Easy Living

The Rise of the Home Office

By Elizabeth A Patton

Rutgers University Press

How did Americans come to believe that working at home is feasible, productive, and desirable? Easy Living examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture and mass media during the twentieth century. Through the analysis of national magazines and newspapers, television and film, and marketing and advertising materials from the housing, telecommunications, and office technology industries, Easy Living traces changing concepts about what it meant to work in the home. These ideas reflected larger social, political-economic, and technological trends of the times. Elizabeth A. Patton reveals that the notion of the home as a space that exists solely in the private sphere is a myth, as the social meaning of the home and its market value in relation to the public sphere are intricately linked.

This easy to read, fun, and unique book approaches discourses on work/life in a way that no one has before. Elizabeth Fish Hatfield, editor of Communication and the Work-Life Balancing Act

Patton draws on an impressive array of archival sources to demonstrate how communication technologies and architectural design have constructed ideals about working at home. Her nuanced historical analysis importantly reveals that our contemporary struggles over work/life balance are not new. Amy Corbin, author of Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America

Remote Work Won’t Save Us: The home office was never designed to give workers more freedom. The pandemic has only made it worse,' by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein
https://newrepublic.com/article/158704/remote-work-wont-save-us-home-office-elizabeth-patton-review The New Republic

Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office [is] a piece of engaging and prescient scholarship which, especially at the present moment, makes a valuable contribution to now central and ongoing global debates about what working from home has meant, means now, and might mean in the future. Visual Studies

Easy Living sheds necessary light on the practice of working from home. It is also (and seemingly unintentionally) timely: as societies negotiate an exit from the pandemic emergency and attempt to move towards some form of the new normal, choices about whether to continue working from home or to return to the office are being made on both corporate and individual levels.' LSE Review of Books

Easy Living offers a strong critique of the contemporary myth of work-life balance, a myth that 'keeps workers from recognizing the exploitation of their labor and the dependence on service workers to support work-life balance'....Although written before the onslaught of Covid-19, Easy Living exposes the long-standing discourses of gender, race, and class undergirding American experiences of work and home, discourses laden with power and inequality that the pandemic has exposed. Television & New Media

ELIZABETH A. PATTON is an assistant professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the co-editor of Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships.

Contents
Introduction
Part I: Where Does Work Belong?: Toward a New Conception of Home
1          The Home and Its Function
2          Industry Stay Out
3          The Telephone and Better Living
4          Portable Typewriters for Home Use
Part II: Consuming Office Practices and Technology in the Postwar Suburban Middle-Class Home
5          The Quest for Easy Livin’ in the Suburban Home
6          The Big Business of Homemaking
7          Junior-sized Offices
8          An Office Away from the Office
Part III: The Birth of the Live-Work Lifestyle
9          Real Men Live in the City
10        Pseudo-Bohemian Bacherlorettes
11        Work Where You Live
Part IV: Neoliberal Domestic Workspaces
12        The Electronic Cottage
13        Adaptable Parents, Flexible Jobs and Adaptive Homes
14        Urban Professional Lifestyles
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

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