uses. In Visit to the Farmstead, the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) depicts a Flemish farmhouse consisting of only one room, with an open fire for cooking and heating in the center and a smoke hole above it. The room is dimly lit by small apertures. Of the peasants and children seen in the room, one woman is breast-feeding her newborn infant, two people are making butter in a churn, and another is entertaining three well-to-do visitors. The table has been laid for a meal, with a white tablecloth and several bowls of porridge, and someone is already eating. A cradle with a sleeping dog inside stands in a corner; a large box serves as storage space. Although the painting shows no bed, in reality one bed, which accommodated the whole family, always stood in the multipurpose living room of the houses of villagers in this period. The farmsteads functioned simultaneously as residence and economic unit of production. The dwelling provided shelter for the family and other inhabitants, the food provisions, harvested crops, tools, and even the cattle. Day laborers also lived in one-room dwellings. Within such a dwelling all human activities took place in the same space, and no boundaries delineated different pastimes or basic functions such as breast-feeding or sleeping. For centuries this spatial model was standard for the majority of the population, both in the countryside and the cities.

Gradually however, as social differentiation and stratification increased, the geography and the interior of the houses became more complicated. Among artisans and master artisans, growing commercial property translated into more elaborate interiors. According to an inventory drawn up in 1647 somewhere on the outskirts of Paris, the layout of the house of an artisan consisted of a downstairs kitchen giving onto the street, a living room behind the kitchen, and two rooms upstairs with a small attic. Up to the eighteenth century, and in some remote regions even into the nineteenth, beds stood in the heated living room, where people also stayed during the day. Even in the larger houses of farmers and burghers, people slept where they had fires—in the same place where they prepared and ate their meals.

The trend toward complexity and privacy. Members of the gentry, the court nobility, and the merchant elite were among the forerunners in the trend toward more elaborate and complex houses. In their households the first provisions for privacy were created, and rooms became intended for specific purposes. The dwellings of the nobility of the ancien régime in France, called hotél or palais depending on the owner's status, also housed a motley crowd of servants. The staff, from the coachman to the kitchen maid and the footman, lived behind the scenes, separated from the quarters devoted to the social life of the owners by one or more antechambers, in which servants waited for their masters and received orders. The German sociologist Norbert Elias observed that these rooms manifested the "co-existence of constant spatial proximity and constant social distance, of intimate contact in one stratum and the strictest aloofness in the other." (Elias, 1983, pp. 47–49). The same pattern is evident in the palace of the king. Noblemen and noblewomen took their humble place in the antechamber to await the king's orders.

The separate sleeping apartments for the king and his wife illustrate both their relationship in their marriage and their relations to their "houses" of descent. Husband and wife were primarily related as representatives of their lineage to the world outside. They had common social obligations to their families, but for the rest they were relatively free in their movement. They did not have what one might call a family life, and each had their own social circle and led their own social life. To allow them to perform their representative functions, the society rooms of their places were divided into two parts. Among the nobility the large salon was the heart of court society. In this appartement de société the master and lady of the house received a small circle of visitors and engaged in their more intimate social intercourse. Public and official visits took place in the appartement de parade, where the owners of the house arranged the affairs of court life as scions of a noble family, always endeavoring to live up to the demands of their social status.

Among these absolutist court circles, houses were built to meet the representative social obligations of their owners. Through their choice of materials, design, and decoration, architects tried to express the social status of the inhabitants. The cost was attuned to the demands of their ranks. "A duke must build his house in such a way as to tell the world: I am a duke and not merely a count" (Elias, 1983, p. 63). In European absolutist societies, houses of the haute bourgeoisie and middle-class families were small-scale imitations of the houses of the nobility, with some significant differences. Sleeping arrangements of husbands and wives reflected their greater affective attachement. The bourgeois elite was not geared to social intercourse with many people but rather pursued contacts primarily related to business—hence the small size of their "society," or reception, rooms. Their homes had no appartement de parade, and their salon, or reception room, was less impressive than that of the nobility. Nevertheless, their houses were also built to display social status and prestige. In matters of interior design the French set the standard for civilized taste. It became fashionable for architects in the Netherlands and England to decorate interiors, window panels, doors, chimneypieces, ceilings, and vases in the French style. This style was transmitted by "advice books," illustrated with genre scenes and engravings of interiors that depicted the current good taste.

Family life and interiors. In the seventeen-century Dutch Republic, the wealthy ruling families in the city demonstrated their status by way of the comfort and luxury of the interiors of their houses. In addition to serving as living accommodations, these houses had separate areas for the use of business. Simon Schama (1987) has written of such homes as symbolic centers of decency, where morality was upheld. In the Dutch Republic family households were seen as the origin of authority and held a central place within the state. The special significance of the family is reflected in well-kept and carefully arranged dwellings. The Dutch attached great significance to tidy and well-kept interiors, and indeed exhibited a ritual cleaning mania. Wives and mothers had a pivotal function in fitting out and protecting hearth and home. They used their cleaning utensils to ward off the wickedness of the outside world and more generally to shield the house from evil. Careful tending and meticulous cleaning of the interior of houses demonstrated the solidity of family life and expressed at the same time feelings of patriotism and commitment to liberty and purity. A filthy and unattended house was seen as a breeding place for disease, creating opportunities for the spread of evil. Inventories of the houses of the elite attest to an array of carefully chosen furniture, cooking utensils, paintings, and household articles. All the accoutrements of domestic life were chosen to create a comfortable and well-maintained home and to express the social status and moral solidity of its owners.

As compared to earlier European housing arrangements, the houses of the Dutch elite showed a greater concern for privacy. This separation from the world outside is one aspect of broader processes of the modernization and growing intimacy of family life. In the Netherlands the modern family came into being relatively early. The seventeenth-century urban elite gave special attention to an intimate family event like childbirth by arranging kraamkamers, or lying-in rooms, to lodge mother and infant after delivery. The interior of these kraamkamers would be fitted up in accordance with fixed patterns and provided with special furniture for mothers and children. Objects like the bakermat (a rush basket for the dry nurse), the kraamscherm (a screen to protect mother and child from drafts and the inquisitive gaze of bystanders), the baby-linen basket, baby clothes, blankets, cradle, and pincushion were all meant to show the care and competence of mothers and to express the social status of the family. Drawings of kraamkamers show the increasing value placed on privacy, with mothers and infants screened from outsiders. Whereas images from earlier in the seventeenth century depict visits from neighbors, relatives, and acquaintances to see mother and child, over the course of the century the childbed moved increasingly into the private sphere. As the number of visitors decreased, such scenes ceased to be community gatherings but rather became intimate, private moments within the nuclear family circle, concentrated in carefully arranged rooms.

This and other arrangements within the home correspond to changes analyzed by Norbert Elias in his landmark work of 1939, The Civilizing Process (2000). Elias showed that from the Middle Ages onward western Europeans became more sensitive and more reserved in their own behavior as well as in their behavior toward others. Bodily functions such as defecating, urinating, sleeping, and copulating began to arouse feelings of shame and embarrassment in the presence of other people. These feelings were reflected in the geography of houses and in the objects within the rooms. Houses became divided by more walls and gained more floors. Rooms acquired special functions for public and private behaviors and became accessible only from corridors and halls. Houses were adapted to these new needs, such as the replacement of one central, free-standing fireplace by several fireplaces built into the walls. The elite more and more put their beds behind the scenes and equipped them with curtains and hangings. People who were not familiar to each other less often slept in the same bed or the same room.

An important development in the trend toward privacy concerned defecating. In the countryside people continued to relieve themselves outdoors, but in the cities of the sixteenth century public conveniences were arranged and municipal ordinances forbade defecating outside these facilities. During the seventeenth century more and more well-to-do people acquired chamberpots, or chaises percées, for their own houses. These conveniences, formerly placed in the middle of dining rooms and salons, later were kept only in bedrooms; over time they were gradually ostracized to special nooks and crannies within the house, to cellars or under the doorsteps. Pots were also placed in bedside cabinets and cupboards or disguised as something else, for example as a pile of books. Conveniences for servants were still built in gardens and outdoor courtyards.

URBANIZATION, INDUSTRIALIZATION, AND THE INCREASED NEED FOR PRIVACY

During the nineteenth and in particular the twentieth century, houses underwent important changes, with urban dwellings leading the way. Two parallel processes, both characteristic of the breakdown of older social hierarchies, were significant: The social distance between family and servants lost its former clarity, prompting employers to increase physical distance between themselves and their staff. At the same time, relations between husband and wife, and between parents and children, became more egalitarian. These processes promoted further differentiation of the geography of houses and increased the individual need for privacy. Rooms and sections of the house were strictly divided on the basis of social, functional, and moral criteria. The interior decoration of the house now received more attention, and decorating the home became a profession.

Among the bourgeoisie, rooms acquired specific functions earliest and with greatest effect in England. Already in the sixteenth century a yeoman's house had a specialized geography, and in nineteenth-century country houses this specialization became elaborate. The preparation of the (quite simple) English meals was dispersed over specialized rooms: the larder, divided into store rooms; separate rooms for different kinds of cleaning; a scullery; and areas for cooking, baking, and washing up. By the middle of the century the medium-sized houses of the middle classes, small-scale imitations of Georgian houses, were also becoming elaborate. Masters and servants, men and women, visitors and family members had separate staircases and specialized spaces. Women gained their boudoirs, men their gentleman's room, and children their nurseries. The dining room was equipped with massive, simple furniture, expressing masculinity, while the drawing room showed feminine charm and elegance. In the planning of the house is evident the middle-class conviction that the private sphere belonged to women. Children were raised apart from their parents, tended by the nanny and governess. Rooms were preferably not connected by doors but rather separated by corridors and halls built at the expense of the size of the rooms themselves.

These houses allowed for a high degree of personal privacy, in particular for the adult owners, less so for children, adolescents, and servants. The layout of the house allowed English parents to avoid too much contact with their children. In contrast to customs on the Continent, English ladies never set foot in their kitchen domains. When the first English flats were built, architects tried to make the horizontal subdivision of the houses match the vertical subdivision in standard townhouses. But by the 1870s, in reaction to the elaborate Victorian houses, the suburban houses of the new middle class acquired a simpler layout. These houses had no basement, while the kitchen and reception rooms were arranged on the ground floor and the bedrooms were placed above.

The banning of beds to rooms that acquired the specific name of "bedroom" and their clear separation from the rest of the house became characteristic of the sleeping habits of much of the middle class. Hygienists of the nineteenth century recommended fresh air in the bedrooms and specified ideal sizes for the rooms. Curtains around the bed were preferably kept open. Gradually the idea became accepted that single beds for one person were preferable to cupboard beds and that spacious bedrooms were preferable to alcove bedrooms. A feathery eiderdown and pillow and too many blankets came to be seen as the breeding places of unpleasant odors and as an incitement to masturbation. Rooms for sleeping were to be kept free of odors of any kind—flowers, servants, animals, or foul laundry. Isolated houses were preferred, remote from the emanations of bustling crowds. In cities, windows were not to be opened for too long lest the polluted evaporations of the streets enter.

Although ideas about the desirability of privacy were similar in other western European countries, they varied in their realization. These differences were a consequence partly of the available economic resources and partly of traditions in family and societal life. French cities, for example, were more crowded than English, partly because of greater preference for urban over suburban life. The Parisian apartments that were built in the nineteenth century consisted of several ingeniously arranged, specialized one-purpose rooms, but their scale was very small and they did not offer as much privacy as English apartments. The French made the most of the available space and were less sensitive to the mingling of different atmospheres. Their bedrooms had a more open character and were seen as a comfortable extension of the drawing room; the kitchen and dining room were sometimes connected. English critics found such habits shocking. They saw the houses of the Parisians as uncomfortable, crowded, and even indecent. But compared to the dwellings of the ancien régime, these houses were not so bad, and compared to the houses in Vienna the new Parisian flats were paragons of compact and ingenious architecture.

The function of home as a display of status and wealth also varied among countries. English Victorians and Edwardians saw their houses primarily as a place for the family and eschewed ostentation, while the French home combined family uses with those of maintaining social relations, business, reception, and entertainment. The cultivation of this public side of life demanded more luxury, and thus the Parisian flats were lavishly furnished, with marble chimneypieces, velvet upholstery, embossed wallpaper, and abundant mirrors. In nineteenth-century Vienna, the continued social and political dominance of the aristocracy left the bourgeoisie in a subordinate position also in matters of culture and taste. The impressive lodgings of aristocrats came to epitomize good architectural taste and thus became models for bourgeois homes. Imitation of aristocratic styles often entailed a sacrifice of interior comfort in favor of external display and its suggestion of status. The petit bourgeoisie paid less attention to practical needs, such as places for sleeping, and sacrificed domestic comfort to create a salon for receptions, where they exhibited their volumes of literature and poetry. They were rather slow to give their rooms differentiated and variable designations and late in introducing corridors.

Taking bodily functions backstage. Sanitary provisions are a special chapter in the social history of privacy in the home. Until the introduction of running water, people washed themselves with water from pitchers and washbowls placed on tables. In the houses of the rich, these tables would be elegantly tiled amenities, with towel rails, framed mirrors, and wooden or marble surfaces. Initially they were not placed in special bathrooms but were pieces of loose furniture that could easily be moved. In 1837 even Buckingham Palace lacked a bathroom. For a long time the ownership of baths and washbasins was a luxury. Water sellers served well-to-do customers without a bathtub of their own by carrying baths into their apartments. The first specialized bathrooms were spacious, in accordance with the recommendations of hygienists; they featured heavy furniture and walls covered with absorbent material. Alain Corbin (1986) has argued that the relatively late appearance of bathrooms was the most important event in the history of living accommodations in the nineteenth century and a decisive step in the specification of rooms for intimate purposes.

Great Britain was the first to implement the layout of houses according to the new sanitary norms, which were thought not only to be healthful but, in a more general way, civilized. Piped water supplies and the use of baths spread there earlier than on the Continent. As the custom of performing bodily functions in private became increasingly the norm and the ideas of the nineteenth century hygienists gained acceptance, people paid more attention to the interior of their bathrooms and toilets. Closet pots were made of vitreous china, often with elaborate floral decorations; seat, cover, and floor were made of oak and were neatly waxed. Water closets appeared as soon as running water was introduced in the nineteenth century, earlier for the rich than for the poor, and earlier in cities than in the countryside. But the majority of the population continued to lack such provisions. The pail-and-tub system, cesspools, and dunghills remained common. In France, where tolerance of bodily emanations was greater, the introduction of piped water took place later.

The new standards of privacy and sanitation depended on connecting houses to the public utilities of water pipes and sewers. And constructing these networks depended on two factors: The public needed to recognize that the living conditions of the poor increased the risk for both rich and poor of contracting contagious diseases. And they had to accept the notion that improvements in living conditions, sanitary amenities, and the removal of garbage and excrement from houses were issues that required municipal action in the construction of public works. Changing the behavior of individual poor people would not be sufficient. Houses in newly built districts, where residents were willing to pay for sanitary facilities, were the first into which fresh water was pumped via a branching network of pipes. The waste water and excrement was then drained away in a parallel but separate network of sewers. These public networks had far-reaching consequences for domestic facilities and conditioned the way people urinated, defecated, and washed themselves. Other innovations like gas, electricity, and the telephone had equally important implications for homes and domestic life in industrialized, urbanized societies.

The bourgeois home as a model for working-class dwellings. Until well into the twentieth century, the majority of the working class lived in overcrowded houses of poor quality and without sanitary facilities. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the urban bourgeoisie began to see the houses of the poor as something to be ashamed of, a deficiency they were responsible for. Figures from the municipality of Amsterdam show that poor dwellings still commonly contained one or two multipurpose rooms: in 1899, 28.5 percent of the inhabitants lived in a one-room dwelling, 30.5 percent in dwellings with two rooms. The bourgeoisie was concerned that such dwellings would encourage men to frequent the pubs, while children would be prompted to roam the streets without adult supervision. The development of public housing, often organized by housing associations, was intended to provide affordable, functional, hygienic, and decent homes, and thus create the necessary conditions for a healthy and respectable family life. Rental regulations were drawn up, housing laws established norms for living accommodations, and model dwellings were built. Philanthropic female housing inspectors, who also collected the rent, instructed working-class mothers in proper living conditions.

Norms for good housing were attuned in particular to the family relations within the bourgeoisie, which in those days were taken as a model. Civilizing campaigns promoted a family life in which mothers and children were at the center, with a clear-cut division of tasks for husbands and wives and an inward-looking character. According to this model the necessary condition for a sound and decent family life was a house, preferably detached, with several one-purpose rooms: a living room, a kitchen for cooking only and not for socializing, bedrooms for parents, separate bedrooms for girls and boys, a separate toilet, and a special place for washing. Fresh air and sunlight were recommended as conditions for hygiene and good health, but only the well-to-do could afford such airy, light abodes. The design of houses was meant to allow the inhabitants to perform as many functions as possible—going to the toilet, cleansing the body, and doing the laundry—inside their homes. Collective spaces where members of different families met each other, like corridors and porches, were rejected as likely to promote gossip and indecent behavior. So as to ensure this introverted character, architects of the Dutch expressionist Amsterdam School (roughly 1920 to 1940) placed the windows in houses so high that the occupants were unable to look out.

As real wages rose, members of the working class could afford separate houses with several rooms, and they adopted some of these attitudes toward public space and domestic privacy. However, mapping the house according to existing family norms did not ensure that all people used their houses in the way the designers had intended. Many working-class families persisted in their old habits. They ate meals in their small kitchens, and some of them opposed hygienic campaigns directed at making feces both invisible and unsmellable in the house as well as outside it. Because of the popular belief that physical smells, including that of excrement, had a therapeutic and vitalizing effect, many families distrusted the bourgeois attitude toward bodily functions and saw it as a kind of conspiracy.

In addition to the normalization of specialized rooms, the circulation of fresh air, and the construction of sanitary facilities, efficiency and functionality came to be prized attributes of the home. The idea that a rational household needed a rational division of the house was proposed in the first decades of the twentieth century by women advocates of labor-saving technology to lighten the housewife's workload, such as Christine Frederick in the United States, who was inspired by the American efficiency engineer Frederick W. Taylor; Paulette Bergère in France; and Erna Meyer in Germany. Feminist oriented, they saw housewives as managers running a business; their kitchens had to be efficient workrooms attuned to their professional activities. For modern housekeeping, housewives were to be guided by scientific principles and should have at their disposal the most practical kitchen furniture and household effects, preferably designed by professionals. Special exhibitions were organized to advertise such modern, rationally equipped kitchens.

The working class was also instructed in the choice of furniture and general taste in interior furnishings. Exhibitions showing model interiors demonstrated what was "good" and "bad" taste. Rooms were not to be filled with impractical furniture or ornamental trumpery. The "good" interior contained solid, functional objects that gave the inhabitants plenty of room for movement. Wallpaper and floor coverings were preferably simple and understated. Tasteful design was seen as symbolic of the "right" way to live, of being truly civilized. Industrially produced design furniture could provide tasteful, decent, and "correct" articles affordable to all.

This style of functional interior design was associated with the German Bauhaus school of architecture and design and the Dutch De Stijl movement, both influential in the 1920s. Bauhaus and De Stijl rejected what was seen as a bourgeois aesthetic, eschewing, for example, pillars, elaborate ornamentation, and pointed roofs. Modern architecture—represented by Walter Gropius, founder and director of the Bauhaus; Mies van der Rohe, who became Bauhaus director in 1928; Gerrit Rietveld, associated with De Stijl; and Le Corbusier, the highly influential Swiss-born architect and proponent of functionalism—may also be seen as a protest against the privacy of the bourgeois dwelling. These architects rejected conventional divisions between rooms and tried to diminish the distance between the inside and the outside of the house by the use of glass. The counterpart to the functional style in early-twentieth-century architecture and design was the Art Nouveau, or, in German, Jugendstil, movement, with variants all over Europe. This style, which flourished from 1890 to 1910, combined ideals of modernity with the tradition of handicraft and was characterized by a sinous, organic ornamentation.

VARIATION IN LIFESTYLES AND DOMESTIC INTERIORS

It was only after World War II that economic conditions permitted the widespread application of prewar ideas about housing and family life. In western European countries housing policies were still aimed at constructing small, standardized, functional family units, but over the years architects became less patronizing. Economic growth gave people the opportunity to arrange their own houses according to their own wishes, and "do-it-yourself" enthusiasts intent on renovating their houses and changing their layouts became common. In the twentieth century social inequality between men and women, between parents and children, and between different social classes gradually narrowed; as a result, in a process of informalization, manners became less rigid and a greater range of social behaviors and expressions became acceptable. Domestic interiors of ever greater variety reflected this trend. The geography of houses and the designation of rooms became more open and dependent on individual preferences. A strictly functional division of houses was abandoned and multipurpose rooms adopted, although the bathroom and the toilet remained inviolate. The bedrooms of adolescents were used for study, listening to or playing music, and socializing. Kitchens were joined with living rooms to become "great rooms." In many houses televisions became fixtures in several if not all of the rooms.

Domestic design has become an important domain for cultural consumption and for expressing taste and, by extension, social identity. Everyday life has become aestheticized, not least in the way people arrange and decorate their homes. A range of magazines and stores addresses their desire to create the "house beautiful" and their ability to spend an increasing portion of their household budget to achieve that goal.

In the late twentieth century the Internet offered a new collective network linking people in their homes all over the world. Although the consequences remain uncertain, clearly the Internet allows people to carry out more functions within the confines of the home. At the same time, it brings the vast spaces out there into the private home, blurring far more than did radio and television the boundaries between inside and outside, and to a greater degree dissolving the line between work and home.

See alsoThe Urban Infrastructure (volume 2);Social Class; Public Health (volume 3);The Household; Cleanliness; Manners (volume 4);Consumerism (in this volume); and other articles in this section.

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