The upper class segment of American society dominates control of society's institutions (government, the media, etc.). Through these institutions they highlight and reinforce the values that most benefit their own interests and agenda. Progressive reformers often used photography as a means of projecting a certain point of view that reinforced the need for various reforms they sought. In the "before" and after "pictures" here, the photographer shows a Philadelphia one-room apartment in the early twentieth century.
The "before" photograph shows a cluttered room, with drying laundry hanging across the room on jerry-rigged clotheslines. There is no window and the walls of the room are covered in wallpaper. Cooking utensils are scattered in the small space meant for cooking. The "after" picture shows a much neater version of the same room. The wallpaper is missing, the laundry and cooking utensils are put away, and there is now a window on one wall.
The differences in the "before" and "after" images shown here are purposeful and intended to persuade the lower-classes (i.e. immigrants) to adopt the housekeeping manners of the middle class. In the "after" image, the window is included to permit fresh air and light into the room. The laundry and cooking utensils are put away and the room is rid of clutter. An old hardback chair is replaced with a newer looking rocking with a pillow. The wash bin is missing and the wallpaper is down in the "after" image. These differences are meant to impose the values of the middle class on the immigrant class, values that "reformers saw as the ideal" in housekeeping (Documentary 613). Through such images, reformers hoped to persuade or influence the immigrant class to adopt such an ideal.
It is doubtful the immigrant class would have readily accepted the reformers' ideal of housekeeping. Many immigrant families were poor and cramm
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