Ethical Practice and Material Ethics: Domestic Technology and Swedish Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century, Exemplified from the Life of Hanna Rydh

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to discuss questions about materiality: how different material phenomena can be involved in an ethical, or more precisely, feminist process concerning public interventions in the material construction of the family, home and household and their related contexts during the last century. A background is Suzanne Spencer-Wood’s (1996: 407) definition of material feminism as a theoretical approach focussing on material culture not just as a product of behaviour but also as an active social agent used by feminists to symbolise and implement their transformations of culture by combining the supposedly separate domestic and public spheres in order to raise women’s status. Reform women gave new meanings to material culture that they used as social agents to change gender ideology, identities, roles and practice. The theoretical approach also relies on discussions concerning ethical practice and ethical materiality as it is highlighted by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008a, b) in their anthology Material Feminisms. Materiality is understood in this chapter as something physical in a broad sense, including domestic animals and the human body. Special attention will be paid to material phenomena as an active and significant factor with a historicity, a force and a value of its own, material agency.