Abstract

This article examines the relationship between kitchen design and women, to be more specific, women’s gender identities. The kitchen is one of most gendered spaces whose history represents the history of women and transformation of their identities in a vivid way. From a sociocultural perspective of kitchen design, which mainly focus on key design features such as compact layout, open-up space and electrification of kitchen, I seek to track the changes of women’s identities and to figure out how the developments of kitchen design influenced women, including their lives, experience, as well as the sense of being. Has the modern kitchen design really set women free from the way the designer planned, or on the contrary, just constrained them with a fashionable model packaged as the modernism design myth?