Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Editorial

In Belgium, as in most other Western countries, the inter-war years were a period that saw new ideas about housing being introduced among various sections of the population. Acting as intermediaries in communicating the housing ideas of architects and government to those being housed, were diverse social organizations. One of those organizations, the Katholiek Arbeidersvrouwen (KAV—Catholic Working-class Women) grew during those years to become one of the most influential of its kind, devoting itself to improving the lot of the working class by way of a multifaceted program of education for working-class women. A crucial theme in the KAV program from the early 1920s was workers' housing, which, towards the end of the 1930s, became the central plank of the organization's wider policy. At that time, indeed, the KAV was promoting a new type of domesticity in defense of the Catholic person and Catholic family life against the increasing herding of people into a mass society. The argument advanced by the KAV for this new form of domesticity interwove political ideas with views about hygiene, anti-materialism and gender.