It may look like a regular kitchen. But it holds a fascinating story of women's liberation

EMILY BRIGHT: In the archives of the Minneapolis Institute of Art sits a kitchen. It doesn't look like any other piece of high art you might find at Mia. It looks like a regular kitchen, but that kitchen holds a story of design and women's liberation not often told. The kitchen is called the Frankfurt Kitchen, and the one that exists at Mia is one of just a few that remain in the world. There's a high likelihood that the design of your own kitchen replicates it. Minneapolis journalist and historian Katie Thornton reported a piece all about the fascinating history of this kitchen for the podcast 99% Invisible. And she joins me right now to talk about it. Katie, welcome back to Minnesota Now.

KATIE THORNTON: Emily, thank you so much. It is nice to be back.

EMILY BRIGHT: Well, I'm looking forward to hearing about this. So what got you interested in reporting about the background of the Frankfurt Kitchen?

KATIE THORNTON: Yes, certainly, so I am from Minneapolis. I live in Minneapolis again now. And I've always loved the design and furniture section of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. And so I had seen the Frankfurt Kitchen in Mia's collection, and I was really intrigued to learn more. It was part of this big public housing effort back in the 1920s in Frankfurt. This kitchen was installed in about 10,000 public housing units. And it clearly had lasting influence. As you said, it looks like just an almost standard, modern IKEA kitchen.

And in reading more about this, after I had seen it in the Institute of Art, I also learned that its designer, Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky, was an ardent feminist. And she designed this very efficient compact kitchen with the goal of enabling women to complete their unpaid housework in the kitchen with greater ease so they could get it done faster and get on with their lives. She really wanted it to be a feminist kitchen. And this raised all sorts of questions for me.

I wanted to go deeper into the history to learn did it work? Did this kitchen design really help aid women's liberation? Could any kitchen design do that? And so I ended up going deep into the history of the Frankfurt Kitchen, learning what it did and didn't accomplish and learning about the generations of feminists before and after Schutte-Lihotsky who were trying to use design to aid women's liberation and in some cases do away with women's unpaid labor in the house.

EMILY BRIGHT: Oh, boy, I want to hear all about this. So first, I assume you went to Mia, and you got to stand in the Frankfurt Kitchen and look around. Did it feel very different from the one in your own home? Paint me the scene of what it looks like.

KATIE THORNTON: Such a great question. And I will say it was so cool to get in there. So truly, all credit and thank you to Jennifer Komar Olivares, who is the head of exhibition planning and strategy at the museum. I've long dreamed of going inside one of these few remaining Frankfurt Kitchens. And it's really interesting to be in there because on the one hand it is so special and so unique to be in this seminal kitchen that a lot of people have described as the first modern kitchen. But on the other hand, it did feel normal in a lot of ways. I have an IKEA kitchen, and there were a lot of features that I could see myself using or features that I have in my own kitchen that weren't wildly dissimilar from this kitchen from 1926.

It has a double sink for washing and rinsing dishes. It has a dry rack system suspended above countertops. It has plenty of storage, efficient storage for pots and pans. And it has this long, continuous countertop. So there's all of these features that, at this point, are very, very normal in kitchens. You don't even give them a second thought. But at the time that this kitchen was built and designed in the 1920s, these were really revolutionary ideas. Kitchens, what we know about kitchens in Europe at that time, where this kitchen was designed, was that they were often quite cramped.

They were hodgepodges of random surfaces and tables. And you would hunch over these tables of differing heights and almost break your back doing the food prep. There weren't necessarily sinks. And so you would be hauling this heavy water basin in to wash dishes and to clean. There wasn't efficient electric or wood stoves and ovens. You would just be cooking over an open hearth. And so there's just a lot of soot, a lot of smoke. And these were spaces prior to the Frankfurt Kitchen that didn't usually get attention from architects and designers largely because they were considered the domain of women and of servants.

EMILY BRIGHT: So talk to me about some of these revolutionary ideas that went into creating this kitchen.

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, certainly, so the countertops, which we mentioned, were really a big one. Along the perimeter of the Frankfurt Kitchen, it's a small, narrow room, maybe about six, maybe eight feet wide by 12 feet long. And there's a counter of consistent height that wraps around the edge of the kitchen. They put a stool-- the woman who designed it put a stool in this kitchen, often on casters, so that women could sit while they were working. There was a fold-down ironing board that you could easily fold back up and get out of the way. It was very efficient. It was very compact. But there were also things that just reduced a lot of the labor that women had to do.

So there were these 12 identical storage bins for different foodstuffs, different grains, sugar, salt, coffee, things like this. They were storage bins, but they were also measuring cups. So they have these notches inside. So instead of lugging out a big bag of flour, plunging a measuring cup into the bag of flour and pouring that into a separate bowl and dirtying up multiple dishes in the process, the storage bins themselves could just be used as measuring cups to pour something like flour right into the pot that you were using or the bowl that you were using to cook. So all of these designs--

EMILY BRIGHT: I want that.

KATIE THORNTON: Right? Exactly, I know. So while a lot of them lasted, some of these really efficient ones actually didn't make it into our modern kitchen. But you can see how they really save a lot of time and a lot of work for the women who were doing this unpaid household labor.

EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, and so did the design of this Frankfurt Kitchen-- clearly, it took off. But did that conversation-- did it launch any larger conversations about women's work or unpaid labor or anything like that?

KATIE THORNTON: It did, but I would say that it was also not so much the instigator of these conversations. But what I learned in my reporting for 99% Invisible is that it was actually the culmination of generations of women who-- and feminist designers who were working to design their way out of inequitable household labor. And so this to me is where the story took a really interesting turn that I didn't necessarily see coming because this idea that you could make household labor more efficient, get it done faster, get women in and out and on with their lives, on to work outside the home, on to creative pursuits or intellectual pursuits, that seems very progressive for the 1920s in a lot of ways.

But what I ended up learning is that, as far back as the 1860s, there were a lot of American feminists who were advocating to use design to not just make that unpaid housework easier but to obliterate it entirely. There were generations of American women designers and feminists who wanted to see the end of the private kitchen. So starting back in the 1860s, there was a woman named Melusina Fay Peirce. She started the Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society where they basically used this very, very large building near Harvard Square to have women collectively share laundry and baking responsibilities for nearby homes. And they were paid for that work.

EMILY BRIGHT: I love that.

KATIE THORNTON: The idea--

EMILY BRIGHT: So before there was frozen food or takeout, there was let's all combine the work it takes to cook so we can feed each other and still have time.

KATIE THORNTON: And let's get paid for it as well.

EMILY BRIGHT: Yes.

KATIE THORNTON: Remove it from the house. So the idea was really to remove quote unquote "housework" from the home. And a lot of other feminists followed in the same idea. There were folks who were designing utopian communities, small-scale utopian communities with kitchenless houses, where these housing units would all surround a shared collective kitchen.

And it was a very popular and somewhat widely accepted movement, the idea that the private kitchen would be completely removed from the home in 1918. There was articles in Ladies' Home Journal that promoted this idea that kitchens may no longer need to exist within the home. The writer likened it to the spinning wheel, a relic of oppressive, tedious labor that could more efficiently be done collectively.

EMILY BRIGHT: Katie, this is completely fascinating. I wish I had more time to talk with you. But I will point people toward the episode that you did for 99% Invisible so they can listen to the rest. Thank you for your time, Katie.

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, thank you so much for talking with me.

EMILY BRIGHT: My pleasure. That was Minneapolis-based journalist and historian Katie Thornton.