As much a mental as a physical construct, "home" is a place we dwell on as well as dwell in. The emergence of home as we understand it in the early twenty-first century began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The modern notion of home ultimately replaced the older idea of household, a slow, almost imperceptible process but one of huge significance for the future of American society, for the shift from household to home was paralleled by the rise of the idea of "homeland," a key concept in the founding of the new American nation.
At the mid-eighteenth century, the subjects of European monarchies living on the North American continent, both free and enslaved, dwelled in places universally described as households. The household was not only the basic residential unit, but also the fundamental political, economic, and social organization. In many of the New England colonies, everyone was obligated to live in a household. These were organized in a hierarchical manner, with the royal household at the pinnacle. The household of each royal subject was ruled by a patriarchal master, who exercised authority over all the inhabitants: family members, kin, servants, slaves, even guests. No distinction was made between family and household. Indeed, the term "family" applied equally to all living under the one roof. In the big houses of slave plantations, masters talked of their families as including both black and white members.
The household was a functional unit to which few of the sentiments that we now associate with home were attached. Membership of the household changed frequently, and people felt at home in a particular region rather than in a particular house. There was little interest in roots or the history of particular residences, and no sense of sacredness attached to domestic space as such. When people talked of going home, they were referring to a place of destination rather than of return. In the journey, the prevailing metaphor of Christian life, the ultimate home was in heaven rather than on earth. Households were mere way stations, and too great a fondness for worldly places was considered an obstacle to salvation among both Protestants and Catholics. Neither faith spiritualized the household in the ways that later generations would do.
The time and space of the household was not significantly different from the times and spaces of the world at large. Its rhythms were dictated by the work and leisure patterns of its inhabitants. It was more communal than private and was heterogeneous with respect to age, race, and gender. As long as each resident adhered to her or his assigned place in the household hierarchy, they mingled quite freely, sharing rooms, even beds. There was little concern for personal privacy; and the household was as much men's space as it was women's. Indeed, in this patriarchal society it was more his than hers.
There is no precise date by which to mark the transition from the eighteenth-century notion of household to the nineteenth-century idea of home. The shift was the product of changes in social and economic conditions, of religious transformations, but also of the American Revolution, which replaced the ancient notion of royal sovereignty with the idea of the sovereign nation defined as a people sharing a certain bounded territory. The Revolution displaced not only the figure of the royal father but the royal house, replacing them with republican fathers and republican homes. The old hierarchy of households was replaced with an imagined landscape of singlefamily homes, congruent with the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, each with a wife and children. The result was a radically new sense of both domestic space and domestic time that gradually established itself as the middle-class norm by the mid-nineteenth century.
By the early nineteenth century, the household had begun to lose its place at the core of American life. It shed its economic functions when paid work was relocated to the shop or the factory. Apprenticeship was replaced by wage work, and it became less common for employees to live in the houses of their masters. Servants remained, but they were now quartered apart from family members. In time, the household would also lose its educational role to the school, and in the new republican nation-state, powers once vested in the head of the household were relocated to the courts and governmental agencies. By the middle of the century, there was a clear separation of the private and public spheres. To the former belonged women and children; to the latter belonged the free, property-owning males who were now employed in offices and factories and who, as citizens, exercised power in the new nation. This process proceeded fastest in the industrializing Northeast, in cities rather than on farms. A clear distinction between family and household emerged first among the urban middle classes there. In the plantation South, older forms of household persisted, and among the working classes, heterogeneous households were still common.
Among the middle classes of the Northeast, a new kind of feminized domesticity was emerging, reflected in the gendered concept of the "homemaker." It came to be assumed that only a woman, preferably a mother, could create a proper home. Previously honored for their domestic skills, fathers were now defined by their prowess as breadwinners. The patri-centered house gave way to the matri-centered home. Thus, while the residence remained for women a place of work, it became something very different for middle-class men. For them, it became a retreat, a place of rest and relaxation. It was said that "with fond longings does he turn toward that bright paradise, his home. . . . With what refreshing gladness does he retire from the noise, and strife . . . into this sanctum sanctorum of the world's vast temple" (Boydston, Home and Work, p. 146).
Home had begun to take on a meaning once associated only with heaven. This transition was slow and uneven, but in the course of the early nineteenth century a shift in religious sensibilities initiated by the evangelical Protestant middle classes spiritualized domesticity, giving it a sacramental quality that it had not had earlier. Catholics were slower to sacra-lize the home, but they too would eventually sanctify it. The first step in this process was to erect new boundaries between home and world. The house, previously a semipublic space, was gradually becoming an entirely private sphere. Entry into the sanctum sanctorum took on a ritualized formality it had not previously had. But because most middle-class households had servants, internal space was differentiated in such a way as to segregate those rooms (the parlor, dining room, and bedrooms) that belonged to the family and those (kitchen, stables, and "below stairs") reserved for strangers. The singlefamily house, located at the edges of eastern cities, was becoming the norm of middle-class family life. This private way of life was mirrored in a private way of death, with new cemeteries laid out in family plots with tombs that looked like suburban houses. Heaven itself came to be imagined as a pleasant suburb filled with nuclear families.
Time was also used to set home apart from house. A series of daily, weekly, and annual family-centered rituals came into existence, separating the newly invented notion of "family time" from work and public time more generally. Christmas, previously a public event, came to be the archetypal family occasion, a moment of homecoming that had no precedent in earlier centuries. The idea of home, usually the maternal home, as a place of return reinforced its temporal as well as spatial mystique. Home came to be associated with personal or familial past, an object of intense nostalgia. In an era of rapid change and frequent movement, when Americans—both native and immigrant—were beginning to move westward in massive numbers and would never go back to their place of birth again, the symbol of home took on enormous meaning. Home became for many, and especially for middle-class men, both a dream of future success and a memory of lost paradise. Home was to become an ideal, often at odds with the places people actually lived in.
The ideal of the American home emerging in the early nineteenth century should not be confused with the residential life even of the Protestant middle classes who invented it. It is wrong to think of housewives as ladies of leisure. Their toil, vastly increased by the elevated standards of Victorian homemaking, was portrayed as a labor of love. Yet married women were in many ways worse off than single women, who at least had access to their own earnings. Motherhood, also idealized, was no paradise either. High infant and maternal death rates made it a cause of intense anxiety and real distress. No wonder many women put off marriage and considered alternative living arrangements. Children were perhaps the chief beneficiaries of the newly established home life. Among the middle classes they were coming to be regarded as innocent creatures, in need of protection from the world. Withdrawn from work and increasingly confined to school, they were, however, still subject to whims of adults and were much less independent than their age-mates among the working classes.
For the vast majority of Americans, home was nothing more than a dream. A freestanding house was beyond the reach of most wage workers. Slaves, who were a part of their masters' household property, were not allowed to own their own houses. Immigrants might aspire to homeownership, but most were too poor to attain their goal. And even among the rising middle classes, the ever-increasing standards of a middle-class home—fashionable furniture, fine art, good food and drink—always seemed just beyond reach, a spur to constant striving, a source of anxiety, and in the case of those who failed to earn enough, a cause of shame. Home had become a generator of gender and generational differences. It was also to become a marker of class division.
The Protestant middle-class concept of home did not go unchallenged, however. Most Americans lived the best they could, ignoring and even defying its standards. In the early nineteenth century, inner-city slum dwellers as well as people on the expanding frontiers put together their own heterogeneous residential arrangements. The various utopian communities that proliferated in this same period offered a variety of alternative living arrangements which were explicitly aimed at coping with the well-known shortcomings of the private home and nuclear family. Experiments ranging from polygamy to celibacy attracted many adherents; at places like Oneida community in New York State, communal dining rooms and shared child care proved very popular. In the South, slaves, forbidden to marry, performed their own nuptials, which allowed them to have some measure of family and domestic life.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was particularly uneasy about the new homes and private cemeteries he saw being built all around Walden Pond. He worried that the sanctification of domestic life reflected in their architecture produced a poorer rather than richer spiritual life. Invoking an earlier tradition in which the house was a mere way station on a grander journey, he wrote: "We no longer camp as if for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. . . . We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb" (Chandler, Dwelling in the Text, p. 40). In this respect, Thoreau was a prophet, anticipating developments that continue to shape the American landscape into the twenty-first century.