Gender as a Category of Analysis in Vernacular Architecture Studies
Author(s): Angel Kwolek-Folland
Source: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Vol. 5, Gender, Class, and Shelter (1995), pp.
3-10
Published by: Vernacular Architecture Forum
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3514241
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I
Chapter 1
Gender as a Category of Analysis
in VernacularArchitecture Studies
Angel Kwolek-Folland
There is a growing awareness among scholars in
many fields that gender is an important area for
study. Most now agree that gender is an experiential and analytical category as fundamental as class
or race.1Therefore, my purpose in this essay is not
to suggest ways to "add women and stir"in order
to arrive at some more fair version of experience
that incorporates women's lives into a history written in male terms. Rather, I want to move directly
to the issue of how we can make gender an integral part of our research. In this essay, I shall focus on some ways I think gender can open up
new avenues for understanding the history of the
design and experience of vernacular environments. My task here is to challenge and to encourage-and perhaps to provoke-further discussion
of this issue by providing some approaches to using gender as a category of analysis.
When new topics or issues are introduced into
the scholarly debate, the need for new methods
often seems imperative. And indeed new methods
can be helpful in getting at difficult research problems. Sometimes, however, the call for new methods can become a way to avoid the issues. In that
light, I would like to take a position that runs
counter to the usual academic notion that new
problems need new methods and argue that in order to incorporate gender we do not need any new
methods. Vernacular architecture studies already
have borrowed just about every useful method
that is available. It seems to me, however, thatwhile
we do not need new tools, we could use some
different blueprints. It is not whatwe use to build,
in other words, but how we conceptualize our research problems that needs to be redesigned if
gender is to be a revealing category of analysis in
understanding vernacular architecture.Just for the
record, no one, to my knowledge, has ever claimed
that using gender as a category of historical analysis would be easy.
I should begin with a definition. By "gender" I
do not mean "women," although the term is often
used that way as a kind of politically neutral shorthand. By gender I refer instead to a set of abstractions rooted in biology and expressed in social,
cultural, and historical terms.2 Gender differences
build on the biological fact that males and females
have different sex organs and different reproductive functions. This biology inherently has no history: the existence of reproductive organs is timeless. They were present in prehistory (or we would
not be here), and they have been with us ever
since. Unlike biological sex differences, however,
gender does have a history because it is a social
creation that changes according to ethnic, cultural,
religious, economic, national, racial, and temporal
differences, among others. Gender, then, is a system of interrelatedideas about men's and women's
social roles, self-definition, and cultural experience
that is grounded in the historical process. It is closest to class as a socially constructed category of
human experience, but it is also like race in that it
is based in biological fact but expressed in cultural terms.
Gender is a concept that includes both men and
women, manhood and womanhood, and other
4
4
nelKolkFoln
Angel Kwolek-Folland
definitions of self that build on biological sex. We
have two genders; some cultures have three and
even four. We have heterosexual dominance, but
we also have gay and lesbian people who have historically used manhood and womanhood to define
a non-heterosexual cultural experience.3 There are
people, such as a student at the Universityof Kansas in the late 1980s, who insist they are sexually
neutral and refer to themselves as "it."While the
biological is embedded in the cultural aspects of
gender, it is the cultural expressions of gender that
have the most bearing on the study of vernacular
architecture,since it is in culture that human choice
and creativityare found.
With this definition of gender in mind, I would
like to describe briefly four ways of thinking about
gender that I believe would be useful to research
on the gendered dimensions of vernacular architecture. I then will provide several specific examples in which I see gender operating in ways
that force us to modify our interpretations of vernacular architecture. These are neither exclusive
nor definitive; I offer them here simply as a basis
for discussion.
First, gender is a structural category. It encompasses the underlying notions of manhood, womanhood, and/or other gender divisions in social,
economic, and ideological systems. In our western, Anglo-dominated society, patriarchalstructure
is both idealized and a reality. It appears in the
labor market, where women continue to earn sixty
cents for every dollar a man earns. It appears in
ritual, where brides are still "given away" by their
fathers. Men give women engagement rings to cement their property rights against the claims of
other men. Men, however, do not themselves accept a similar token of exclusive rights.
Reality does not always conform to ideal, however. Despite assertions of male dominance, for
example, recent literatureon business management
has argued that male managers should learn their
interpersonal skills from women, who, some claim,
are more empathetic and other-directed than men.4
Some claim that the recent appearance of a "men's
movement" grows out of men's sense of their economic and social subordination.5 Finally, there are
those who believe that social gender is directly
linked to biology. Some people on both the right
and left of the politicalspectrum claim that women's
hormones dictate a predisposition to nurturance
and empathy and men's hormones a tendency to
violence and insularity.6
Structuralpatriarchyalso must acknowledge racial, sexual, and ethnic differences. Right now, unemployment levels are high for everyone, but highest for black men, who consistently have higher
unemployment levels than any other group. Gay
men are subject to beatings by gangs of "straight"
thugs. This theme, I might add, is often couched
in spatial terms:for example, the city streets of Rod
Stewart's song "Georgie Boy" or the playground
violence that ends the life of Matthew Broderick's
character in the film Torch Song Trilogy.7Not all
men, in other words, benefit equally from structural patriarchy.Any gender system, therefore, will
have both dominant and contested meanings: ideals that are held as culturally important and challenges to those ideals that complicate the dominant structure.
Second, gender is a chronological category.
Gender systems are subject to historical flux and
perhaps can themselves stimulate change. For example, the notion of "separatespheres," which has
guided so much of the research in women's history and shaped gender studies, grew out of trying to understand the nature of patriarchy. It has,
however, proved too simple as an overall organizing principle for the study of women, men, or gender because it is specific to a particular time-the
nineteenth century-a particularclass-the middle
a particular racial group-whites.
class-and
While that group has had power to impose its own
gender norms on others in the form of laws and
regulations, "separatespheres" is neither a description nor an organizing assumption that has proven
universally useful.8
Gender as a Category of Analysis
Sally McMurry'swork on the evolution of farm
family dwellings in the nineteenth century provides an excellent critique of the separate spheres
notion and modifies it in useful ways. She emphasizes the economic distinctions of separate gender
spheres in urban and rural life, and she shows
the ways rural men and women defined their
economic, social, and familial positions first in
contradiction to and then in subversion of urban
gender roles. In McMurry'swork, separate spheres
is a complex set of relationships between men
and women, work and home, farm and family
space, and urban and rural experience that simultaneously highlights the connections as well as the
conflicts between men's and women's worlds.9
Race and class also complicate the model of
separate spheres over time. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, ideas about manhood and
womanhood stressed social and legal differences,
but emphasized sexual, racial, and class similarities. In the nineteenth century, with the evolution
of the white, middle-class notion of separate
spheres, white men's and women's economic, social, and sexual roles sharply diverged in both
theory and practice, even as differences of class
and race developed that created complex gender
categories. The sexuality of white men, lower-class
women, and men and women of color recalled the
earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emphasis on human sexuality as based on uncontrollable and animalistic urges, while middle-class
white men and women defined the sexuality of
white middle-class women as pure, passionless,
and reproductive.?1
Third, gender is a fragmented category. Any
dominant gender system will engage different
people in different ways and will create multiple
layers of experience. One of the best examples of
this is the way in which gender complicates the
history of the family. The family is not and never
has been an emotional or experiential unit, despite
its predominately patriarchal structure. Men and
women, children and adults, boys and girls, and
5
parents and siblings are not necessarily vested in
the family in the same way. Some historians, in
fact, see the family as the basic unit of social and
political struggle over allocation of resources, control over reproductive issues, and the sexual division of labor.' Thus, to talk about a "house" or
even a farmstead as a single unit of construction
and experience is inaccurate, since men, women,
and children make different contributions to the
shape of family life. It is especially inaccurate if the
paradigmof that experience is male, since women's
predominant place of work throughout our history
has been within the household. Joan Jensen's research on early-nineteenth-centuryruralPennsylvania, for example, demonstrates women's critical
economic and technological role as butter makers.
Not only did women's butter making help bring
the farm family into the national market economy
and represent a crucial gender-linked set of skills
and interests, but it also reshaped the material
technology of butter making as women adapted
boards and chums to increase their production.'2
Fourth, gender is an experiential category. Individuals and groups, variously constituted and
acting in various capacities, may experience gender in different ways. Like race but unlike class,
gender is simultaneously a private, intimate, personal category and a public, communal, social expression of self. Like class and race, gender can
link the individual to society in personal, forceful
ways.
For example, the history of the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century city will be forever incomplete
without a comprehensive treatment of the rise of
gay and lesbian urban culture. In the cities, gender became a way to define the self against the
dominant culture's expectations for individual behavior. In turn, this complex play of self-defined
and culturally imposed "deviance" became the
foundation for urban spaces, which acted as "bohemian zones": places where gay and lesbian men
and women led the way in creating alternative
identities, economies, and communities. These ur-
6
6
Angel
Kwolek-FondI
I
Angel Kwolek-Folland
ban bohemian zones reached both inward-to
provide safe and economically viable places for a
persecuted minority-and outward-to the possibilities for self-definition those urban spaces helped
present and embody for all city dwellers.
Thus gender as a category of analysis is as complex as race or class, and as useful as race or class
to understanding historical change. Gender analysis demands no methodology vastly different from
any used in historical study. One of the most revealing discussions of gender in Native-American
workplaces, for example, used time-honored archaeological fieldwork techniques to uncover task
differentiation among the Hidatsa Indians.'3 A recent book on Native-American architecture uses
photographs, drawings, paintings, oral histories,
and the written records of anthropologists-all traditional historical documents-to link gender to
housing construction. In the latter book, understanding gender was not the primary aim; rather,
an awareness of the ways dwellings, work, and
cosmology were gendered simply was part of the
overall analysis.'4
What is different in using gender as a category
of analysis is the level of awareness and the added
complexity that gender demands of historical reconstruction. What, then, should be kept in mind
about gender when studying vernacular architecture? What can using gender as a category of
analysis tell us about the built environment? Let
me suggest four areas in which I think gender
would be useful in reconceptualizing veracular
architecture. As my examples, I will interpolate
some well-known essays in the field of vernacular
architecture studies. In doing so, my intent is not
to castigate any of the authors for essays they did
not write. Rather, I am using them because they
are exemplary essays by prominent and wellknown experts in the field, and therefore pieces
with which most students of vernacular architecture are already familiar. I would like to use them
to think about ways we might push our usual
methods, and what we already know, a step or
two closer to a gendered analysis.
First, the study of vernacular architecture will
have to be very inclusive of subject material if
the gender of environments is to be understood.
Many contributions to vernacular architecture are
ephemeral, a fact particularly true in the case of
women. In our historical experience of gender, the
trappings and interior decorations of buildings,
some of which are seasonal, are important to the
meaning and experience of vernacular space.'5 To
understand gender in everyday spatial expression,
we may have to go to artifactsother than the building to understand the building as an environment.
To suggest some ways the inclusion of gendered
ephemera would expand our understanding of
vernacular space, I would like to build on Dell
Upton's famous study of Anglican parish churches.
Upton found women acting as sextons (or janitors), as wives and daughters of elite men, and
they were segregated in the lower-status seating
areas of the church.'6 Thus, Upton's portrait of
women's participation in vernacular space emphasizes their subordination to men's definitions of
that space. We know, however, that it was women's
work as seamstresses to provide special vestments,
robes, and other ornamental elements for church
worship. A study that included these ephemera
would throw the status implications of church participation into a different and more complexly
gendered light.
Official positions within the parish church may
not, in fact, exhaust the gendered experience of
eighteenth-century church going in Virginia. Laurel Ulrich has argued that New England women
also took part in status definitions through their
struggles over seating space in church. Further,
both men and women contributed in differentways
to the status of a family. A man might have the trappings of wealth, but it was his wife who cemented
elite status through careful management of household goods, servants, and children.17 In other
words, although the cultural ideal of seventeenthcentury Anglo-Americawas female submission and
male dominance, the reality seems to have been
much more contested and open to interpretation.
I
Genderas a Categoryof Analysis
Second, attention to gender suggests that the
same places and social messages may be interpreted by men and women in differentways. Carol
Gardner tested Erving Goffman's sociology of public place by subjecting it to gender variables.'8
Gardner's findings suggest men and women approach public space very differently. Using standard anthropological field study techniques and
oral interviews, Gardner found that women were
not at ease with social interactions such as wolf
whistles or even asking a stranger the time of day
in a public place. For men, these activities signaled
openings for encounters; for women, they could
be threatening.This fear of public places led women
to invent complex imaginary identities that included pretending they were waiting for a man
when they were not. What Goffman took for
granted in public space-that male experience defined public encounters and that those encounters
were experienced in the same way by men and
women-turned out not to be true. Gardner used
no innovative new methods to gain these insights;
she merely approached her study with an eye to
gender differences between men and women.
Third, gender ideologies can have an impact on
the experience and definition of space that can
complicate or add to other meanings. Here I would
like to use Robert Blair St. George's fascinating essay "SetThine House in Order"about the changes
in domestic space that took place in seventeenthcentury New England.19Leaving aside the fact that
St. George treated both the barn and house as
male space (an unrealistic assessment given the
work roles of seventeenth-century New England
women), let me point to his intriguing insight
about the spatial attitudes of one New England
farmer, William Morse of Newbury, Massachusetts.
Morse, he observes, experienced the walls of the
house as a thin membrane separating the rational,
domestic order from the irrational,supernaturaltumult of nature. For Morse, St. George argues, the
world outside the house was filled with spirits,
with witches, with all the wild and uncontrolled
urges of the devil's company.
7
What happens to this sense of clear boundaries,
however, if we add that in seventeenth-century
New England, as Carol Karlsen has demonstrated,
witchcraft and the supernatural were gendered?20
Most witches were women, and it was women's
proximity to nature and the animal world that allowed them to make cows go dry and children to
be born with deformities. This is not to say St.
George was wrong about Morse; perhaps house
walls were boundaries. But Morse also lived with
the supernatural world in the form of his mother,
his wife, his sisters, and his daughters. The supernatural was both outside and inside, although in
different forms. Was there a way that the houses
and barns, the steads and lofts, the workplaces
and living spaces were divided to keep out the
darkness outside and also to keep the darkness
within the family-in the form of women-contained? I do not propose to answer these questions; I merely raise them to suggest that while St.
George was onto something, his interpretation of
the meaning of house walls could be enriched by
the dimension of gender.
Fourth, gender can add to our understanding
of the transmission of dwelling types and other
built forms and to our understanding of the way
culture and history modify those types. Dominant
gender systems never stand alone in any social
or temporal context, but rather play against multiple systems that may involve different classes,
ethnicities, and races, and may take us beyond
national boundaries.
Another familiar essay can elaborate this point.
John Michael Vlach's path-breaking study of the
shotgun house is an eclectic bit of detective work
that clearly ranged far from the national, ethnic,
regional, and racial boundaries initially set for this
well-known southern housing form.21From New
Orleans to Haiti to the Arawak Caribbean to Nigeria, Vlach traced the development of this architectural type through the slave trade. This essay is a
model for precisely the kind of informed, creative
approach we must have to understand gender and
vernacular architecture. I would like to use Vlach's
8
8
Angel Kwolek-Folland
Angel Kwolek-Folland
method as a pattern and merely approach the
shotgun from a slightly different direction.
The famous Nigerian novelist, Buchi Emecheta,
has written extensively on the role of women and
the family in Yoruba and Ibo tribal experience.22
Her books contain vivid fictionalized portrayals of
the social life of family compounds and the spatial
uses of the twentieth-century Ibo equivalent of the
shotgun dwelling. Where Vlach traces a housing
type and makes a point about slavery, Emecheta's
stories suggest questions about the social functions
of this housing type, and specifically the role of
the compound in defining and shaping men's and
women's cultures. Combined with what we know
about the gender divisions of slavery-the ways
in which African and African-Americanslaves created extended families, non-exclusive parenting,
and communal living spaces-we could reveal not
only the continuation of a particular architectural
form but also the ways that form supported particular cultural constructions of manhood, womanhood, family, and communal experience.
Again, I do not intend to make all these connections in this essay. Rather, I raise these examples to suggest that the lack of a method for
incorporating gender is not the problem. We have
the methods; we even have as precedent the
thoughtful, nuanced work of scholars like Upton,
Gardner, St. George, Vlach, and others. What is
needed is the sense that gender matters, that it acts
in powerful and compelling ways, that it can reveal important aspects of the history of the built
environment that otherwise would go unexplored.
For the sake of discussion, I would argue that gender is not an optional category, any more than
race or class are optional, if we are to reconstruct
the story of the ways humans have created and
experienced their built environments.
Notes
"Womenin the American
1. For a review of literatureon women and vernaculararchitecture,see SallyMcMurry,
Museumtook as the
Winterthur
the
VernacularLandscape,"MaterialCulture20 (1) (1988): 33-49. In 1989,
theme of its annual conference the intersection of gender and material culture. See Kenneth L. Ames and
Katharine Martinez, eds., The Material Culture of Gender/The Gender of Material Culture (New York: W. W.
Norton, forthcoming). On gender, see Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,"
Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28-50, and Peggy Sanday,
Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981).
2. On the social construction of gender, see Suzanne Kesseler and Wendy McKenna, Gender An Ethnomethodological
Approach (New York: John Wiley, 1978), 1-20, and Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, Sexual Meanings:
The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
3. See, for example, Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline David, "The Reproduction of Butch-Fem Roles: A Social
Constructionist Approach," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 241-56.
4. See, for example, Margaret Hennig and Anne Jardim, The Managerial Woman (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1978); Margaret Laws, "The Superior Sex," Working Woman 9 (Mar. 1984): 16; Ann Hughey and Eric Gelman,
"Managingthe Woman's Way," Newsweek (Mar. 17, 1986): 46-47; and Angel Kwolek-Folland, "The Female Management Style: The Cultural Construction of Gender in Offices, 1960-1989," paper presented to the American
Studies Association Annual Meeting, Nov. 1989. For the historical development of gendered work definitions in
Gender as a Category of Analysis
9
offices, see Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).
5. See Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990), and the "Epilogue" in
E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Moder
Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 284-93.
6. On the links between definitions of maleness and femaleness and the development of modern science, see
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Cynthia Russett,
Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989);
and Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?. Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
7. For historical works that focus on the importance of urban space for the gay and lesbian community, see Jeffrey
Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York:
Quartet Books, 1990), and Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 18801930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For a brief review of literatureon urban space and women's
culture, see Linda Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,"Journal of American History 75 (1) (June 1988): 32-37.
8. Kerber, "SeparateSpheres," 9-39.
9. Sally McMurry,Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). On women's contributions to the built rural environment, see
Rebecca Sample Bemstein and Carolyn Torma's "Exploring the Role of Women in the Creation of Vemacular
Architecture,"in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture IV, ed. Thomas Carterand Bernard L. Herman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 64-72.
10. The literature on these shifts is voluminous. A good summary can be found in Estelle Freedman and John
D'Emilio, Intimate Matters (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
11. Tamara K. Haraven, "The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change," American Historical
Review 96 (1) (Feb. 1991): 95-124; Rayna Rapp, Ellen Ross, and Renate Bridenthal, "ExaminingFamily History,"
Feminist Studies 5 (1) (Spring 1979): 174-200; and Heidi I. Hartmann, "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class
and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework," Signs 6 (31) (1981): 366-94.
12. Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986).
13. Janet D. Spector, "Male/Female Task Differentiation Among the Hidatsa: Toward the Development of an Archeological Approach to the Study of Gender," in The Hidden Half Studies of Plains Indian Women, ed. Patricia
Albers and Beatrice Medicine (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 77-97.
14. Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
15. See, for example, Angel Kwolek-Folland, "The Useful What-Not and the Ideal of 'Domestic Decoration,"' Helicon Nine 8 (1983): 72-82, and Angel Kwolek-Folland, "The Elegant Dugout: Domesticity and Moveable Culture
in the United States, 1870-1900," American Studies (Fall 1984): 21-37.
16. Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1986), 7, 186, 188, 194.
17. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives:Image & Reality in the Lives of Northern New England Women, 1650-1750
(New York: Knopf, 1982).
10
Angel Kwolek-Folland
18. Carol Brooks Gardner, "Analyzing Gender in Public Places: Rethinking Goffman's Vision of Everyday Life," The
American Sociologist (Spring 1989): 42-56.
19. Robert Blair St. George, "'SetThine House in Order': The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England," in Common Places, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1983), 336-64.
20. Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
21. John Michael Vlach, "The Shotgun House: An African ArchitecturalLegacy,"in Common Places, 58-78.
22. See, for example, Buchi Emecheta, The Slave Girl (New York: Braziller, 1977), and The Bride Price (New York:
Braziller, 1976).