Do-It-Yourself

Do-it-yourself refers to people providing for themselves services that they could be expected to pay a professional to provide. While a vast range of activities can be undertaken under the label of do-it-yourself (DIY), the term emerged as a recognizable cultural phenomenon in relation to home maintenance and repair, and that remains its core field of reference and is the main focus of this entry.

Throughout history and across cultures, householders have of course done home maintenance and improvement, and even construction, themselves. Yet DIY and the use of the term to refer to a more or less bounded field of meanings and activities is both culturally specific and historically recent. Understanding the emergence of the term helps to further illuminate the position of DIY within both consumer culture and the progress of advanced capitalism.

To begin with, what makes the execution of a particular task DIY is the expectation that the practitioner might have paid someone else to do it. The emergence of DIY can be seen as a reflection of ongoing processes of professionalization and specialization of paid work in the division of labor. Beyond this basic definitional point, the rise of DIY can be seen to result from its role as a recreation from, or even resistance to, the ongoing evacuation of craft skills and manual production from paid employment, particularly for the urban and suburban middle classes. Indeed, the sorts of activities that might now be recognized as DIY, at least in its more skilled expressions, were valorized by artisanal ideals inherited from the Arts and Crafts movement and its valorization of skilled productive manual labor. Home maintenance and improvement provided a recreational release from a working life largely evacuated of productive skilled manual labor, at least for the burgeoning middle classes of suburban white-collar workers who provided the seedbed for the growth of DIY.

DIY has always been understood overwhelmingly as a male pursuit and, despite rapidly widening [Page 470]female participation, it remains so today. For Steven Gelber, the rise of DIY is inseparable from the dynamics of gender and household divisions of labor in the twentieth century. In postwar America, household maintenance and improvement enabled suburban husbands to respond to growing expectations that they should be actively involved in the home without compromising masculine identities. The requirements of the work could legitimate the carving out of space in the home for a bench or workshop, and allow men to claim time in the domestic economy, enabling them to retain separation from the routines of daily reproduction while rewarding the household with the material products of their skilled labor as a contribution within the domestic division of labor.

By the 1950s, undertaking home maintenance and improvement was an established element of typical suburban masculinity, in the United States at least. However, it was the 1970s that saw the stabilization of DIY as an idea and as a consumer market. Before the 1970s, securing the wherewithal for a DIY project meant visiting potentially intimidating places like builders' yards or plumbers' merchants. From the late 1960s, dedicated DIY retailers began to be established, like B&Q in the United Kingdom or Castorama in France (both in 1969), designed to be accessible one-stop shops for the DIYer.

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