The essays in this collection work to dislodge the study of domesticity from exclusive considerations of the private home and homemaking practices. Moving beyond simple gender analyses of the domestic sphere to address other complexities that shape this arena, Burning Down the House presents domesticity as a manifestation of larger national and imperial projects. However, it also reveals how the domestic can provide a means of critiquing these unwieldy ideological structures from within.

Several essays in this collection consider the economic, racial, and gendered arrangements that need to be in place nationally and often internationally before respectable homemaking is successfully achieved.