Aubrey Prestwich completed “What! Is This the Kitchen? Domestic Advice and the Market for a Model Kitchen, 1841-1959”
Introduction
Aubrey Prestwich filed her MA thesis, "What! Is This the Kitchen? Domestic Advice and the Market for a Model Kitchen, 1841-1959," chaired by Prof. Jonathan Mekinda.
The thesis assesses the role of domestic advice in creating an idealized, middle-class American kitchen and selling it to women. Starting with Catherine Beecher’s 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy, the thesis traces the existence of the ideal, perfectly arranged kitchen from nineteenth-century domestic advice manuals to twentieth-century shelter magazines, including Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal. It also examines two sites where the ideal kitchen was made tangible: the Levittown kitchen, a modular unit delivered to site in one piece and installed in a day, and the 1959 RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen, a display kitchen used in the 1959 American Exhibition in Moscow that brought the notion of American, capitalist prosperity to a curious Soviet public. In analyzing the kitchen and the people who influenced its design, the thesis aims to understand the American white middle class, and specifically its women, as the class codified. Its research aims to elucidate the active role of white, middle-class women in delineating the taste, behavior, and household norms that dictated hegemony for the entire nation. The kitchen, as the heart and stomach of the home, is the place where these women had the most pull and the most duty, and should be taken seriously as the center of both their power, and their toil.
Congratulations, Aubrey!