Home away from home: federal domesticity and displaced families, 1933-1945

Abstract

In the twentieth century, “federal domesticity” emerged as a result of the combined effects of massive internal migration in the United States, a growing federal bureaucracy, and increasing government interest in shaping citizens’ family formations and sexual identities according to racial norms for gendered respectability. Across the 1930s and 1940s, as a global financial crisis segued into a global war, millions of people left their homes. Some were forced out, while others voluntarily sought work and stability in new communities. For many American families, these migrations led directly to government intervention in the intimate zones of domestic life. For the first time, an expansive federal government built and managed temporary shelters and camps to house migrant families throughout the country. Federal officials enacted federal domesticity, a constellation of prescriptions for family life, including heteronormative gender roles, rigid sexual morality, consumerism tied to white, middle-class norms, and a single-family home, on displaced families through architecture, objects, and educational programming. Agents of the federal government – who could be members of the military, camp managers, home economists, and sociologists – sought to remake displaced people into productive American citizens. Employees of the federal government initiated federal domesticity in one-on-one relationships with migrant families and particularly with migrant women. Federal domesticity, however, was not simply a government prescription. Migrant families did not blindly accept the advice they received from these agents of federal programs, but rather negotiated their relationships with and the benefits they received from federal officials.