Cheryl Buckley

Made in Patriarchy: Towards a feminist analysis of women and design

This article is extracted from Design Issues, Vol. 3, N. 2 (Autumn), The MIT Press, Cambridge 1986, pp. 3-14, is here re-published, with the kind permission of MIT Press.

`De¿Humanised Females and Amazonians¿: British Wartime Fashion and its Representation in Home Chat, 1914¿1918

Popular representations of the fashionably dressed female body between 1914 and 1918 were highly contradictory and, as this essay will show, were sharply delineated in Home Chat, one of a growing number of relatively new womens magazines which addressed the needs of an expanding skilled working-class and lower-middle-class female readership. Aiming to provide women with practical advice about all aspects of their daily lives, from the traditional concerns of fashion and beauty, marriage and children, to the more contentious issue of womens aspirations beyond the home, Home Chat was uniquely placed to reflect shifting gender and class relations.

From York to New Earswick: Reforming Working-Class Homes, 1899-1914

How to improve the lives of the working class and the poor in Britain has been a key concern for social reformers, architects and designers, and local and national governments throughout twentieth century, but the origins of this were in the preceding century. From the middle of the nineteenth century, reformers had understood the necessity of improving the living conditions, diet and material environment of those with low incomes. Housing, at the core of this, was increasingly a political issue, but as this case study of the development of a garden village in the North of England demonstrates, it was also a moral and aesthetic one.