Beyond Domesticity: Material and Spatial Expressions of Gender Systems in Deerfield, Massachusetts

This presentation was part of the symposium "Memory, Power, and the Archaeology of Rural New England" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Providence, Rhode Island. The paper focuses on the cult of domesticity and how it has been the most widely studied of all gender systems. However, additional ideologies – such as equal rights feminism, domestic reform, and others – also shaped gender relations during the second half of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Architectural changes and ceramic assemblages from three homelots on the village landscape of Deerfield, Massachusetts were examined to understand the structure of human interactions during this time in this location. This research considers the separation of gender roles, the codification of gender ideals in this rural setting versus that which was occurring in urban areas, the articulation of gender with developing class systems, and the many spatial scales at which these social relations were expressed.