Papers by Deborah Sugg-Ryan
This paper draws on and extends the author’s earlier work on the history of the Daily Mail Ideal ... more This paper draws on and extends the author’s earlier work on the history of the Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition and suburban modernity in Britain. It contributes to historical research in material culture studies and design history on modernity and domesticity, drawing on contemporary ethnographic methodologies. It explores the ways in which new domestic technologies helped form modern identities for women as housewives and consumers in the inter-war years in Britain. This paper rejects functionalist critiques of domestic labour-saving technologies by feminists and Modernist design historians. It argues that for many women who lived in the new suburbs the significance of technology was in its symbolism rather than its rational claims to functionalism and efficiency. It posits that although appliances did not necessarily save labour, they enhanced the status of the task, by recognising women’s labour. It argues that domestic appliances were not just valued for their labour-saving po...
Houses through time: some homes can reflect a century of social change
The interwar house: Ideal homes and domestic design
Prince Philip Designers Prize (1959–2011)
The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design, 2016
9 Ways to Find Out What Your House Was Like Generations Ago
How to use the 1939 Register to find the wartime history of your house
Performing Irish-American Heritage: The Irish Historic Pageant, New York, 1913
On 8 and 9 May 1913'An Dhord Fhiann': An Irish Historic Pageant was performed i... more On 8 and 9 May 1913'An Dhord Fhiann': An Irish Historic Pageant was performed in the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory in New York City by a cast of five hundred at a cost of $10,000. The scenes were presented on huge stages erected across one end of the Armory by a mixture of professional and amateur actors from Gaelic Societies of New York and Brooklyn, County Societies, and the Sixty-Ninth Regiment, as well as sportsmen from the Irish-American Athletic League. The pageant united warring elements from the Irish-American community ...
Towards an Uncensored History of Design: modernismart/design historyConstance Spry: A Millionaire for a Few Pence exhibitionIdeal Homes, Design Museum, LondonIdeal Homes and Constance Spry at The Design Museum, London
Smith, (Thomas) Wareham (1874–1938), newspaper publicity director and founder of the Ideal Home Exhibition
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2015
Reynolds, Nancie Clifton (1903–1931): [real name Agnes Margaret Warden Hardie; married name Reynolds], domestic advice writer and broadcaster
”Pageantitis”: Visualising Frank Lascelles’ 1907 Oxford Historical Pageant
This article challenges the existing historiography of the emerging interdisciplinary field of tw... more This article challenges the existing historiography of the emerging interdisciplinary field of twentieth century pageant scholarship and also contributes to knowledge and understanding of twentieth century visual culture. Drawing on a range of primary sources and the author’s previous published original research, it argues that existing scholarship of twentieth century historical pageants has overlooked the importance and influence of the pageant master Frank Lascelles by focusing on his rival Louis Napoleon Parker and failing to question the championing of the latter by the Edwardian pageant scholar Robert Withington. The article also investigates and substantiates the significant impact of Lascelles’ pageants and their distinct visual sensibility on the American pageant movement, which has hitherto been neglected by pageant scholars (most notably David Glassberg, author of the only contemporary monograph on the subject) who have tended to have written from within the disciplinary ...
Ideal Home Exhibition (est. 1908)
Staging the imperial city
From the 'smart' kitchen to 'kitchenism
The American kitchen, 1850-1950: from workroom to heart of the home
This essay explores the changing space and material culture of the American kitchen from 1850 to ... more This essay explores the changing space and material culture of the American kitchen from 1850 to 1950. There were huge changes in what a kitchen is, what a kitchen does and who works there. The origins of the American kitchen are in the Colonial ‘keeping room’ or ‘hall’, which was prevalent from 1700-1839. Located on the ground floor of dwellings, the keeping room was a space in which cooking was done on a massive hearth, alongside day-to-day living activities. In the mid-nineteenth century, the kitchen continued to be the space for family meals and activities in rural areas. However, in middle-class households in urban areas the kitchen became the space for the activities of domestic servants and family life moved into the parlour and the dining room. The kitchen tended to be located in the basement to separate the dirty work of the kitchen, smells of cooking and activities of servants from middle-class residents. From the 1870s, when apartment houses or buildings rather than townhouses and brownstones were built, kitchens were located on the first floor, at the rear of the home. Thus the location of the kitchen made it a workroom rather than the heart of the home. This designation of the kitchen as a workspace was further exacerbated by its diminishing size in the 1920s and 1930s, influenced by domestic reformers such as Christine Frederick who advocated the introduction of the work triangle in galley, U or L-shaped floor plans. These shifts in the location of the kitchen were intrinsically tied to the role of the mistress of the house and the shift in her status from mistress to professional housewife in the 1930s, alongside the declining availability of domestic servants. By the 1940s the multipurpose kitchen as a space for food preparation, cooking, eating and living became popular. Thus the kitchen was returned to the heart of the home. All these changes in the space of the kitchen are reflected in the trade catalogues of the period. Furniture and cabinetry took on an increasingly factory-like appearance, firstly, with freestanding Hoosier cabinets, influenced by the Beecher sisters. The introduction of the fitted kitchen with white-painted wooden or metal cabinets developed this tendency further. The use of bold primary colours in the 1940s, followed by softer pastel shades in the 1950s made the kitchen an attractive space for the housewife. Together with the introduction of kitchen islands and L-shaped counter extensions with stools in the late 1940s, this facilitated the kitchen’s redesignation as a combined living and workspace. Trade catalogues of the period illustrate vividly changes in food preparation and storage, cookery, washing up and laundry. Technologically driven changes in cooking appliances, aided by the availability of gas and electricity, meant that they could be maintained and used firstly by a greatly reduced household staff and then by the housewife herself. The cooking hearth gave way to the iron cookstove and the range. The introduction of refrigeration, and later freezers, revolutionised food preparation and storage, along with pre-prepared and convenience foods. New chemicals, detergents and washable wallpaper, flooring, and work surfaces facilitated hygiene. Labour-saving appliances were said to take the place of servants and reduce some of the drudgery of cookery, laundry and housework. Ironically, some of these developments meant that higher standards of housewifery and housework became desirable, which in Ruth Schwarz Cowan’s words, created ‘more work for mother’, meaning that the housewife did not actually save any labour.
Prince Philip Designers Prize (formerly Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for Elegant Design) (1959-2011)
Performing Irish-American Heritage: The Irish Historic Pageant, 1913
This is the first article to examine the Irish-American Historic pageant of 1913 as a subject of ... more This is the first article to examine the Irish-American Historic pageant of 1913 as a subject of study. It is the first article to draw on primary sources in Belfast and New York libraries and archives to extend knowledge on the pageants’ director, John P. Campbell. The very limited existing scholarship had only considered his career as an artist and theatre designer. As such, this article contributes to knowledge and understanding of the early twentieth century historical pageant movement in the United States and makes a significant and important contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of twentieth century pageant scholarship, of which the author is a leading proponent with returns on this subject in the last RAE period. The article also contributes original research on the Celtic Revival, which extends its boundaries of artistic and visual practices, and makes a significant and original contribution to the under-researched area of the Celtic Revival in the north of Ir...
The English Historical Review, 2017
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2017
Towards an Uncensored History of Design: Ideal Homes and Constance Spry at London’s Design Museum
In 1993 Ideal Homes, a survey of the history of the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition (founded i... more In 1993 Ideal Homes, a survey of the history of the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition (founded in 1908), opened at London’s Design Museum. It drew the highest visitor numbers to the museum at that date, many of whom although Ideal Home Exhibition regulars were new to the Design Museum. As curator of Ideal Homes I aimed to challenge the established approaches in museums of design and decorative arts in exhibiting design history. In particular, influenced by feminist design histories and anthropology and ethnography, I wished to move away from reading objects through aesthetic, primarily modernist, considerations of form and function and consider instead objects as bearers of social relations. I also aimed to subvert the white cube of the museum and capture some of the carnivalesque pleasures of the Ideal Home Exhibition in the presentation and design of Ideal Homes at the Design Museum. This chapter reflects on the curatorial process of Ideal Homes and the conflicts that it created within the Design Museum. It contrasts this with its favourable reception by the public and positive media coverage. It particularly focuses on critical issues raised around ‘good design’, gender and the domestic sphere in relation to both Ideal Homes and the Ideal Home Exhibition proper, which it argues were intrinsically bound up with modernist curatorial practices. It also discusses the ways in which these issues were raised again by the Design Museum’s controversial Constance Spry exhibition in 2004, which led to the resignation of the Museum’s chairman James Dyson.
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Papers by Deborah Sugg-Ryan