To anglophone ears (and noses), ‘domestic science’ carries a whiff of the school kitchen: but is it time to reclaim the term from the cake makers and bread bakers? As this welcome recent work shows, through a series of case studies on ‘domesticity, households, and families’ (p. 1), domesticity and the modern sciences have enjoyed a close and evolving relationship. A helpful introduction to the volume sets up its diverse methods of analysis united by a domestic theme. The many potential and historical conceptions of ‘domesticity’, as ‘space, practice, ideology, [or] object of enquiry’ (p. 12), underpin the work, lending it its tripartite structure: site, experience, community. The scholarly approaches and topics range from contemporary interviewing to archival scouring, a cultural geography of rain gauges (in Carol Morris and Georgina Endfield's chapter) and a Bourdieu-based analysis of Greek familial relationships (by Konstantinos Tampakis and George Vlahakis). Contributions come from several (mainly European) countries, and many different disciplines, including photography, physics, botany, chemistry, meteorology and oceanography.
Just as diverse as the chapters’ contents are the different kinds of home they deal with: the town house and the country house, whether aristocratic pile or suburban maisonette, but also in-between spaces (bespoke laboratories in the home, as well as institutional laboratories meant to reflect the home, such as in Donald L. Opitz's chapter), and incorporating gardens as important parts of the extended domestic environment (as does Julie Davies). I particularly enjoyed many of the authors’ evocative descriptions of the ways in which scientific practice took place at home, often using everyday objects such as bits of card and string. As Claire G. Jones shows in her chapter, it is clear that reorienting the term ‘home-made’ away from connotations of second-rate shabbiness and amateurism would be one important consequence of renewed attention to domestic environments. Considering the emotional as well as the practical work which took place in homes of different kinds, including by the famous inhabitants of Down House discussed by Paul White, similarly enables the writing of more historically nuanced and rounded accounts.
Indeed, many essays demonstrate that a key component of domesticity is (and was) not just location but relationships, a significant complex of home–family–kinship–children–colleagues. These could be scholarly Enlightenment networks such as those described by Isabelle Lémonon; intergenerational relationships, such as the father–son focus of Staffan Bergwik's chapter; the uneasy coming together of family life and social policy depicted in Sven Widmalm's chapter; or the ‘fictive kinship’ forged in the academic workshop in Helena Pettersson's phrase and work. Such relationships, many of the chapters in this work show, were related to local and gendered identities, whether the ‘global Indianness’ of Aalok Khandekar's analysis, or the opportunity for the negotiation of gender identities through pulp fiction about newly domesticated wireless technologies, as Katy Price argues. These more dynamic constructions help present domesticity not just as a backdrop for certain kinds of enterprise, but also as an active means by which historical experimenters, authors, correspondents, students, ‘citizen scientists’ and more could reflect on and participate in creating many different kinds of scientific activity.
Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science is, therefore, an important contribution to the historical geographies of scientific practice, to the history of professionalization, and to the history of family life. Given its range, some scholars might be interested in just one or two chapters which pertain most directly to their areas of interest, but read in its entirety it is a manifesto for reorienting scientific study, past and present. It urges scholars to reclaim the importance of the domestic space, knowledge and residents; and homemade objects, equipment and ideologies. As Alix Cooper advocates in a stirring afterword, the impulses behind this collection can be expanded both chronologically and geographically, to ‘discern even broader patterns’ (p. 284) and changing relationships between domesticity and the sciences across time and space. In historians’ haste to emphasize the role of the laboratory, observatory, hospital or field site, this collection is an important reminder that, for many people, modern science began at home, and is itself a beginning of a new definition for what counts as domestic science.
