Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The ‘dwelling hotel’ and the Feminist Transformation of Dutch Housing

Abstract

This proposal reviews the 19th-century American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and her influence on Dutch housing during the early 20th century, particularly due to her book Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898). Gilman deplored mistress-servant relations as much as husband-wife exploitation, so she advocated for kitchenless apartments with dining rooms and day-care centres in cities, as well as kitchenless houses in suburban blocks, suggesting that female entrepreneurs organize cooked-food delivery, childcare, and cleaning services on a ‘business basis’. As Dolores Hayden pointed out, in Women and Economics Gilman introduced the feminist ‘apartment hotel’ as an element of urban evolution: ‘the human race was evolving in a more cooperative direction, so, too, she was sure that the physical form of human habitations was subject to evolutionary forces’.
In the Netherlands the shortage of domestic servants became a problematic issue at the end of the 19th century, and it stimulated middle-class housewives and architects to find solutions. Gilman’s work had an influence on this: In the American feminist’s view, this shortage of servants jeopardized the liberation of middle- and upper-class women, who were now forced to stay in the privacy of the home instead of playing a public role. The reception of Gilman’s ‘grand domestic revolution’ - i.e. the attempt for the centralisation of all domestic services - generated interesting projects in the Netherlands, from ‘collective kitchens’ (the first of which opened in Amsterdam in 1903), to the Dutch version of the ‘apartment hotel’, which came to be known as the ‘dwelling hotel’ (woonhotel). The first of these ‘dwelling hotels’ opened in the Hague in 1906 and was followed by more, some of which were no longer designed for families but for single working women.