In The Parlour and the Suburb, Judy Giles challenges the equation of modernity with a masculine universe, comprised of the nation-state, city, public sphere, and workplace. The book is largely a furthering of her work in Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), in which she explored working-class women's construction of their identities and how their class status, familial relations, the development of suburbs, and the decline of domestic service influenced that process. The Parlour and the Suburb continues to explore these issues through the lens of modernity and argues that women constructed fully modern identities in the context of their domestic lives.

In studying of theories of modernity, Giles finds that women and the domestic are identified with the traditional world, dependence, and constraint. Men had to escape from the premodern domestic sphere in order to be modern, creative individuals in control of their futures. Some feminist historians and cultural theorists have included women in modernity by pointing out that women increasingly entered the public sphere from the late nineteenth century. However, Giles and a few other theorists argue that in doing so, they are accepting the masculinist model of modernity. Giles points out that modernization affected the domestic sphere by creating the suburb; reducing mortality, ill health, and involuntary childbearing; creating a consumer economy; and introducing the ideal of the efficient, rational home. Therefore, as the domestic sphere was permeated with modern ideas and products, women were not excluded from the process of conceptualizing modern identities. They formed their own modernity through their domestic management and choices in the suburban home. Through the analysis of oral history, literature, and mass media in the form of women's magazines, Giles explores how women constructed and remembered their modern identities in the first half of the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 leads the reader into the space of Giles's domestic modernity, the suburb with its uniform semidetached houses and their parlors, gardens, and modernized bathrooms and kitchens. The first part of the chapter studies the criticism of suburbia by middle-class, usually left-wing, intellectuals, such as George Orwell. The suburb came to represent conformity, lack of creativity, constraint, and a femininity that undermined modern masculinity. As Giles points out, criticism by left-wingers is ironic considering that British suburbs in the 1930s were providing improved housing for the better-off working classes as well as the lower middle classes. Although the city was theorized as the arena in which men could escape the stultifying and infantilizing atmosphere of the suburbs, for women who were able to move out of city slums, the suburb represented a positive side of modernity, the increased security of life. Security might be dismissed by thinkers such as Orwell as destructive of the intellectual, creative life, but it was an intelligent choice for working-class women who had grown up in the midst of struggle, ill-health, and high mortality.

Suburbia did not, however, eradicate the influence of class and gender on women's lives. Since the nineteenth century a middle-class woman's status had been marked by her authority over her working-class servants. The decline of domestic service, analyzed in chapter 2, destroyed her identity as the mistress of the household. As working-class women found employment in the consumer economy, the mistress became the servantless housewife. The identity of the suburban housewife was theoretically egalitarian, open to the middle and working classes, yet working-class women still served as daily domestic help and in inferior positions in the growing consumer economy. Chapter 3 documents the creation of the consumer housewife, an identity that advantaged the middle-class woman, who could participate in shopping and the creatively productive areas of homemaking more easily than a working-class woman. Consumption also created tensions for women as they balanced identities as eager spenders versus rational budgeters or as consumers of labor-saving devices versus hardworking homemakers. Mass-market magazines, each targeted to a specific social class, offered women of a variety of identities within the concept of “housewife” and encouraged the association of consumption with pleasure and domesticity. World War II reinforced the value of the housewife identity by valuing the self-controlled woman whose wise and regulated consumption contributed to victory.

Giles ends the book with a chapter on the influence of masculine modernity with its connections to the public sphere on the abilities of feminist scholars to recognize and analyze modern feminine subjectivities. Using The Feminine Mystique as an example, she argues that feminists have had difficulty valuing women's struggles to define their own modern identities within the domestic realm. The identity of a woman in the home is shaped by social class and the historical moment, so middle- and working-class British women dealt with modernity differently, but this does not belie the ability of a domestic woman to conceive of herself as a modern person, an individual with control over her life and the ability to shape her future.

With the space constraints of this relatively short book, the material culture and social history of 1930s British suburbs are not developed as fully as would be useful to explicate further Giles's many insights into femininity and modernity. For a reader unfamiliar with the period and the equipment of 1930s homes, it may be difficult to enter fully and imaginatively into the debates over domestic service and the choices women made regarding purchases of labor-saving devices. Giles sometimes underplays the amount of actual housework performed by many middle-class mistresses of households with only a couple of resident servants in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. In fact, the choices that they made in hiring a housemaid versus a nursemaid might profitably be compared with the choices that later women made between purchasing a washing machine or a radio. These criticisms aside, the challenge that Giles offers to traditional understandings of modernity is a useful reminder of the difficulty of describing the historical and present boundaries between masculine and feminine, public and private.