“…be a genuine homemaker in your own home”: Gender and Familial Relations in State Housing Practices, 1917–1922

Using institutional ethnography we examine the Own-Your-Own-Home (OYOH) movement as a configuration of ideological practices designed to reorder gender, family and housing arrangements in the United States during the early 20th century We describe the social organization of these practices — with particular emphasis on the coordinating activity of the OYOH Section of the Department of Labor — and provide specific examples from texts of the National Archives and Research Administration. These texts are part of an historic, ongoing process of work organization that coordinated other sequences of action at multiple sites of production within the housing enterprise. We demonstrate that the texts of the campaign organized white, working class, married couples with children as the owners of homes.