​New Project: 
​
In volume 2 of The Second Sex, Beauvoir explains why women are more likely to spend time doing housework than men by appealing to 1) the centrality of the home in the life of a couple or family, and 2) the fact that a man's function is more than that of a husband or father, because he works, and because he has a life outside the home, whereas a woman is supposed to be, first and foremost, a wife and mother – even if she works outside the home - and these are functions which tie her to the home. Given that, Beauvoir argues, it is natural that the woman should seek some pleasure in her occupations, and that she should try to better her own life at least by taking pride in the surroundings she is responsible for and that often, confine her: 

Man has only a middling interest in his domestic interior because he has access to the entire universe and because he can affirm himself in his projects. Woman, instead, is locked into the conjugal community: she has to change this prison into a kingdom.[1]

Beauvoir's account is in someways outdated. The situation of a woman in a marriage is not what it was in 1949. Women often have careers that are as valuable in economic and personal terms as men, and there seems no reason why they should seek value for their lives in a beautiful home. Yet, women do still perform most of the housework, and it is often they, rather than men, who still care that the home should be pretty and comfortable as well as clean and functional: it is mostly women, not men, who plump the cushions. So the question is whether this is a harmless leftover from a time when women were confined to the home, and could not find value for their lives outside what they did there, or whether there is something more sinister at stake, and whether we should fight our urges to straighten the throw on the sofa. 
 Whatever we conclude, it will still be the case that some version of the home, with or without cushions, is essential for human flourishing. Philosophers as opposed to sanctifying the home as Charlotte Perkins Gilman agree that it is, even though she also argues that most homes at the time she is writing are causing more harm than good by perpetuating domestic myths. ​​

[E]very human being should have a home. The single person his or her own home; and the family their home. […] The home should offer to the individual rest, peace, quiet, comfort, health and that degree of personal expression requisite; and those condition should be maintained by the best methods of the time.[2]
 

Nel Noddings, for whom the home is central to the ethics of care, agrees and emphasizes the nurturing and identity shaping aspects of the home: 

A home provides not only shelter and food but also a place from which, in which, one claims an identity. The house, or a room, or a corner becomes an extension of one’s body. A human organism interacts with the building, the objects it contains, and its setting. In an ideal home, every inhabitant beyond infancy has some control over doors – those physical objects and psychic symbols that close out the world, let others in, and allow ingress or egress for the individual controlling the door. There is a place to store one’s belongings and cherished objects. There are people to respond to an individual’s needs and who will make claims on that individual to respond to theirs. The home is created and maintained to promote the growth of all its members. It is a place of some stability and, for better or worse, it is a place where members can be found by the world and where they will be missed if they wander off.[3]

But given that the home needs to be shaped and maintained to provide the needs of its inhabitants, and that the work of doing so often falls to women, is it more accurate to say that domesticity is a way to bring about a certain type of flourishing for men at the expense of a (more basic) flourishing of women? In particular, does the well functioning home enable a better integration of its inhabitant, male and female, as productive members of society? Does it make female values more visible and help them become more centrally valued? Or does it perpetuate the existence of a private and public spheres, with participation in society is mostly done by those who spend time in the public sphere and those who spend time in the private sphere remain unrepresented, and unspeaking? 
 
In this book I will look at these questions philosophically, but from the perspective of a selection of women philosophers, from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. In doing so I hope to reinstate the home as a philosophical problem, worthy of inquiry. It seems that as things are, the home is absent from the history of philosophy, and we would be forgiven for thinking that it was a new problem, one brought up perhaps by Simone de Beauvoir the Second Sex. But by bringing up the writings of earlier women, we will debunk this myth and show that the home was only absent from philosophy because the women were, and men did not regard it as a problem (why would they? It is, after all, where the food gets made that allows them to keep working). 
Furthermore, bringing up the perspective of women philosophers on the problem of the home enables us to study that problem in all its historical richness and variety. The home has not always featured in our lives in the way it did when Simone de Beauvoir (or Betty Friedan) wrote about it. And although Beauvoir, like many philosophers before her, speculates about what the home was to those that came before her, we are better off in many ways reading the accounts of the women philosophers that lived in those homes.  I will look at writings about domesticity from Heloise of Argenteuil, Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish and the Leveller Women, Mary Astell, Madame de Maintenon, Jacqueline Pascal, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Harper, Frances Wright, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Simone de Beauvoir. 
 
In conclusion, what I hope to show through this project is that the home, in all its historical richness and variety, works both as an enabler and preventer of women's flourishing, both as a springboard for their participation to political society (though often not in what we now consider the traditional form of the home) and as a source of oppression and domination, and so a place to escape from. As with most philosophical problems, domesticity can and should be investigated to work out which of the various aspects I have highlighted here should be developed and which should be quashed. The point is that we have a history of philosophical reflection on the home, we are not at sea, and we have the tools to draw our own conclusions. Some of mine will become apparent over the course of the book, but mainly, I hope to prompt readers to engage in their own philosophical reflections about the home, taking the work of women past as their springboard. 
 
[1]  Here I am using the translation of The Second Sex by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage E-book 2009, (p.535). In the book I will use my own translations.

[2] The Home, Its Work and Influence, chapter 1. 

[3] Nel Noddings “Caring, Social Policy and Homelessness” Theoretical Medicine 23: 441-454, 2002, 444-445. 

And now in words of one syllable: 
​

Is home where the heart is or is not? Is home just good for men or for us too? What did we say about home in the past (the old and the new past)? Should we run or should we stay? What is best for us and best for all?