Miniature Material Worlds: Women and the Baby House in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract Unlike modern dolls’ houses, eighteenth-century baby houses were more than playthings meant only for children. For genteel women and girls alike, these small-scale spaces held positions of large significance. Taking a material culture approach that combines analysis of extant baby houses with an array of archival evidence, this article reconstructs their role as important affective agents within women’s lives. Expanding upon existing studies which illuminate the connection between the baby house and the full-scale domestic interior, it argues that these miniature material realms were also inherently entwined with the ever-growing world of goods around them. Rather than simply replicating this wider material world in miniature, the baby house represented a powerful and especially intimate medium through which the female user could contemplate and negotiate her place within it. Furthering a flourishing literature concerned with the analytical potential of smallness, the article demonstrates how a close focus upon these personal objects can shed new light on women’s emotional, sensory, and material experiences in this period. It thus advances recent efforts to rehabilitate the status of feminine toys and trinkets, doubly dismissed because of their size, and inherent association with women, as essential historical agents worthy of scholarly investigation.