Where Mother Saw Best

The house nurtures our sense of self, embodies our notions of intimate family life, and serves as our haven in a heartless world. But it’s also the site of Sisyphean labor, mostly female—cooking, minding, cleaning, imposing order on the fruits and detritus of bourgeois life, including but not limited to vast holdings of cotton-ball-festooned pre-K art projects. All of which means, of course, that it’s contested terrain—between the individual and the family, children and parents, wives and husbands.

Alice Friedman’s Women and the Making of the Modern House and Colin Davies’s Key Houses of the Twentieth Century probe aspects of the complex relationship between modernism— the dominant architectural style of the 20th century—and domesticity. Together and sometimes in spite of themselves, they illuminate the central role middle- class women played in the development of a peculiarly American strain of ...