Utopian Visions and Architectural Designs of Turn-of-the-Century Social Settlements

Abstract

This chapter explores how nineteenth-century women social reformers materially embodied their utopian visions of society through architectural designs of their public institutions. Reformers made women’s public professions and institutions acceptable within the dominant Victorian gender ideology by depicting them as extensions of women’s domestic roles (Spencer-Wood 1999a: 170-1). As reformers expanded woman’s domestic sphere to encompass man’s public sphere, they successfully argued that women’s superior morality enabled them to control their expanded sphere, increasing women’s power in both the home and the public realm. Unlike their contemporaries, the suffragists, domestic reformers did not directly confront male dominance in the public sphere by arguing that women should have public roles. Nonetheless, the reformers’ argument that women would bring a higher moral tone to government was instrumental in gaining the majority of men’s support for female suffrage (Spencer-Wood 1991: 241; 1994a: 178-80).