All my books arrived before xmas thankfully, I received:
The Housewife's Book from 1938
Housewife's Handy Book from 1920's
The Happy Housewife from 1976
Helping at Home from 1961
The Housewife's Yearbook from 1937
The Housewife's Almanac from 1938
Sentenced to Everyday Life - Feminism and the Housewife from 2004
Retro Housewife - A Salute to the Suburban Superwoman from 2004
All of these publications really helped with putting my project together in terms of research, idea generation.
The main source of inspiration came from Appointment with Sigmund Freud by Sophie Calle. This gave me the confidence to juxtapose my collections into someone else's.
My favourite book was the Housewife's Book and this became my vessel for which I placed my work. It was full of great images and the writing was so lovely to read. When I wrote explanations or any parts of additional script I stuck to this style of writing.
I feel that Sophie Calle has such an interesting take on life and her work is full of mischief and tongue-in-cheek words along with good dosings of humour and I strove to bring a small element of humour to my work although I was very careful not to over-do it.
For instance when discussing the storage of a shoe collection I wrote
'Tidy storage is essential to using the collection fully
and knowing what you are short of in terms of
colour and form'
I enjoyed finding the small ways to amuse my audience (hopefully) I guess its funny to play with irony!
