1 This special report invites the reader to enter domestic space, studying social structures through a sociology of social class in the home. This focus is first of all justified by privacy’s historically increasing importance, and by the significance of the home as an exemplary site for the development of intimacy. [1] The twentieth century was the one in which domestic space was conquered: work moved gradually out of the home; work hours decreased, freeing up time for other activities; and, at the same time, housing conditions improved significantly. This change was initially reserved for the bourgeoisie, but it gradually spread to other social classes; “comfort” reached the majority of homes by the 1960s. [2] In recent decades, housing has become increasingly important for individuals’ social existence. Its role in organizing sociability has grown stronger, [3] and the layout and decoration of the home have gained a new status in domestic practices, one demonstrated by the rise of DIY and furniture brands and the growing number of television programs and specialist publications dedicated to such practices.

2 Domestic space, then, is one of the matrices of individual socialization and the genesis of class subcultures. As the center of family relations, it is one of the main frameworks of primary socialization. Housing supports specific practices and representations, characterized by forms of sociability, by ways of dividing tasks and space between household members according to gender and generation, and by modes of appropriation through decor, layout, and furnishing. These ways of living vary with environment and depend on material housing conditions and the constraints these impose on lifestyle. The physical configuration and decor of the home function as socializing devices, shaping their occupants’ dispositions—something confirmed by the presence of works of art in bourgeois family homes as a vector for the early interiorization of a familiar relationship with legitimate culture [4]; by the effects of domestic order and disorder on the acquisition of dispositions that promote academic success among working-class children [5]; and by the role of overcrowding and constrained housing, which are factors in the importance of the street for teenagers on housing estates, and in their entry into gang life. [6] Lifestyles are shaped by living conditions, and are therefore closely linked to the position one occupies in social space and to the logics governing housing markets and public housing policies.

3 In a context marked by the explosion of both housing costs and economic inequality, everything indicates that social differences in housing conditions have increased significantly in recent decades. [7] Increasing inequalities in wealth make the division between landlords and tenants more and more structuring in definitions of social position and processes of social reproduction. [8] The development of ownership savings schemes since the 1960s, the construction of large housing estates, the renovation of old inner-city neighborhoods, and the promotion of single-family homes have also contributed to an increasing diversity in the housing supply and new possibilities for residential trajectories, giving one’s habitat an increasingly important place in the differentiation of social position and trajectories, but also material conditions of existence. [9] As a consequence, “whatever the forms of standardization of leisure, culture, food habits, or clothing may be, the conditions of control of space and the constraints of access to housing are powerful reminders of the social stratification of different lifestyles.” [10]

4 While the form a habitat takes is largely determined by the position one occupies in social space, it has another distinctive property. The “private world” [11] is relatively sheltered from relations of domination and confrontation between social classes. It certainly does not escape them: for instance, lifestyles may be highly sensitive to the influence of exemplars of expertise that can impose standards of good and bad domestic taste. And domestic space is never completely isolated from the outside world, since it is subject to coexistence with a neighborhood that may sometimes encroach on the domestic sphere, as well as visits from friends and institutional representatives that sometimes take the form of social control of private life, especially among the working classes. [12] Nevertheless, unlike other spheres of existence marked by the lasting and repeated nature of situations of contact and concrete experiences of domination—work, school, and so on—the domestic space offers a place to withdraw from relations with other social groups. It is an appropriable domain where one can organize one’s space and time as one likes, and where lifestyles express themselves more freely. This observation has already been established for the working classes, but it applies to other social groups. [13] As Pierre Bourdieu remarked, unlike cultural practices, which are largely shaped by the “express pedagogical action” of the school, other ordinary practices like those in the domestic space are subject to less powerful instances of legitimization, leaving more room for the membership group’s symbolic autonomy. [14] The domestic space is both domesticable and domesticated, characterized by the possibility it offers its occupants to deploy personal appropriations—decor, layout, leisure, and so on—that escape relations of direct subordination. [15]

5 The domestic space is defined by the duality, evoked by René Baer’s poem at the beginning of this issue, between submission to constraints related to the position one occupies in social space and the possibility of expressing symbolic autonomy: a place whose uses are determined by the structure of inequalities, the nature of the resources one possesses, and class membership, but also a space in which these constraints can be forgotten, a break from relations of domination, and a home for dreams, for the imagination, and for personal appropriations.

6 Finally, as a place where social class distinctions can be observed, housing is a privileged space for analyzing social relations between the sexes. By affirming that “the personal is political,” feminist movements and the sociology of gender have made domestic space a primary object for challenging and analyzing power relations between the sexes. [16] This is the space where domestic work occurs, a set of invisible, unpaid tasks largely carried out by women. It is also behind the closed doors of the home that women experience the most serious physical and sexual violence. [17] Because it is a place where male domination is exercised in specific forms, the analysis of lifestyles in the home represents a new way of studying the articulations between class and gender social relations.

7 By dealing with the inside of the home, this special report departs from the most widespread approaches to social structure, which often focus on other dimensions of practice—cultural practices, work, relationships with schools and politics, and so on. This extends a body of research that examines the role of space in the “social construction of populations,” [18] shedding light on what classes and class fractions owe to their place(s) of residence. [19] Residential space affects how they are formed in two ways: on the one hand, housing and neighborhood form an environment that generates practices and so lies at the origin of specific lifestyles that, under certain conditions, can function as a “local matrix of habitus” [20]; on the other, because of the symbolic representations it bears, residential space helps define social status, both because the population’s spatial distribution can reinforce the social hierarchy by naturalizing it, and because, like “status groups,” it can help to distribute places or positions on an alternative scale to those typically used to describe social space, like economic, cultural, or social. [21]

8 Much like a recent collective study of “little-middle” France, which showed how a suburban neighborhood can support both social trajectories and a specific “local domestic culture,” [22] such research begins from questions of housing, using a sociology where social classes “stand on their own two feet,” combining analyses of social position and lifestyles. [23] In the wake of the seminal article by Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Madeleine Lemaire on housing estates, [24] research looked at the logics of settlement, the modes of articulation between social and residential trajectories, and sociabilities, customs of the neighborhood, and forms of cohabitation in the local area. Despite the importance attached to the role of space, these works rarely entered into questions of housing, [25] whose private, intimate nature made sociological observation difficult. [26] Some, however, broke with this trend. This dates mainly from the 1980s, and followed Richard Hoggart [27] in describing the “culture of residence” [28] and the logic structuring the working classes’ “private world,” [29] analyzing the functions of domestic space among the upper middle classes, [30] and the forms the lifestyles of the “new middle classes” took at home. [31] In his survey of the space of French lifestyles in the 1970s, Bourdieu also included several dimensions of domestic practice—choice of furniture, ways of receiving guests, and so on [32]—while other studies emphasized the variation of sociabilities within housing, [33] or studied processes by which housing models and ways of living are diffused from a historical perspective. [34]

9 Domestic space, then, is not new territory for the sociology of social class. But these studies had few direct successors. While the quantity of research on the domestic space has increased since the 1990s, [35] it typically occurs within new, competing frameworks that challenge classic ways of interpreting the social world. It has little interest in social structure, [36] preferring instead to examine variations in ways of living between different countries and cultural areas, [37] to deal with questions of habitat from the point of view of the “exclusion” of the homeless, [38] or, more recently, “residential vulnerability,” [39] and to postulate the existence in French society of a process of individualization that makes differences between social classes imperceptible or even non-existent. [40] The articles in this special report are united by the claim that there exists a relatively strong separation between research into social class and into domestic space, and by the desire to break this down.

10 The studies collected here all have the same ambition: to uncover the logics of the construction and transformation of domestic lifestyles specific to certain classes or class fractions, to examine the connection between social relations of class and gender, and to analyze the fact that differences between these lifestyles owe as much to inequalities in resources and positions in social space as to these social groups’ cultural autonomy. The six articles in this special report are accompanied by Hortense Soichet’s photographs of domestic interiors, which illustrate the variety of types of habitat and logics of appropriation. [41]

11 The sociology of social class in the home moves along several dimensions. It refers first of all to the structural logic that governs the production of differentiated habitat types and their distribution in social space. [42] Secondly, comparing residential contexts and contrasting social groups reveals the social differentiation of housing preferences, variations in housing uses, and the symbolic meanings associated with them. These differences are embodied in decorations, layout, and furnishing, in personal or collective uses of the various rooms in the home, or in domestic sociabilities, which vary in terms of frequency, ways of receiving guests, and the nature of the social relations that unfold within them. Some forms of housing—like loft apartments for the “new middle classes” in gentrified neighborhoods [43]—are associated with specific social groups and ways of living in a place. Among arable farmers, upward social mobility has brought with it a transformation of housing and residential tastes, which form part of the process of separation between work and private life and follow logics of distinction that aim to keep away stigmatized working-class groups and move closer to the local upper classes. [44]

12 Domestic lifestyles, defined by the expression of socially situated tastes and distastes, are also governed by the economy of the “maisonnée”: [45] the daily management of tasks that allow the domestic group to survive, and their distribution among household members, or between them and outsiders, vary greatly between social groups. The possibility of delegating domestic work to employees, who often have little job security, is a factor in social inequality; [46] it is also a distinctive attribute of upwardly mobile households, and can be the subject of classification struggles between different fractions of the middle and upper classes. [47] Examining the maisonnée also allows us to connect analyses of class relations to those of sex relations. [48] The gradual generalization of the norm of women’s work fuels criticism of their domestic confinement, division of labor according to sex forming, in certain contexts, a major line of differentiation between classes and class fractions. [49] But the distribution of domestic chores is still structured by strong gender inequalities, [50] which take different forms depending on social milieu, the degree to which men are willing to play a role, [51] and the delegation of these tasks, typically by upper class households to women from working or immigrant classes. [52] Despite the progress made by the egalitarian ethos, primary socialization still plays a decisive role in gender differences in the management of domestic tasks: the demand falls much more heavily on girls than boys, but this differs a great deal depending on their social class and the conception of childhood and relationships between the sexes prevailing within it, which is related to the parents’ cultural and economic resources and the power relations between them. [53]

13 The connections between gender, class, and domestic space are also at the heart of Family Fortunes, which we reproduce large extracts from here. [54] It took thirty years for this classic work of English historiography to be translated into French. In it, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall decode the historical process by which a social class, the English bourgeoisie, was born. They show that, beyond its place within relations of production, the formation of the bourgeoisie was based on the adoption of a specific lifestyle that allowed it to stand out both from the urban working classes and the aristocracy that dominated it at the time. It was characterized by a strong emphasis on religion and a highly unequal recasting of social gender relations, which led to the exclusion of women from economic affairs, assigning them instead to a role centered on the family and tasks related to maintaining morality and educating children. Space played a fundamental role in this process, which relied on the bourgeois settling in residential suburbs, away from commerce and the urban centers where this social group was previously located. The birth of the English bourgeoisie was intrinsically linked to the invention of the home, which enshrined the separation between workplace and domestic space and between public and private life. The construction of housing as an intimate space separate from other social spheres was part of the same movement that relegated women to domestic space and assigned them management of the home.

14 The sociology of domestic space is based on the analysis of links between historical transformations of social space and the changes in lifestyles and social relations between the sexes. Over recent decades, popular male sociability in rural areas has redeployed itself from public spaces—which are now stigmatized—into the interiors of homes, excluding women from them. [55] Finally, paying attention to history leads us to examine the processes of construction, diffusion, and circulation of models and tastes in terms of housing. [56] We pay particular attention to the role of the authorities who prescribe domestic taste, and of “intermediaries” between producers and consumers, [57] including housing professionals—architects, decorators, and real estate agents—brands devoted to aspects of housing like DIY, decorating, and furniture, and specialized cultural products, including print media, TV shows, and blogs. The example of the open-plan kitchen reveals the dynamics of and obstacles to the diffusion of new domestic tastes. While the wholesale rejection of this arrangement by those living in housing estates makes it possible to identify several dimensions of working-class domestic lifestyles, and the distance separating them from those of the cultivated middle class, its adoption by some households who are, to a modest degree, upwardly mobile shows the logics of diffusion and appropriation of heteronomous habitat models based on symbolic logics specific to the social group that claims them. [58] Placed in a dynamic perspective like this, the sociology of domestic space illuminates the logics governing the differentiation of lifestyles and their distribution in social space, at the intersection of gender and social class.