feminism

Very probably I had never heard of ‘man caves’ for ten years after the term’s 1992 coinage and I found the term puzzling and off-putting. Surely, I thought, whether men made their ‘exclusive’ spaces in rooms that were subterranean or not, they didn’t want to emulate cavemen. I thought the term would fade. As I am wont to be, I was wrong.

As the American home grew metastatically throughout the Naughts, sprouting great rooms and game rooms, room-sized closets and bonus rooms, wine cellars and media rooms, outdoor living rooms and family rooms off of formal (indoor) living rooms, the idea that men needed dedicated male spaces became more entrenched. In 2006, The DIY Network premiered Man Caves tv show and episode after episode of homebuying television like HGTV’s Property Virgins and House Hunters would feature couples searching for a house with an appropriate man cave space.

There was no female corollary, no ‘woman cave’. It seemed that there was no need for one, as there was a generally accepted a narrative that only male space had declined and only male space needed restoration, a view well articulated by The Art of Manliness:

“The rise of suburban culture with its emphasis on creating a domestic nest, usually meant sacrificing male space for the good of the family. Home designs in the 1950s exchanged the numerous, smaller rooms of the Victorian home for fewer, larger rooms….

With no room to call their own, men were forced to build their male sanctuaries in the most uninhabitable parts of a home. Garages, attics, and basements quickly became the designated space for men, while the women and children had free reign over the rest of the house.

Men filled these rooms with the trappings of manliness- animal heads, discarded furniture, and pictures of sports figures (or women) would adorn the room. They would use their “man caves” as a place to retreat to when the demands of work and family life felt suffocating.“

[emphasis mine]

Even as American homes had swelled almost 1,000 square feet on average from the 1950′s to the 2000′s while fertility rates and average family size shrank, a narrative emerged that the whole home had been feminized as a nest, and men needed caves in which they could enjoy privacy and perform masculinity. The requisite stainless-and-granite kitchens (open to the living room/ great room/ living room / family room / den) were the domain of women and children while the man cave, centered traditionally around an extra large television and comfortable seating, belonged to the man. Now the discount retailer HomeGoods is arguing for a corrective to that lack of exclusive women’s space, a “Mom Cave“.

Calling it “a personal space where a woman can re-energize doing the activities she loves”, the Mom Cave would seem to be the fulfillment of that Woolfian ideal that a woman must have “a room of one’s own”. But the comparisons of a mom cave and a man cave suggest they are very different and not necessarily equal. The man cave has many manifestations but is primarily a place of passive leisure, dominated by the viewing of screens more than the creation of anything. Mom caves, meanwhile are imagined as a place for cognition (“reading”), making (“scrapbooking”), and writing (“blogging”), with resting (“or just relaxation”) having a definite last and lesser place. Functionally, the mom cave is little more than a home office with extra seating, yet another room in which a woman must do something and is defined primarily by her parental job (hence ‘mom cave’) rather than her gender (‘woman cave’).

Thinking about the functional differences–passiveness vs. activeness, consumption of media vs. creation– in these gendered spaces, I can’t help but wonder how much of their differences reflect real divergences in how men and women wish to relax and to what extent these spaces encourage the exaggeration of gender stereotypes and gender oppression. Men do cook, play with their children and live in their living rooms; women do enjoy television and down time and yet these ‘retreats’ would have us believe in the old Venus/Mars duality. Do you have a personal space in your home? To what extent does it express traditional gender norms? And do you think that man caves and mom caves give us places to be ourselves or do they reinforce streotypes?

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