HOW ABOUT THIS? The Sexism of American Kitchen Design

[Ryan Goble]

If you just posed the photo of a kitchen (using something like the right question technique) it would be interesting to see if students got anywhere near these conclusions...

The Sexism of American Kitchen Design

Before women were all hunched over screens, applying filters and tapping out hashtags to food photos, we were hunched over sinks, sudsing dishes and keeping an eye on the stove. Today’s kitchens may have more machines, but they remain abuzz with structured and artificial femininity, from aprons to pink KitchenAids. Everything matches, even the woman, whose body the kitchen has been designed to fit—albeit inaccurately—since almost a century ago, when engineers measured thousands of women to try to make housework more comfortable.

Over the last 100 years, kitchens have grown, walls have fallen, and appliances have multiplied, but the kitchen protagonist—a woman, standardized—has stayed the same. So has the height of the countertops, sink, and oven.

Until the 1930s, kitchen-surface heights, like clothing, varied as people did, with kitchens and clothes matching the women in them, rather than the other way around. Engineers even sought to bring precision to the task. Kitchen work would be less back-breaking, they said, if the counters and sinks were the right height for the women using them.

One of those engineers, Christine Frederick, studied women at work to create a chart pairing work-surface height with woman height; a 5-foot-6 women, for instance, would be most comfortable with her countertops and the bottom of her sink 31 inches from the floor. Correct heights, combined with efficient kitchen layouts, could make cooking slightly less of a burden, she wrote.

But then American industry, for the sake of more efficient production, needed (and still needs) standards. Two decades after Frederick created her chart, standardization took over, and not just in the U.S., but in other parts of the world too. The tailor-made kitchen was gone. While it’s easy enough to make adjustable chairs and bikes, it’s much harder to build customization into an entire room filled with chunks of wood and granite wedged between heavy, expensive, factory-made appliances.

Read the full article HERE.