The notion of home has been upheld as the ideal of perfected femininity right from the time of the ancient Greeks. The place or habitation [Greek oikos] of women in society was intricately intertwined with nature/birth [Latin natura, from natus, birth] and the domestic - domos [Greek for house or household] (Stratford 2019: 2f). In Wilhelmine Germany (1888-1918) too, the time in which ‘Das Haus’ is historically placed, domesticity was celebrated primarily as a feminine ideal,' although this was also the period when the modern feminist movement took off in Germany. The midnineteenth-century German attitude towards women gets deeply reflected in the work of the German social historian and theorist Wilhelm Riehl (1823-97) where he professes that ‘a woman has no importance as an individual, but only as a wife and mother; the family is the overriding consideration. He condemns careers for women, believes in a minimum of education - and that minimum to be rendered in the home on domestic matters with a smattering of “culture”™ (Hallmark 2014: 15). One can hence hardly disagree with Luce Irigaray when she writes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that the ideal of home is a male construct for which woman serves as the ‘construction material’ which is ironically ‘not available to her’ (2005: 107). Woman is man’s ‘linguistic home’ (Irigaray 2005: 107) - in whose ‘flesh’ he envelopes *himself and his things’ (2005: 11). Male subjectivity depends on...