“This easy to read, fun, and unique book approaches discourses on work/life in a way that no one has before.”
~Elizabeth Fish Hatfield, editor of Communication and the Work-Life Balancing Act
"Patton draws on an impressive array of archival sources to demonstrate how communication technologies and architectural design have constructed ideals about working at home. Her nuanced historical analysis importantly reveals that our contemporary struggles over work/life balance are not new."
~Amy Corbin, author of Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America
~The New Republic
"Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office [is] a piece of engaging and prescient scholarship which, especially at the present moment, makes a valuable contribution to now central and ongoing global debates about what working from home has meant, means now, and might mean in the future."
~Visual Studies
"Easy Living sheds necessary light on the practice of working from home. It is also (and seemingly unintentionally) timely: as societies negotiate an exit from the pandemic emergency and attempt to move towards some form of the new normal, choices about whether to continue working from home or to return to the office are being made on both corporate and individual levels."
~LSE Review of Books
"Easy Living offers a strong critique of the contemporary myth of work-life balance, a myth that 'keeps workers from recognizing the exploitation of their labor and the dependence on service workers to support work-life balance'....Although written before the onslaught of Covid-19, Easy Living exposes the long-standing discourses of gender, race, and class undergirding American experiences of work and home, discourses laden with power and inequality that the pandemic has exposed."
~Television & New Media
