Pooja Sastry – Symposium: Push/Pull Thresholds in Art and Architectural History An Early Career Researchers Symposium, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (7 March 2025)

What can advertisements and recipes tell us about home interiors in the 1930s? While they may not be reliable indicators of how women actually used spaces, they constitute cultural blueprints, and such spatial fantasies did inspire real-life domestic interiors. My work uses recipes and advertisements for stoves from two 1930s periodicals: The Illustrated Weekly of India in Bombay and Caras y Caretas in Buenos Aires to show that colonial capitalism, global modern domesticity, consumption, and conjugality were spatialised and temporalised into everyday routines for women in similar ways in such far-flung territories. When read together with recipes, advice columns and nationalist propaganda, advertisements for stoves help narrate the ways in which social reproduction and commodity consumption in both British India and interwar Argentina became fused in the domestic sphere by blurring the line between women’s continual productive activity and the modernisation of the spaces they created via the families’ consumption of advertised products. I further argue that the export and import economies of both territories played a role in shaping domestic spaces, including by mainstreaming the restriction of women’s economic activities to the domestic sphere, new ideas of childcare and nutrition, and the use of ancillary objects such as utensils and cutlery.

Link to programme: https://www.tarraingt.com/schedule-1#