Books computers, telephones, and washing machines are examples of material culture true or False

MATERIAL CULTURE

Whitney Walton

Social historians define material culture as the objects of daily life and the meanings that possessors, users, and observers invest in them. On one level the objects of daily life are stable over time. Food, shelter, furnishings, and clothes are common to all Europeans from the Renaissance to the present. On another level such objects vary enormously across different time periods, among different groups, and in different locations. They change drastically in terms of quantity, content, variety, and what their different forms signify to users and observers. For example, certain items of clothing have existed for centuries, like shirts, hats, skirts, and cloaks or coats. But new apparel articles, like long trousers for men, shirtwaist dresses for women, and underwear for everyone, and modifications of old ones, along with styles that change with increasing rapidity, make clothing highly variable. Moreover the connotations of clothing in terms of social standing, political positioning, and personal identity also vary greatly. Europeans have been drinking beer and wine and other fermented beverages since before the Renaissance. However, by the eighteenth century tea and coffee were becoming integral to the European diet, and the locations and manners of their consumption separated the sexes and gave rise to new utensils and social practices. Thus scholars find in material culture a rich source of information on the physical, daily existence of Europeans and how it changed. They also look to material culture for insights into the exercise of power, social relations, group values, and people's sense of themselves as individuals.

The influential historian Fernand Braudel drew attention to what he termed "material life" in his broadly conceived studies of Europe and the world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In his works Braudel described in detail and in comparative perspective the objects of everyday existence, including food and drink, housing, furnishings, and clothing, in Europe, Asia, and Latin America during the Renaissance and early modern eras. Using a variety of texts and images he charted developments like the gradual introduction of the fork for eating food or the evolution of household furnishings from simple, carpentered storage boxes or trunks to elaborately decorated and variegated wooden chests of drawers, highboys, sideboards, stands, and desks. Such developments are significant because they reveal a refinement in manners and greater valuation of civility in the first case and more stable residences and an increased sense of security in the second. Braudel's interest was in delineating structures through this inspection of minute daily practices and objects. For Braudel material life, or the deeply internalized habits and implements of routine survival, was the dominant feature of preindustrial European society. He discerned the fundamental rhythms of human existence through close observation of things.

Numerous scholars are indebted to Braudel for his massive research and innovative analysis of everyday objects, and they have furthered the study of material culture by practicing new methodologies, introducing new analytical frameworks, focusing on particular geographic areas or social groups, and extending the time frame both backward and forward. One approach to material culture that several historians have employed fruitfully is to analyze the goods of rulers, aristocrats, and wealthy elites as reflecting certain cultural values and social and political power.

THE POSSESSIONS OF ELITES

The Italian Renaissance commonly is associated with great cultural achievements in the arts and in scholarship. These achievements were closely connected with extensive commercial networks and the accumulation of goods by wealthy Italian merchants, prelates, and princes. In addition to being works of art that represent innovations in perspective, color, and the treatment of the human figure, paintings of the Renaissance portray the settings and objects of everyday life and the values of their owners and patrons. They render in precise and beautiful detail the architecture of houses, the colors and designs of clothing fabrics and wall hangings, and the decorative carving on furniture and in household interiors. Painters represented few items of furniture—storage chests, tables, chairs, and beds—in domestic settings, but these were often skillfully carved and made of fine, polished wood. Plush fabrics, such as velvet, silk, brocade, and fine wool, appear frequently in dazzling colors—scarlet, green, ultramarine blue, russet, and lavender. Typical and opulent interior furnishings in fifteenth-century paintings include brass or silver-gilt candlesticks, tasseled cushions, embroidered cloths, and illuminated manuscripts bound in leather with jeweled clasps. The backgrounds of even religious paintings show rugs from Turkey, porcelain and silk from China, leather bookbindings from Spain, fur-trimmed, brocaded robes of the Ottoman style, and glass from Venice, reflecting the dynamism of the Levantine trade in the Renaissance and its contribution to the material culture of the rich.

The content of many paintings suggests that owners and patrons valued their material possessions and took pride in the prosperity and cultivation that accrued from successful commercial activity. Indeed paintings were commodities and furnishings whose value lay in the cost of the paint and the skill and reputation of the artist. Renaissance princes collected paintings and books as much to assert their status and influence as to promote fine art and humanist learning. The material culture of Renaissance elites reflects a daily practice of acquisitiveness and commercialism as well as erudition and art appreciation.

Patrons and collectors particularly prized antique artifacts because they provided an association between the present and a desirable past. The Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), for example, claimed that his possession of a book by Cicero (106–43 b.c.) made him feel like he possessed Cicero himself. In this case a material object embodied the knowledge of one of the ancients. Wealthy and cultivated persons of the Renaissance sought to tie their existence to ancient history through the acquisition of antique artifacts. When the supply of antique objects diminished or disappeared, collectors turned to artifacts of the Renaissance. Thus the private accumulation of historical goods became the foundation of public institutions to display the culture of the present and started a new, Western sensibility about the importance of preserving the past.

Material objects reflected power and wealth in other ways and in other contexts. Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) of England spent lavishly in her court to impress the population with her authority and power and to coerce the nobility to spend extravagantly as well. Paintings show the queen dressed in gorgeous silks and fine lace and covered with jewels. She filled her many palatial residences with elegant furnishings and entertained her guests with hunts, dances, performances, and huge banquets consisting of numerous courses and rare dishes. These practices required expensive objects for ritual proceedings that made visible the magnificence and hence the power of the monarchy, and these practices forced the nobility to do the same. Elizabeth wanted the nobles, the chief rivals to her authority, to spend their money and their time at court seeking her favors. This developed into a cycle whereby nobles who wished for royal beneficence spent large amounts to maintain their appearance and status at court. The more they spent, the more they depended on Elizabeth's largesse, and hence the more time and money they were required to spend at court. In this case, then, luxurious objects served as an instrument of power.

King Louis XIV, who ruled France from 1643 to 1715, exercised this technique notably, and his impressive material surroundings subsequently became the model for other rulers in Europe. Louis XIV built the magnificent palace of Versailles outside of Paris and furnished it with tapestries that recounted his glorious deeds on the battlefield. Paintings and sculptures portray the king as imposing, attractive, and effective, and to further enhance his self-image as absolute ruler he constructed the famous hall of mirrors to reflect and multiply his greatness. Surrounding the palace are extensive, carefully trimmed gardens and fountains with sculptures, refreshing and beautiful settings for parties, masquerades, and fireworks displays. Louis and his successors also constructed separate buildings on the royal grounds for more intimate gatherings and pleasures. Louis XIV claimed that he was the state, and his possessions were the visible manifestation of France's power.

In contrast to the absolute monarchies of France, Prussia, and Austria that attempted to construct national unity around royal splendor, the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggests an alternative interpretation of material culture. Lacking an individual monarch to display publicly his or her power as representative of the state, the Dutch nonetheless placed and used material objects in a manner to assert an emerging national identity. Dutch people were intensely conscious of their Protestant faith and religious morality and sought to endow consumption and goods with moral meaning. They were no strangers to luxurious and exotic goods, since their efficient farming practices and growing trade networks provided them with abundant food, furnishings, and pleasures, even for successful artisans and modest tradespeople. Dutch persons of the middling sort enjoyed satisfying meals of salads, stewed meat, vegetables, fish, and buttered bread with cheese or meat slices. They drank their favorite beverage, beer, out of pewter or silver tankards, some highly decorated. A room in a great merchant's house had walls hung with gold-stamped leather, fifteen paintings, and one ebony-framed mirror. The furniture consisted of an East Indian cabinet, a round nutwood table covered with a Turkish rug, a nutwood buffet, twelve chairs, a cupboard, and a harpsichord.

Yet the Dutch feared that excesses of materialism might lead them astray from a righteous and godly life. One solution was to encourage consumption in moderation. That is, goods in themselves, like alcohol and tobacco, were not inherently evil, but immoderate indulgence in them might hinder an individual from fulfilling a patriotic or civic responsibility. Another solution was discretion. The Dutch enjoyed food, furnishings, and clothing in the privacy of their homes, in contrast to the more public activities of the aristocracies of other European states. Yet another means of legitimizing private wealth was the Dutch valuation of cleanliness. Keeping their persons, homes, and cities clean was a sign of moral rectitude no matter how many possessions the Dutch had. Moreover cleanliness connoted civic-mindedness for it distinguished the Dutch from less fastidious Europeans, and it was a prophylactic against disease that threatened to weaken the country.

ORDINARY PEOPLE

The paintings of princes, lace and jewels of royalty, and domestic comforts of merchants are fascinating in their sumptuousness and as manifestations of culture, power, and national identity. But in the early modern era the vast majority of Europeans did not have access to such goods. Indeed the poverty and simplicity of most people's existence contrasted sharply with the wealth and opulence of a minority. Yet the material culture of ordinary persons was no less significant than that of the privileged few during this period, and certainly the changes in daily life of the majority were slower but ultimately of far greater consequence.

Housing throughout Europe from 1400 to 1800 frequently consisted of wood. Peasant dwellings were simple, sometimes constructed of earthen materials along with wood. Their function was to provide shelter for humans and animals, and they often comprised only one room. Furnishings were also simple and might include a bench, a table, possibly some bed planks and sacks of straw, and basic cooking utensils, such as a pot, a pothook, and a pan. In some urban areas stone or brick replaced wood over time as the most common element in housing construction. Floors at the ground level, especially in poor dwellings, were of earth. Various types of tile floors appeared in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by the eighteenth century parquet floors were popular among the rich. Until the sixteenth century Europeans laid straw or flowers and herbs in ground-floor rooms; eventually this was replaced with woven mats and carpets. Walls were painted or covered with tapestry, though wallpaper became common in the seventeenth century. More expensive coverings, like leather or carved wood paneling, adorned the houses of wealthy families.

The staple food of Europeans was wheat, which they consumed, along with other cereals, in bread and gruel. In addition wealthy Europeans enjoyed plentiful and various meat dishes, like roasted and boiled fowl, beef, mutton, and pork. The poor settled for vegetables and some salt meat as accompaniments to bread and, more often, gruel. Eating practices in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were crude by modern standards. People ate off a wooden board or trencher instead of a plate. In many parts of Europe guests were expected to provide their own knives and cups or goblets. A common plate piled high with varieties of meat occupied the center of the table, and diners picked out what they desired with their fingers. Servants presented and removed dishes and filled cups with wine or water. Knives were essential eating utensils. Spoons became common in the sixteenth century, and individual forks spread slowly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Peasant clothing changed little from 1400 to 1800. The most common fabrics were homespun linen or wool, and shoes were often a luxury. However the clothes of the rich changed rapidly during the same period, with distinctive regional variations. Women of the Italian Renaissance wore square-necked garments with wide sleeves and elaborate hairnets and headdresses. In the sixteenth century the black clothes of the Spanish court became popular throughout Europe, succeeded by clothing in brilliant colors from the French style in the seventeenth century. Although fashion trends affected all of Europe, regional variations were rife. Linen or lace neck ruffs could be huge and elaborate or small and modest. Face paint was popular in some places and frowned upon in others. The three-piece suit for men made its appearance in seventeenth-century England as the outward sign of masculine disdain for fashion and focus on serious matters like politics.

NEW PRODUCTS

In the seventeenth century and especially the eighteenth century material culture in Europe reflected the increased availability of goods from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. European trade with the Middle East, other southwestern portions of Asia, and northern Africa never entirely ceased after relations were established in ancient times. Europeans obtained silks, spices, and slaves from these areas throughout the late Middle Ages and early modern periods. Yet certain Renaissance princes, eager to bypass Muslim middlemen and acquire access to or a monopoly over larger quantities of highly valued goods, like spices and precious metals, subsidized sea voyages of exploration to other parts of the world. In terms of material culture, the long-term results of these voyages included the introduction of new products and larger quantities of known products and the subsequent transformation of daily European practices.

Tobacco from North America enjoyed immediate success among European men in the seventeenth century. Commentators believed that tobacco had a calming effect on the consumer while simultaneously stimulating intellectual activity. Pipe smoking was the most common form of tobacco consumption until the nineteenth century, though inhaling it into the nose in the form of snuff was also popular among certain eighteenth-century elites. Tobacco consumers acquired pipes and snuff boxes, new objects of pleasure. Additionally tobacco fostered public, largely masculine, taverns and coffeehouses, where men gathered to drink, smoke, and share news.

Coffee became an extremely popular beverage in Europe during the eighteenth century. Like tobacco coffee was initially consumed by men in public places, and coffeehouses became centers of information, business transactions, and, some governments feared, political subversion. Tea and chocolate were also drinks of choice among Europeans. Unlike coffee, they were often consumed in the home with new, largely feminine rituals, especially surrounding tea consumption. Ladies of the aristocracy and the middle classes bought pewter, silver, and porcelain tea services. A "public" ritual performed in the home, tea drinking became a social activity that ideally required comfortable and elegant tables and chairs and fashionable dress. These products and social practices have helped historians understand the meaning of material goods in the everyday lives of ordinary Europeans.

An extensive sampling and analysis of probate records in London and provincial England for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals both traditional and new patterns of domestic existence and sense of personal identity. Lorna Weatherill has maintained that the numerous cooking utensils in the homes of the comfortable classes were both traditional and reflective of the importance of food in this group's everyday life. While utensils were functional and unadorned, items for serving and eating food—dishes and cutlery—became more decorated and refined from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Wooden trenchers and bowls gradually were replaced by pewter dishes. Forks and knives were new in the list of personal and family possessions, as were tea services. These developments, according to Weatherill, indicated a new layout of table settings and a new habit of food consumption as a social activity. Additionally Weatherill noted an increase in mirrors in private homes, suggesting both a greater importance of the self and a desire to enhance the appearance of the home.

Similarly the diaries of Elizabeth Shackleton from 1751 to 1781 reveal a bourgeois Lancashire homemaker for whom the care and upkeep of household goods was a major source of identity and self-worth. According to the diaries Shackleton spent a considerable amount of her time ordering, mending, and maintaining household linens, clothes, dishes, and the like. She divided her domestic possessions into the categories of either "best" or "common," indicating her profound sense of distinction between private, family events, and social rituals. Although she was well aware of fashion trends and style changes in china and clothes on a national level, Shackleton was no giddy pursuer of novelty. She was a discriminating consumer who exercised a standard of tastefulness, beauty, and longevity in the items she bought. Regarding items of furniture in particular, Shackleton valued durability and recognized that quality pieces would outlast her own lifetime.

Poorer consumers also responded to the availability of new and more affordable goods, notably sugar. An expensive and highly prized item for several centuries, sugar became more widely available and cheaper in the eighteenth century with the establishment of sugar plantations in the Caribbean Islands. Owned by Europeans and worked by slave labor, these plantations produced sufficient quantities of sugar so that almost all Europeans could afford to buy some. Over the course of the nineteenth century sugar became a mainstay of working-class diets in Britain. Combined with tea, it provided a quick, cheap, warm, and psychologically satisfying food for laboring men, women, and children with little time to spend cooking or consuming a more elaborate meal. The anthropologist Sidney Mintz suggested that sugar made possible the industrial revolution in Britain because workers in factories, sweatshops, and other operations regarded tea (almost always drunk with sugar), jam, and other sweets as convenience foods and compensation for long and difficult days or nights of continuous labor.

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

An issue of great importance in the history of material culture and a subject of intense debate among historians has to do with changes in consumer behavior and the meaning of goods during the early modern period. Was there ever a consumer revolution, a dramatic and broad-based transformation in European attitudes toward things and in Europeans' daily practices involving material objects? If so, when did it occur, and how did it happen? Neil McKendrick and several other scholars have asserted that a consumer revolution did occur in the eighteenth century. They maintain that early industrialization was accompanied by increased domestic consumption in England. Working people acquired many possessions, like dishes, household adornments, ribbons, buckles, and trinkets, which were more affordable due to changes in production methods. Thus the laboring poor desired and enjoyed more material goods than ever before. McKendrick also discerned a revolutionary change in material culture among wealthier consumers. Enticed by innovative entrepreneurs, like the pottery maker Josiah Wedgwood, middle-class consumers wanted earthenware decorated with classical designs, which Wedgwood successfully marketed as fashionable among the elites.

By contrast, some scholars have maintained that the extravagant spending of Renaissance rulers and the somewhat more restrained acquisition of goods by wealthy commoners laid the foundation for the modern acceptance of consumerism as an integral part of daily life and personal identity. From this perspective, instead of a consumer revolution, a gradual "trickle-down effect" occurred over a few centuries. The purchasing of numerous household and personal items spread from the elite strata of society down to the less wealthy. Some research supports a bottom-up approach, indicating that working people, even the laboring poor, in early modern Europe made joint decisions at the household level about the allocation of their resources into production and consumption. Thus Jan de Vries posited "an industrious revolution" in the early modern period, referring to an increase in labor productivity stimulated by families' desires for more consumer goods. This interpretation challenges the idea of a consumer revolution because working people started to acquire more goods long before technology changed the manner of production and prices of goods. Moreover the desire for goods was internally generated at the family level and was not an imitation of elite behavior or the result of manipulative marketing.

Whether or not the increase in consumption was revolutionary or gradual and whatever the motives behind Europeans' desire for various furnishings and clothes, by the eighteenth century more goods were available and were consumed. Studies of notarial inventories of household possessions at the time of the owners' deaths in eighteenth-century Paris show a trend toward greater comfort, efficiency, and privacy in home life compared with earlier centuries. Room arrangements in apartments shifted away from a vertical organization, usually with the kitchen on the ground floor and other rooms serving multiple or separate functions in different levels above. A horizontal arrangement of rooms on one or two floors in the eighteenth century was more convenient for general movement and for hauling water and fuel to different parts of the home. Parisians at this time created more privacy in their homes with separate rooms for separate functions and the use of screens or partitions. Whereas in the early modern era a single room might serve for sociability, working, eating, and sleeping, by the eighteenth century urban dwellers were inclined to separate spatially these different activities. Lighting improved with more and better candles and lamps, clearer window glass, and less obstruction from closely packed, tall buildings. Mirrors were more common than ever before, suggesting both more sophisticated home furnishings and greater concern for personal appearance. Even the clothing of poor residents changed as the century progressed. Men had several changes of shirts and more variously colored clothes, while women added dresses, aprons, and even corsets to the standard petticoats.

The political significance of eighteenth-century consumption was apparent during the French Revolution of 1789–1799. An important contributing factor to the revolution was the inability of producers and distributors to satisfy popular demand for cheap knickknacks that imitated articles worn and used by the aristocracy, for example, stockings, umbrellas, and fans. The French Revolution eradicated the guild laws and other restrictions on production characteristic of the Old Regime.

Moreover the French Revolution imbued ordinary domestic products and clothes with political meaning. Dishes and wallpaper decorated with blue, white, and red and patriotic symbols became popular as consumers wished or felt compelled to communicate their revolutionary sympathies. Supporters of the revolution and the new republic abandoned the elaborate dress and powdered wigs of the Old Regime in favor of simpler styles of clothing and more natural hair arrangements. During this period male fashion shifted from silk knee breeches and stockings to long trousers worn with boots. Embroidered waistcoats and cutaway jackets gave way to more humble fabrics and long frock coats. Indeed English styles became the model in men's clothing, and the three-piece suit symbolized responsibility, masculinity, and the ascension of bourgeois men to political power. Dark, sober colors became popular among middle-class men in Europe in the nineteenth century. Unpowdered hair cut fairly short or arranged in falling curls hearkened back to classical antiquity. Such styles were named "à la Titus" and were worn, with some differences, by women and men alike. Women's dress also became simpler though more varied. Under the Directory (1795–1799) and during the Napoleonic era (1799–1814) fashionable women sported pale, diaphanous gowns with low necklines and high waists that revealed more natural figures than the corseted ones of the Old Regime. Eventually styles returned to a fitted look and tight-laced corsets, but the changes wrought in clothing by the French Revolution spread throughout Europe, fostered by the industrial revolution in manufacturing.

READY-MADE GOODS

For several centuries Europeans produced and dressed in woolens, linens, and occasionally silks. Sturdy wool or hemp fabrics were the foundation of the majority of Europeans' clothes, manufactured from the local indigenous sheep or grown in fields of flax. Wealthier persons also wore silk fabrics, lace, and embroidery produced in Europe from raw materials native to Europe. Cotton textiles, however, transformed Europeans' dress and way of life. Europeans came into contact with cotton fabrics through trade with Asia. In the eighteenth century Europeans were enamored with cotton calicoes from India with their brilliant colors and intricate designs. English producers of wool and silk objected to the importation of fabrics that cut into sales of their own goods, and the government placed high tariffs and prohibitions on the calicoes. Recognizing the market for cotton textiles, ambitious craftspeople and entrepreneurs figured out a way to produce cotton textiles in England with a succession of spinning and then weaving machines. These methods of mechanical production and increased output were a significant part of the industrial revolution that started in England and spread to Europe. They also contributed to a dramatic change in the material culture of Europeans in the nineteenth century.

Plentiful and cheap cotton cloth constituted new and popular forms of clothing. Rarely worn in earlier times, underwear became a fundamental part of European dress as a result of the domestic manufacture of cotton textiles. Handkerchiefs, stockings, and other knitwear also were available to more consumers. The number of clothing items a person owned, even a relatively poor person, increased noticeably in the nineteenth century, though this trend was apparent earlier as well. Mass production methods required an agglomeration of workers, and migration from the countryside to urban areas proceeded apace. City dwellers were largely unable to produce goods for themselves, so increasing numbers of persons purchased larger proportions of household goods, clothing, and food. This demand for manufactured goods in turn fueled the quest for increased production. How did the mass-production methods of the industrial revolution affect the material existence of Europeans in the nineteenth century?

Wealthy Europeans could still obtain fine, handcrafted furnishings and tailor-made clothing throughout the nineteenth century. They might request a chest of drawers or a desk in a particular historical style, and craftspeople skilled in woodworking, veneering, design, and sculpting could produce an original and beautiful piece of furniture made out of valuable or attractive woods. Fashionable women and men also had many of their clothes custom-made, selecting a fabric and style. A dressmaker or tailor fit the garment to the customer's body and taste. Yet new items produced in new ways and ready-made goods offered a wider array of choices to consumers in the nineteenth century than in earlier times.

For example, a good bed was still constructed of wood, but box spring mattresses were an innovation in bedding brought about by more efficient methods of metal production. Beds made of metal were introduced and usually used by children, servants, the poor, or in hospitals. Knives, forks, spoons, and other tableware were fundamental items for many Europeans, but electroplating silver or gold on top of flatware made of baser metals enhanced their appearance. Rich and poor families liked to decorate their homes with art, and new alternatives were available to those who could not afford original paintings or sculptures. Print reproductions of varying quality adorned the walls of the comfortable as well as the working poor. For the middle class three-dimensional reproductive technology produced affordable versions of antique and contemporary statues and figurines.

A significant innovation of the industrial era was the manufacture of ready-made clothing. In earlier times many Europeans produced cloth and clothing for themselves and their families. An adult's worn-out jacket often provided suitable fabric for a child's trousers. Itinerant peddlers transported lengths of cloth throughout the countryside for purchase by rural inhabitants. Additionally a lively trade in old, used clothing was another source for the working poor, and employers passed on their old clothes to servants. New clothes were constructed for the most part for the wealthy, who selected fabric at a draper's shop, then proceeded to a tailor or dressmaker who fitted and stitched the garment for the individual customer. All of these methods of obtaining clothing continued into the nineteenth century, but a new method added a new array of cheap clothing choices, especially for male consumers of the working class.

In the years of economic slowdown cloth merchants could hire out-of-work clothing makers to cut simple patterns in men's trousers and jackets. The cut pieces were distributed to stitchers, usually female, who worked out of their homes. Merchants then offered for sale completed articles of clothing at low prices to working people. Gradually during the nineteenth century, with more and cheaper fabrics produced in textile factories and the patenting of the sewing machine in 1846, the ready-made process effectively produced more fitted, finer garments for sale in the department stores that appeared in France and England in the 1850s. In the nineteenth century urban dwellers in Europe had access to more goods than did their ancestors, though the middle classes were by far the greatest beneficiaries of this new abundance.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Housing, the setting for these new goods, was also a significant aspect of material culture for nineteenth-century Europeans. Income from successful enterprises expanded housing options for the middle class from urban apartments above or behind shops to detached houses in the suburbs. In England the middle class invented suburbs in the early nineteenth century as a means to escape the dirt, noise, and crime of densely populated urban centers. Building houses in the countryside surrounding cities, successful middle-class families enjoyed peaceful, healthy, and comfortable surroundings while men continued to operate family businesses or to work in other positions in the city. Removed from the site of trade and manufacturing, women and children became more home-centered, and domestic decoration and upkeep and child rearing became the primary functions of middle-class wives and mothers. To be sure many middle-class women had for a long time gained a sense of identity and self-worth through housekeeping, but in the nineteenth century this function assumed a new intensity. A flood of published housekeeping manuals testifies that more women were focusing on household cares and that they felt a need for professional assistance in the appropriate means of cooking, furnishing, maintaining, decorating, and entertaining in the home. Whether they lived in urban apartments or houses in towns, suburbs, or villages, middle-class women felt compelled to maintain comfortable surroundings for their families and suitable households for their status. The housekeeping manuals kept them abreast of changing styles in home furnishings and the manners and accoutrements appropriate for sociability.

While middle-class women fretted over the upholstery fabrics of their sofas and the carpet patterns on their floors, working people experienced a different material environment. Housing for the poor was usually makeshift, cramped, and overcrowded. A few rooms for a large family and simple, sparse furniture were luxuries indeed throughout much of the nineteenth century. In the cities workingmen especially sought warmth, light, companionship, and escape from dismal, cold, and uninviting living quarters in cafés or pubs. Women socialized on the front stoops and at the public laundering sites, where they washed their families' clothes and household linens. A vibrant public or street life compensated somewhat for the inadequacies of individual housing units. Urban renewal in major cities like London, Paris, and Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made some improvements in working-class housing by razing areas of dark and hazardous buildings and erecting apartment buildings with uniform designs, more lighting, and modern conveniences like plumbing and later electricity.

New inventions of the nineteenth century also led to new items of material culture. Photography, invented and developed in France in the 1830s and 1840s, quickly affected European lives, especially those of the middle classes. Around midcentury stereoscopic viewers—decorative holders that put photographs side by side so a viewer could see an image that approximated three dimensions or "real life"—were popular in comfortable Victorian homes. Visiting cards, made of photographic portraits reduced in size and mounted on a card, were exchanged and collected ubiquitously in both England and France. Family portraits became central items of home decoration. Picture postcards offered a means for people to communicate through the postal service that was less time consuming than writing an entire letter and that conveyed images to family and friends of, for example, a vacation site. Photography and travel increasingly were connected after the invention of small, cheap cameras at the turn of the century. Instead of relying on professional photographers, ordinary people could buy a portable camera, take pictures of scenery on holiday trips or informal snapshots of family members, and either develop the film themselves or send it to the manufacturer to be made into prints. People collected photographs in albums or put them in frames set atop a fireplace mantel or a piano. Pianos became common household furnishings in middle-class and eventually in working-class homes in the nineteenth century. Other new articles that made life easier, more pleasant, or more mobile during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included matches, typewriters, electric lighting, telephones, gramophones, bicycles, and, for the very rich, automobiles.

Although urban populations grew steadily during the nineteenth century, the majority of Europeans still lived in the countryside, where traditional, regional objects and rituals persisted. Rural people still slept in box beds, and women wore high, starched, white lace coifs in Brittany until World War II. Farmers and agricultural workers were not likely to use many candles or oil lamps, following the pattern of working in daylight and sleeping when darkness prevailed. The mass-manufactured goods that characterized urban life arrived slowly in the countryside. Yet even in Russia, a predominantly agricultural society at the beginning of the twentieth century, material culture became more urban and modern. Elegant, fixed-price shops competed with open markets in cities, and fashionable, Western clothing replaced traditional Russian shirts and shawls.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND DOMESTIC POLITICS

Although material culture is experienced by most people in the form of everyday activities and surroundings, it is inseparable from international relations and domestic politics. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries European imperialism affected material culture in Europe itself in ways different from foreign trade and earlier forms of colonialism. Europeans continued to enjoy tea, coffee, chocolate, and tobacco from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Art and artifacts from these continents contributed to Europeans' sense of themselves as distinct from other cultures and in most cases superior to them. In the nineteenth century European artists integrated a flat, two-dimensional Japanese aesthetic into paintings and decorative objects. Appreciation for Chinese art and Indian design also affected European porcelain, textiles, woodworking, and other goods. Cashmere shawls, originally imported from Asia but increasingly produced in England or France, were fashionable articles of clothing for middle-class women. English women who had lived in India returned to Europe with tastes and recipes for curry dishes. Although Europeans admired arts and crafts from other parts of the world, they represented these accomplishments as something less than the products of their own culture. By the late nineteenth century museums and exhibitions displayed textiles, furnishings, and decorative objects from Asia and Africa as exotic items produced by peoples whose inferiority to Europeans was obvious in Europeans' military conquests and domination over them. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that Europeans only "knew" the peoples of Asia and Africa through the artifacts they produced. Through museums, exhibitions, mass manufacturing, and department stores, many Europeans were exposed to non-European products or motifs and purchased them for use or decoration in their homes.

Material culture involved governments in other ways as well. By the nineteenth century the era of an absolute monarch associated with a particular furnishing or clothing style was over. Nonetheless, rulers and democratic governments patronized the arts and crafts and cultivated styles and designs that might promote a popular sense of national identity and state power. Following the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the first international gathering of products and machines, the British were gratified that the efficiency and output of their mechanized methods of manufacturing were unsurpassed. However, the men in charge of the exhibition were dismayed at the poor design and quality of British products in comparison with those from other parts of Europe and Asia. With the proceeds of the exhibition and selected items purchased from it, they established a museum of industrial design that later became the Victoria and Albert Museum. The purpose of the museum was to inspire British producers and consumers with examples of good taste in design and style. Although limited to an elite of intellectuals and artists, the arts and crafts movement in Britain was another systematic effort to manufacture objects of beauty and utility that defied the standardization and poor quality associated with mass-production methods.

French officials felt vindicated after the Great Exhibition that French goods were more beautiful than those produced in Britain, but they also were concerned about national manufacturing. All the more reason then for subsequent French governments to seek ways to maintain a competitive advantage. The government of the Third Republic (1870–1940) promoted both an ideal standard of good taste and an artistic style of art nouveau in the interests of economic prosperity and national unity. Cultivating the tastes of middle-class women was a major component of this effort. Through a reformed public education program for girls and in support of taste professionals who wrote books and articles, the Third Republic emphasized the importance of women's role as tasteful consumers for the home. A woman's civic function, according to the schools and the manuals, was to exercise good taste in furnishing her home. Similarly women were identified as major propagators of art nouveau, a graceful and fluid artistic style reminiscent of the rococo style from the eighteenth century. The Third Republic's intention in sponsoring the international exhibitions of 1889 and 1900 was, among other things, to encourage women as producers and consumers to revitalize handicraft production in France along with a distinctive French style of art nouveau.

Several scholars have deemed western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a mass consumer society. More goods were available to more people than ever before, and even workingpeople had choices about the appearance and style of clothes and furnishings they purchased. Advertising in the popular press, on streetcars, and through pamphlets or catalogs urged people to buy particular products at particular stores. Women, especially of the middle class, were the primary architects of material culture in the home and were thus the main target of advertising and of advice on tasteful consumption. This function had alarming effects when wives purchased more than their husbands could afford, and in England legal authorities reduced men's liability for their wives' spending, setting back women's ability to obtain credit and hence individual autonomy. Even working-class women, in certain regions and depending on local manufacturing industries, assumed responsibility for feeding and clothing their families and furnishing the home. Historians have debated, however, to what extent this was an era of mass consumption, given the limited participation of the working poor in the world of department stores, leisure travel, national identity, and as the target of advertisers.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The material culture of all Europeans changed dramatically during World War I. As national resources were increasingly channeled toward the war effort, even the wealthy experienced a variety of shortages. Following two or three years of murderous fighting, governments in England, France, and Germany restricted civilian consumption of fats, textiles, meat, bread, and other essentials, and imported goods of all kinds were limited or prohibited. Even before the first year of the war ended, bread and other foodstuffs were scarce in Germany, and authorities called on women in particular to exercise restraint in consumption. Although many Europeans made do with coarse-grained bread, margarine, and other food substitutes, frustration and discontent exploded in Berlin in October 1915, when women demonstrated against the high prices merchants charged for butter. As a result the government attempted to impose systematic rationing of goods in acknowledgment of consumers' legitimate concerns about the capacity of the regime to provide for its citizens during wartime. Germany's failure to effectively address the shortages was a significant part of its failure to prosecute the war itself. By contrast, Britons as a whole actually ate better in spite of wartime rationing and prohibitions.

Shortages of textiles and the new tasks women performed during the war in industry, agriculture, and the service sector led to long-term changes in feminine apparel. Even after the war ended more practical clothing remained, leaving behind the prewar long skirts, elaborate bustles, and extravagant hats. Women's dress in the 1920s and 1930s was less fitted and confining and increasingly presented a vertical, androgynous silhouette. Daring, fashion-conscious women wore their hair bobbed, contributing further to the boyish look. Short hemlines, slim styling, and small cloches allowed women greater freedom of movement.

After the war the promotion of electric household appliances altered material culture in Europe. Electric irons, sewing machines, and vacuum cleaners were available for household consumption before the war, and clothes washers and water heaters appeared in the 1930s. Such appliances were touted as laborsaving devices, compensating middle-class women for the loss of servants at the war's end and promising modernity to households equipped with the latest appliances. However, research on both France and Britain reveals that diffusion of these machines was slow, taking decades to reach even half of British households. In addition to income and price, gender and leisure significantly affected who bought which appliances for what purpose. By and large families chose leisure products over those that would relieve women of some household labor. Working-class British households were more likely to have better interior electric lighting and radios than electric cookers in the interwar years. The main reasons were economic. The cost of appliances, their installation, and their operation was more than most working-class families could afford. Consumers spent more on household furnishings, including bed and bath linens, curtains, cooking utensils, and dishes, and on clothing than on appliances, to say nothing of expenditures on food and leisure activities, including travel by train or motor vehicle, pubs, and movies. Producers of electricity and electrical appliances appealed to middle-class women to improve the cleanliness of their homes with these products. Although middle-class families were more likely than working-class families to own electric appliances, these devices actually confined women to the home more by raising standards of cleanliness. If appliances did not confine middle-class women, then working-class women who worked part-time for the middle class used the appliances in another person's home.

While electrical appliances and various forms of leisure and entertainment slowly permeated western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the inhabitants of the new Soviet Union experienced a drastic change in material life with the transition to a state-controlled economy in the 1930s. Severe shortages and deprivation were the common characteristics of the Stalinist experiment. Famine in the countryside in 1932 and 1933 along with collectivization forced millions of rural inhabitants to migrate to the cities, where they found little food and housing. Bread was scarce and adulterated, and people waited in line for hours at bakeshops, sometimes returning home with nothing. Bread and other hard-to-obtain necessities, including meat, milk, butter, vegetables, salt, soap, kerosene, and matches, were referred to as "deficit goods." As the government concentrated most of its resources in capital goods production, clothes were hard to come by, and shoes were sometimes unobtainable. Even persons with the skills to make and repair clothes and utensils could not ease the situation because thread, needles, and buttons were scarce and the state prohibited the private consumption of paint, nails, boards, or other raw materials. State ownership of housing meant the conversion of old buildings into communal apartments and the construction of barracks in new, industrial outposts. A typical communal apartment consisted of one room for an entire family with sheets or curtains dividing the space in which several people lived. Running water was not available, food was stored in sacks hung out the window, and building residents shared sinks, toilets, washtubs, and cooking facilities. Although more goods became available after rationing ended in 1935, the practice of urban foraging never really ceased, and severe housing shortages persisted until the 1950s.

Shortages caused by war and the policies of totalitarian states fluctuated or contrasted with steady, sometimes astonishing, growth in the production and consumption of goods in Europe. In the two decades following World War II unprecedented economic growth and welfare states led to extraordinarily high levels of material satisfaction if not abundance. Refrigerators, washing machines, telephones, television sets, and cars became common possessions for all Europeans, even urban workers and rural farmers. People spent less of their incomes on food and housing and more on luxuries and leisure. Although the vast majority of Europeans gained access to the same objects of material culture, differences persisted in terms of style and quality and the meanings of objects for different social groups and individuals. The construction of diverse personal and group identities through the objects of everyday life requires more investigation. Scholars have begun to write the history of material culture in twentieth-century Europe and to examine the effects of wars, revolutions, changing capitalist and socialist economies, new media, and state policies on material culture.

See also other articles in this section.

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Which of these is an example of material culture?

What is true material culture?

What is part of material culture?

Is technology part of material or nonmaterial culture?