Abstract
Cooperative housekeeping was a system for improving the quality of home life, in which several households of one or more people combined to share the costs and labour involved in providing themselves with services such as cooking, laundry and cleaning. Households retained their individual homes and privacy, but ate some meals in a communal dining room and shared other communal facilities. Ideally, cooperative homes would be situated close together, and centred on a specially-built complex of buildings containing the dining room, central kitchen and common room. Cooperative housekeeping was possible for households with or without servants, but if servants were involved they would live in the central building rather than in their employers’ homes. The aim of the system was to allow households to combine resources to achieve economic and other domestic improvements, but it could be portrayed as the first step towards communal living and socialism, or as a purely economic measure.
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Notes and References
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© 1988 Lynn F. Pearson
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Pearson, L.F. (1988). The Nineteenth-century Home and its Alternatives. In: The Architectural and Social History of Cooperative Living. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19122-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19122-2_1
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