Feminist Next System Literature Review

Redesigning the American Dream

Redesigning the American Dream, Dolores Hayden's widely heralded 1984 book is "a provocative critique of how American housing patterns impact private and public life.Americans still build millions of dream houses in neighborhoods that sustain Victorian stereotypes of the home as 'woman's place' and the city as 'man's world.' Urban historian and architect Dolores Hayden tallies the personal and social costs of an American 'architecture of gender' for the two-earner family, the single-parent family, and single people. Many societies have struggled with the architectural and urban consequences of women's paid employment: Hayden traces three models of home in historical perspective--the haven strategy in the United States, the industrial strategy in the former USSR, and the neighborhood strategy in European social democracies--to document alternative ways to reconstruct neighborhoods.Updated and still utterly relevant today as the New Urbanist architects have taken up Hayden's critique of suburban space, this award- winning book is essential reading for architects, planners, public officials, and activists interested in women's social and economic equality."
 

In it Hayden reviews some of the experiments in collective and/or cooperative housing, which have attempted to free working women from the individual burden of housework (noting some of experiments from Sweden). However, she notes that most of the experiments struggled to identify the economic value of housework and either paid outsiders low wages to do it or split the work amongst themselves (but with varying success). 

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