In recent years, numerous studies on architecture and gender have been published, and an increasing number of works are dedicated to women architects and the challenges they face in their professional practice simply for being women. Long before this, Dolores Hayden was one of the first scholars to study a group of American feminists—such as Melusina Fay Peirce, Mary Livermore, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—who campaigned against the isolation of women in the home and their confinement to domestic life, viewing it as the root cause of their unequal status in society.
The Grand Domestic Revolution, a book that has gone largely unnoticed in Spanish-speaking countries, is the seed for many subsequent gender studies in architecture. It sheds necessary light on the innovative plans and visionary strategies of these women, as well as their ambitious goals to socialize domestic work and childcare. The book analyzes the utopian and pragmatic sources of feminist programs for domestic reorganization and how they intersect with conflicts of class, race, and gender—a history of a little-known intellectual tradition that challenges patriarchal notions of "a woman's place" and "women's work." Hayden demonstrates how the political ideology of materialist feminists led them to design physical spaces to create housekeeping cooperatives, kitchenless houses, daycare centers, public kitchens, and community dining halls.
