History 585Essay

Mechanization and Social Changeand

Views of Gender Roles:How Home, Technology, and Ready Energy Transformed Gender

Roles

Joy ShasteenHistory 585 Winter 2014

section A00116 March 2014

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Loretta Lorance, an architectural historian, wrote that

it is difficult to judge just how much mechanization had

changed modern life because its impact was such that people

alive today have difficulty understanding living without it.

"So entwined have mechanical devices become with modern life

that the not so distant past, before they were established

as necessary adjuncts to it, is often viewed with nostalgia

and gratitude for the lessons learned during the preceding

centuries of drudgery."1 Lorance posited that mechanization

in the home was always moving forward and began even before

the Industrial Revolution but that the 1920s were the

confluence of home, technology and readily available

energy.2 This confluence, rather than mechanization by

itself, was what was to create the greatest social change in

the US in the 20th century and what would ultimately lead to

new views on what gender roles should be as well.

1 Loretta Lorance, "Promises, Promises: The Allure of Household Appliances in the 1920s," Part Magazine Vol 3 (Spring 1998): http://www.brickhaus.com /amoore/magazine/house.html accessed 13 March 2014.

2 IBID., same URL.

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The 19th century, although throughly a part of the

Industrial Revolution was still a time in which housework

was hard, physical labor. Meals required human energy and

were time consuming. Cooking was done much of the year out-

of-doors, because of the heat from open wood fires and later

were moved out of the main (often only) room used for family

living into it's own room, again usually for heat and safety

factors as the change was made from open hearth either wood-

or coal-burning stoves. These stoves were labor intensive---

with men or boys chopping wood or hauling coal and women and

girls keeping the fire at the correct levels of warmth for

the proper cooking temperature. The stove had to be

continuously fed and the ash box emptied. The housewife

spent "...four hours every day sifting ashes, adjusting

dampers, lighting fires, carrying coal or wood, and rubbing

the stove with thick black wax to keep it from rusting."3

For other food preparation it was necessary to know what to

do with live animals or recently killed ones---how to 3 Steven Mintz, "Housework in the Late 19th Century America," Digital

History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/housework.cfm accessed 13 March 2014.

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slaughter chickens and pigs for instance (as well as fed and

maintain them even in urban settings) and what to do with

both the parts to be cooked and the "waste"--feathers for

bedding or pillows, as an example, or tallow for candles.

Other supplies also came "unprepared"---coffee was green and

not roasted; the housewife "put up" fruit as jams and

jellies; pickled everything from meat to vegetables and

salted things such as pork and beef to keep them from

spoiling.4

Without dwelling too much on the 19th century, a

mention of what happened in the cleaning process of the home

is another good example of the arduous tasks of housework. A

home heated by wood or coal was a home covered in soot and

smoke. Then there were kerosene and gas lighting which

contributed to smelly walls, carpets, drapes and clothes. If

the home used kerosene (or even whale oil) the lamps of the

house would require their glass chimneys to be cleaned and

wicks trimmed or replaced to use properly that evening.5

4 IBID., same URL.5 IBID., same URL.

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Floors would be washed and rugs cleaned on a seasonal versus

daily basis because of the intensity of the labor. Similarly

windows would only be done when needed or during "Spring

cleaning" which would be when better weather allowed people

to use the out-of-doors to beat rugs and clean the outsides

of windows.6 If the homeowner had money, he could hire help

to do all these chores; usually, however, these chores were

for the housewife, her daughters and young sons to do.

These two areas used as examples, like much of the rest

of "housework" involved two basic needs--power and water.

The power provided in the 19th century was human--the

housewife and her helpers. The water came to the house also

by human power, unless a hand-pump had been placed near or

in the home. It is difficult for people in the 21st century

to realize how much time and effort got devoted to these two

things---when a person was tired, the power stopped. When

the water got dirty it no longer was able to work as a

cleaner. The job of bring water to the home was itself hard

6 IBID., same URL.

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and time-consuming,

"According to calculations made in 1886, a typical North Carolina housewife had to carry water from a pump or a well or a spring eight toten times each day. Washing, boiling and rinsing a single load of laundry used 50 gallonsof water. Over the course of a year [the housewife] walked 148 miles toting water and carried over 36 tons of water."7

The idea of a laundry "day" is a misnomer---the

housewife began laundry the night before, by soaking

clothing in tubs of warm water--which had to be heated first

over a fire of some kind. The next day she would scrub the

laundry on a washboard, rubbing soap she had made (of lye)

into the clothes. With no "rubber" gloves, the lye would

irate the skin. Then she placed the laundry in now boiling

water and usually got the older children to stir the clothes

with a long pole so that the lye would not make yellow

spots.8 Then the clothes were pulled out, rinsed in cold

7 IBID., same URL.8 I could find no scholarly articles on this but remember distinctly my

seventh grade history teacher telling the class that the task mostly to cause injury was "laundry day." With its open fire, boilingwater and use of lye, young children's injuries in the home, she insisted, were most frequent.y caused by this activity. (personal recollection, Mrs. Martin's seventh grade history class, St. Mathew'sGrammar School, Ridgefield, N.J. 1963).

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water and then in "bluing,"9 Then they would ring them to

dry and hang out on the line until they were "dry." Pressing

wrinkled clothes took place on a different day with heated

heavy flatirons (and lots of them, to keep the irons hot for

press by placing them in the stove or open fire).10 Men

shirts would only be done on occasion or were sent out to

commercial laundries costing a few pennies; which meant in

the 1800s that their collars and cuffs, which were

removable, were washed and stiffened with starch--not a

spray but a water and starch mixture done by the housewife

from her own pantry.11 Is it any wonder that gender roles

changed as energy other than human power entered in the

9 Bluing was still done by hand in my home as a young child in the 1950s as our original clothes washer was non-electric. Bluing got itsname for the slight blue cast it returned to white clothes which usually gained a gray or yellow color from bleaching and lye soap. Bluing rinsed out so it was used each time an item was washed. (Personal discussion with Sabina Hewson, my paternal grandmother, in our home and apartment 'walk-up' on Woodrow Wilson Blvd, Detroit, Michigan, about 1955).

10 Again, my home as a young child used flatirons for a time but with the new washing machine came an electric iron and hours of time spentkeeping the flatirons warm was diverted to other tasks. The irons themselves became door stops. (personal recollection, apartment 'Walk-up', Woodrow Wilson Blvd, Detroit, Michigan, about 1955; this building, a series of small shops with three floors of inexpensive apartments above them, was torn down to make way for the Jefferies Freeway in the early 1960s).

11 Mintz, same URL.

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home?

Beginning with the 1880s, for wealthy families, and

through the turn of the new century for urban families,

housework began to change. The change came as new sources of

power replaced human muscle. Electricity to the home brought

new lighting sources as well as new heating sources but most

importantly brought indoor plumbing (municipal water sources

began to pump not just by mechanical means but by electric

ones as well, allowing the flow of water to greater

distances) and it brought "labor-saving" devices---household

appliances.12 Farm families would have to wait until the

1930s and 1940s, when the Great Depression brought the power

of the government to fund the building of the infrastructure

needed to bring electricity to the vast open space beyond

the city's reach.13

Beginning with the spread of residential electrical

12 IBID., same URL.13 Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural

America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 88. Poor and working poor families and those relegated to "the ghetto" also waited as my personal experience as a child in Detroit showed--not every building, even in a large urban complex was connected to the grid.

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power in the cities and continuing through the rest of the

20th century, the "mechanization" of the home transformed

the labor of the housewife. And with this transformation,

came a gender role redefinition. This transformation and

redefinition happen first in urban settings and for a

reason. "Because the electric power industry required a

substantial outlay in capital equipment, utilities had to

cultivate electric power consumption in a variety of ways if

they were to make profitable and efficient use of their

investments."14 What would become interesting about bringing

"labor-saving" electrical devices to the home would be that

a "clash of cultures" would ensue--men, who had little idea

of housework, would attempt to sell devices to women, who

not only understood the work involved but wanted to have

devices which actually saved them time, money and labor.

But..."The industry’s male engineering and sales staffs

initially took full responsibility for devising marketing

14 James C. Williams, "Getting Housewives the Electric Message, Gender and Energy Marketing in the Early Twentieth Century," in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Technology, eds. Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohen (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 95.

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strategies to introduce the new domestic electrical

technologies to consumers. Their misconceptions about what

women actually did and how they functioned inside the home

made the utility salesmen....ineffective in promoting

complex electric tools such as ranges and other cooking

devices that entailed dramatic changes in household

practices."15 There was even an debate, at the beginning of

this century-long sales pitch, as to who was the consumer---

where the utilities people selling to the "homeowner" or the

"homemaker"?

At this point it would be good to mention that without

mechanization (the process of doing work with machinery), it

would be impossible for consumerism (the mechanism in which

social and economic factors encourage greater and greater

amounts of goods and services), to come into being, simply

because without machine power there would be no "greater"

amounts of goods and services. So finding out who was the

real consumer of household devices (appliances both big and

15 IBID., 97.

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small), was a critical issue for utility companies to

increase utility use. As Amy Hewes, professor of Economics

and Sociology at Mount Holyoke College, stated in 1930,

"Only Fairyland can vie with the bright prospects pictured

by the heralds of the Age of Electricity, especially by

those who sell the instruments which make its transforming

power available."16 Hewes conducted a statistical study of

the transformation of housework by appliances in 1929. The

study limited itself to preparing and preserving food,

laundering and making clothes, and cleaning the house.17

What the study discovered was that homes in the Holyoke area

had on average six appliances and that they had bought them

in the last decade (1920-1929).18 The machines that were

most numerous, and therefore most popular, were the washing

machine, the body ironer (mangle) and the dishwasher (not

16 Amy Hewes, "Electrical Appliances in the Home," Social Forces Vol. 9, No.2 (Dec., 1930): 235.

17 IBID., 236.18 IBID., 237. the study showed that the largest group in 1919 were

homes with no appliance; by 1929 the largest group had 4 appliances and there were homes that had as many as a dozen or more. These lasthomes were not necessarily wealthier but rather were found to have more people; homes with 8 or more people had 6 or more appliances.

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the electric dishwasher we know today with a drying element

but an electric washer none the less).19 These large

machines were most popular among large families. As

Josephine Cochrane, inventor of the first two-cycle

dishwasher stated, "When it comes to buying something for

the kitchen...a woman begins at once to figure out all the

other things she could do with the money. She hates

dishwashing...but she has not learned to think of her time

and comfort as worth money."20 This quote is from the late

1880s...as Cochrane, an new appliance entrepreneur,

attempted to sell her hand-powered washers to homes, she

eventually settled on selling them to hotels and restaurants

who, like large families, had large loads and who apparently

knew that time was money.21

19 Unknown, "Early electric Dishwasher," Curator's Favorites, Wisconsin Historical Society, http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/museum/artifacts/archives/003567.asp ( accessed 13 March 2014). The dishwasher, a hand-cranked version was invented and patented in 1850 by a man, Joel Houghton. A woman, Josephine Cochrane, a socialite who wanted a machine that would not chip her expensive china as much as her servants did, invented the hand-powered two-cycled soap and rinse water version, that would be the model for all modern dishwashers in 1886.

20 IBID., same URL.21 IBID., same URL. The 1920s machines looked like a large metal box

with water hoses attached at the bottom placed on a set of legs with

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The Hewes study was done in Holyoke, Massachusetts but

the issues of what the housewife as consumer wanted, were

being played out in California and in Germany and frankly,

anywhere that appliances were being sold. In Germany, it was

difficult to get consumers, men or women, to change the

energy they used, i.e. to even try electric or gas power.

"Consumers were reluctant to abandon their traditional

energy consumption practices....for the sake of new energy

forms that often required very different handling and

carried the danger of unreliability, excessive costs, and

even potential harm to the body."22 The German electric and

gas industry eventually turned, in 1914, to holding energy

expositions to show the public how useful electricity and

gas could be for the home. These campaigns included exhibits

with stoves and other appliances as well as classes in

cooking with the new technology. Never the less, coal and to

wheels, so that the person loading the machine did not have bend downwhen loading dishes. The machine did dishes, cups and glassware, etc only; no silverware or pots and pans. The task of washing silverwareand cooking items like pans, remained one done by hand.

22 Nina Moellers, "Telling by Showing: Early Twentieth Century Exhibitions as Advocates in Energy Transition Processes," RCC Perspectives No 2 (2013): 52.

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a lesser extent wood remained part of the German home well

into the 1970s and not just, as was true in the US, in home

heating but also in home cooking as well.23

In southern California, the issue remained how to get

consistent use out of the generation of electricity. People

in factories, businesses and homes wanted electrical

lighting for use at night but few could conceive of why they

would used electricity during the day. "Entrepreneurial

electric power companies built scores of hydroelectric

plants in...the San Gabriel, and other mountain ranges and

mastered high-tension, long-distance electric power

transmission...."24 but people just wanted lights at night.

In 1904, "...The Edison company had water going to waste

23 IBID., 55. My personal experience with German homes in the late 1980s included transitioning the home to gas--for heating and cooking. We were invited by the Gas company to attend free cooking classes held at the company headquarters in the central town of our "state." The lessons were in German but the teacher also spoke English. She showed my mother, my husband and myself the joys of gasrange cooking. It was an interesting time. My mother was very familiar with cooking with gas but the range was in Celsius so it wasvaluable for us to learn to use its different marking configuration. Geopolitically it was also very interesting--a German gas company representative teaching an American military family how to cook with gas deliver by pipeline from the Soviet Union. The irony was not lost on any of us. (personal recollection, Specbach, Germany, 1987).

24 Williams, 97.

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during the daylight hours; it had big steam turbines

standing idle, waiting for a day load."25 Southern

California Edison (SCE) decided that it needed to "sell"

daytime electricity. They did so by direct marketing. They

opened showrooms in 1911 (much like the Germans would do in

1914) and advertised the benefits of electric appliances,

especially those that could be used during the day. For the

engineers who designed this campaign, however, their first

thought for appliances were of things like coffee pots and

electric irons but they "...avoid[ed] pushing sales of

ranges, air and water heaters and other appliances exceeding

the industry’s accepted limit of 6 amps for lamp socket

installation..."26 Houses were wired for electricity but not

for multiple uses of electricity. Kitchens and other rooms

in the house typically had one socket--- on the light

hanging in the middle of the room.27 Small appliances could

be plugged into the base of the lamp but unless there was a

25 IBID., 98.26 IBID., 98.27 Laluce D. Mitchell, "Early Electrical Wiring Systems in American

Buildings, 1890-1930," APT Bulletin Vol 42, No 4 (2011): 42

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two socket lamp, the appliance, if used at night, would be

used in the dark!

This daytime use SCE was looking for, would build up a

residential load during the day without investing in new

infrastructure, which was great for SCE's bottom line but

not necessarily great for the housewife. Also, houses prior

to the 1940s usually were rated for electrical use at 1/2

the rate seen today in homes and in some areas was rated

even less.28 The problem with this idea of using a daytime

load was that hooking small appliances into light bases

didn't really "save" the homemaker's labor or reduce time

spent in housework. Eventually all electrical and gas

companies that wanted to increase residential business by

getting people to use more of their energy in their homes,

found women engineers, economists or "home scientists" to

sell their product.29 Some utilities arrived that this

28 IBID., 42. Today's standard is 110V 60 HZ in the all of North Americaand in most of Central and South America. Most of Africa, Asia and Europe uses 220-240V50 HZ. Physical connectors--plugs and sockets--are mostly the same for the Americas but differ widely elsewhere.

29 Carolyn M. Goldstein, "From Service to Sales: Home Economics in Lightand Power, 1920-1940," Technology and Culture, Special Issue: Gender analysis and the History of Technology, Vol 38, No. 1 (Jan., 1997): 121.

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arrangement faster than others.

In 1917, "...Public Service Electric and Gas Company of

New Jersey hired Ada Bessie Swann, a home economist, to

develop a program educating homemakers about the benefits of

gas and electricity."30 Swann realized that simply doing

cooking demonstrations were not enough and she offered

instruction in all aspects of "modern housekeeping." This

included laundry, lighting, cleaning, cooking, food

preservation, preparation and serving. By 193 she had a

staff of 1,200 home economists and a local radio show with

an audience of 18,000.31 Her division put a customer

friendly face on the utility. Meanwhile in Southern

California, SCE realized that men where not the best people

to develop or sell appliances and, even though SCE reported

sales in 1911 were high for small appliances: 15,438

electric irons, 4,634 coffee percolators, 3,440 toasters,

and 2,000 other appliances, and they had gained a national

reputation for selling "lamp-socket appliances," they knew

30 IBID., 121.31 IBID., 121.

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they were not reaching all the market they had hoped.32

SCE thought of electrical power and the power industry

as progressive technology but they also thought of it in

terms of helping modernity---which, in the minds of their

engineers had little to do with the home. Their sales pitch

about the wonders of lamp-socket appliances dismissed the

problems with these devices.33 Plugging in an electric iron

might actually cost the user their electric service for the

day if it shorted the lamp-socket. "Cords twisted when

screwing in plugs, short circuits or shock could result from

jerking a cord [made of cloth] beyond its length, and having

to reach lamp-sockets that were placed high up on walls or

in the ceiling was at best annoying. On the whole, lamp-

socket devices were not as handy as they were advertised to

be."34 The salesmen and electrical company businessmen saw

their appliances in the ideal; the housewife saw them in the

"real."

SCE also suffered a faux pas in understanding 32 Williams., 99.33 IBID., 102.34 IBID., 102.

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housework; who wouldn't, they reasoned, want to cook at

their dining room table (in the dark), for instance? The SCE

engineers saw this as convenience; the housewife viewed it

as folly. S. M. Kennedy, General Agent of SCE during this

time period, even commented that with the lack of servants

to work in the kitchen, surely the housewife would want to

do "tabletop cooking" (remember, again, this is off a single

plug).35

The gender stereotyping at SCE extended both ways,

however; in 1915, an SCE sales manual discussed selling to

the "professional cook" which the manual assumed was male:

"This type of individual is frequently a difficult person to

handle. He seldom favors anything new. He is prone to form

intense prejudices; and will often refuse to make an

intelligent investigation of new apparatus, especially when

he has not been previously consulted...," was SCE advice to

their salesmen for selling ranges.36 Interestingly, salesmen

sought to gain experience and information about how the

35 IBID., 103.36 IBID., 104.

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ranges worked by putting them in their own homes; there they

learned first-hand from their very own homemaker if the

product was worth keeping.37 Salesmen had a difficult time

selling ranges because they frankly had little experience

with cooking and it was at this point that SCE introduced

women demonstrators which was the same time they realized

that large load appliances such as the range, the

refrigerator and the washing machine (and much later the

electric clothes dryer) would fill up the daytime

hydroelectric load. 38 But the sales approach remain one

aimed at the homeowner until 1923, when a new campaign began

with the realization that "...fitting electricity to the

home required fitting women to the electrical business."39

Electrical mechanization then changed the home and the

housewife, and changed every American's view of work in the

home. But it also brought women into the utility industry,

first as demonstrators, later as electrical engineers and

economists. It changed the way men viewed the industry and 37 IBID., 104.38 IBID., 104.39 Goldstein, 128.

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the way they viewed women. It also changed how women viewed

the industry and they way they saw themselves. The housewife

role changed from that of physically demanding work, to

time-consuming tasks and finally to time-saving ones. The

role of homeowner became one of cooperation and

understanding regarding the amount of work required to "keep

house" as men took on more "housewife" roles.40 The roles of

men and women in sales, marketing, and industry also changed

and what seemed strictly the world of men's things and

women's things disappeared as housework became less

identified with a "housewife," and more with the role of

anyone who became a homeowner or a homemaker--gender

notwithstanding.

Sources Consulted

Goldstein,Carolyn M. "From Service to Sales: Home Economics in Light and Power, 1920-1940." Technology and Culture, Special Issue: Gender Analysis and the History of Technology Vol 38, No. 1 (Jan., 1997): 121-152.

40 This role adoption did not happen specifically because of mechanization and hasn't been addressed in this essay but will be addressed in the course research paper.

21

Hewes, Amy. "Electrical Appliances in the Home." Social Forces Vol. 9, No.2 (Dec., 1930): 235-242.

Kline, Ronald R. Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Lorance, Loretta. "Promises, Promises: The Allure of Household Appliances in the 1920s." Part Magazine Vol 3 (Spring 1998) http://www.brickhaus.com /amoore/magazine/house.html (accessed 13 March 2014).

Mintz, Steven."Housework in the Late 19th Century America." Digital History. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/housework.cfm (accessed 13 March 2014).

Mitchell, Laluce D. "Early Electrical Wiring Systems in American Buildings, 1890-1930." APT Bulletin Vol 42, No 4 (2011): 39-45.

Moellers,Nina. "Telling by Showing: Early Twentieth CenturyExhibitions as Advocates in Energy Transition Processes." RCC Perspectives, No 2, (2013): 51-57.

Williams, James C. "Getting Housewives the Electric Message,Gender and Energy Marketing in the Early Twentieth Century." in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohen. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998.

Unknown. "Early Electric Dishwasher." Curator's Favorites. Wisconsin Historical Society, http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/museum/artifacts/archives/003567.asp (accessed 13 March 2014).