“Home” in Crisis and Renewal: An Introduction

• Post by: Allan C. Carlson
• April 11, 2023

During the 1990’s, dozens of academic conferences and hefty volumes of analysis appeared on the problem of “the home,” a focus that continues to our day. Driving this analysis has been the wave of feminist scholars, for whom the home has served as “the crucible of gender domination.” Expected phrases such as “patriarchal capitalism” and “masculinist oppression” have been summoned to explain this supposed crisis in basic human social relationships.[1] Yet, beneath the ideological verbiage, real issues appeared. One team of researchers, for example, identified a mounting conflict between the role of wife and mother in the home versus the need for two outside jobs to pay for a mortgage.[2] Others noted the simultaneous occurrence of the triumph of the owner-occupied home and the “breakdown of family life.” In Great Britain, for example, the proportion of houses that were owner-occupied rose from 29% in 1951 to 65% in 1989. During those same years, though, both the birth and marriage rates fell to new lows, while divorce and out-of-wedlock-birth rates soared.[3] Such contradictions did, and do, imply a fracturing of the once clear and primal bond between the child-centered marriage and the home. What is going on? Some Early Definitions Let us start with the Old German and English linguistic origins of the word, “home.” One reference, from southeastern Sweden a thousand years ago, focuses on home as a place of sanctuary: “you may not arrest a killer at his home.” More positive definitions of heimen (Middle German), ham (Old English), and heimr (Old Scandinavian) included “village,” “dwelling,” “one’s farm,” “peace for every man,” “love,” “beloved,” “marry,” “bring to bed,” “to have sexual intercourse,” “to lie down,” and “to return.” Still another encompassed all of these acts and sentiments: “where things are as they should be.” Hus from Old English alluded to the place where goods