Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Modern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation Joy Parr
Modern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation Joy Parr
J O Y PA R R
Dr. Parr, Farley Professor in the Department of the Humanities at Simon Fraser Univer-
sity, British Columbia, lately completed a study of Keynesianism, modernism, and the
design of domestic economies, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Eco-
nomic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
©2002 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/02/4304-0001$8.00
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tions they served. The three articles collected here explore American
kitchens. In the process they suggest national specificities in the relation-
ships among technology, domesticity, and nation that prompt North
Atlantic comparisons that help situate the United States case.
Abigail Van Slyck is interested in the architecture of summer camps for
American girls and boys, and in how the technologies and practices of
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cooking and eating changed over time as organizers reconceptualized the
2002 camps’ missions. Early in the century, when going to summer camp was
VOL. 43
about learning manly and womanly habits of industry, kitchen technolo-
gies were props to pedagogy, chosen (in the mode of the three bears’ por-
ridge bowls) to be not too cumbersome, not too laborsaving, but “just
right” as introductions to self-reliance for novice rustics. By midcentury,
such careful calibration about the meaning of machinery for food prepara-
tion was not required. Cooking was no longer a question of character for
campers, and kitchen technology was hidden from view. Meal provision
became an efficient service provided, transparently, by professional cooks.
Dining then became the part of the food axis where campers learned social
distinctions. These markers were of class rather than gender, carried in the
gentility attributed to the campers’ tableware and the architecturally
achieved separation at camp between the places where meals were pro-
duced and consumed. Van Slyck’s study underlines the significance of place
and practice in the history of kitchen technology. Who should be aware that
there are machines in the kitchen, and who appropriately might participate
in the tending of those machines? When efficiency is not to be a homely
virtue, or a lesson modeled for the young, architecture and case designs do
social work keeping technology out of sight and mind.
Heretofore, the history of refrigerators in the United States and else-
where has mostly been about case design. Shelley Nickles rereads a cluster
of design icons from the kitchens of the United States in the 1930s and dis-
cerns in the streamlined kitchen a “compelling and contentious symbol of
a modern American standard of living.” Until the 1970s, the efficient plant
size for producing refrigerators was larger than for any other domestic
appliance. These long production lines meant that, of the boxes in the
kitchen, refrigerators most urgently required mass-market appeal. Nickles
explores how refrigerators, upscale goods in the United States in the 1920s
by design, were made “average” in the economic crisis of the 1930s. In this
period, the efficiency of unpaid domestic work mattered more, as paid
work could be relied upon for less. The redesign of the refrigerator as a pol-
ysemic mass good modeled an America not divided between the elites and
the masses but multiply segmented. In this America, gender and class divi-
sions were buffered by citizens’ participation in a variegated but recogniz-
ably common world of goods. These domestic goods, Nickles argues, for-
malized and thus made conceptually accessible a differently stratified
capitalist nation.
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1. Walter Dorwin Teague, Design This Day (New York, 1949), 61–62, 184; Henry
Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York, 1955), 74.
2. Bonnie Burnard, A Good House (Toronto, 1999).
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4. Emma O’Kelly, “Galley Girl,” Wallpaper, July/August 2000, 133–34. On the kitchens
of Red Vienna, see Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–34 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999), and “Exhibiting Ideas,” Journal of Architectural History 57, no. 3 (1998).
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on both sides of the North Atlantic as the kitchen table of IKEA catalogs),
one end up against the wall to save space, where the modern family could
gather as Swedes traditionally had come together at the end of the day. This
constituency prevailed in the Population Commission that reported in the
late 1930s.
During the years of the Second World War the position of the house-
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wife social democrats consolidated in a new women-run and state-sup-
2002 ported organization, the Home Research Institute (HRI). This group turn-
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ed to the technical examples of the home economics research units in
United States land grant colleges, among them Iowa State. The HRI hired
engineering staff and equipped laboratories to study the bodies of women
as they engaged in the labor processes of the home. From this base they
designed kitchen cabinetry and floor plans and then turned to redesigning
the machines and tools of the kitchen to rationalize the work of the room.
These included stoves with rims along the top high enough to hold mighty
spills, solid burners that were easy to clean, washers that saved water and
soap by tumbling rather than agitating clothes, knives with handles at an
angle from the blade to make chopping easier. Their standards, until the
late 1950s, were the specifications to which Swedish firms, often in muted
protest, manufactured.5 The Home Research Institute articulated a dis-
course of design and technology for kitchen work, stabilized around the
body of the contemporary Swedish woman. Their interventions gave mate-
rial form to a more conservative ideology of Swedish home life than the
Myrdals either lived or espoused. Through the Home Research Institute,
the Swedes, until the late 1950s, used the knowledge they gained at U.S.
land grant colleges to forge a substantially different relationship with
domestic appliance manufacturers. Whereas Bix shows the faculty as expert
interpreters of technological change cautiously tending the boundaries
between household equipment studies and engineering at Iowa State,
beginning in the early 1940s the home economists at the Home Research
Institute set the industry standards for Sweden for two decades.
The relationships among kitchen design, technology, and work emerged
differently in Britain in the interwar years. After World War I the concern to
increase female employment in the engineering industries led to the found-
ing of the Women’s Engineering Society, a group funded by what their his-
torian calls “society women,” keen to make more places for women as
salaried insiders in manufacturing firms. The good home/good nation
ambiguity led in 1924 to the formation of an offspring of this group, the
Electrical Association for Women (EAW), concerned from the perspective of
energy providers to electrify more homes and make the products of electri-
cal goods manufacturers better (as product users defined the term). The
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EAW also borrowed from the technical and kinesthetic work of the Amer-
ican land grant schools. Their British publications reconstituted traditional
domestic labor on a scientific foundation. After circulating questionnaires
among their members about currently available models, they developed rec-
ommendations for manufacturers. Through exhibitions they publicized the
model kitchens being fitted into new council flats, and in 1935 planned and
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equipped an all-electric model house in Bristol. From 1933 they ran an
Electrical Housecraft School, which certified the product knowledge of DUCTION
teachers and demonstrators for electrical appliance manufacturers.6 After
World War II some Englishwomen served in a similar advisory capacity to
the Council of Industrial Design and its successors.7 With the founding of
the Consumers Association and their publication, Which, in the late 1950s,
the British pattern came to resemble the American form Bix finds among
the faculty at Iowa State. Professionally trained home economists advised
industry and took jobs with private and public utilities. Consumers sought
advice on how to best fare in the market through the publications of their
own organization. British middle-class and professional women were con-
sulted by electrical utilities, municipal councils, manufacturers, and con-
sumer groups in a period when British kitchens became more laborsaving
and energy consuming. The authoritative voices over kitchen design and
technology in Britain remained the council architects and manufacturers.
In Germany, Austria, and Sweden social housing also was common, and
here too kitchens, provided to tenants fitted and equipped, were by tech-
nology and design soundly in the domain of local housing authorities.
Nowhere in western Europe after World War II was this relationship more
pervasive than in the Netherlands, where bombing had destroyed much
housing. Half of the residential stock built in Holland between 1946 and
1972 was commissioned by housing associations and municipalities. By
1992, 44 percent of all housing in the Netherlands was in the “social rent
sector,” three times the percentage in West Germany, Denmark, and France,
and twice that in the United Kingdom. Here, then, may be the European
test case for the question, “how much that comes in through the open
kitchen door is welcome?”
Wiebe Bijker and Karin Bijsterveld have tackled a variation of this query
in “Women Walking through Plans: Technology, Democracy and Gender
Identity,” an article that appeared in a recent issue of this journal.8 Their
question—to what extent can “nonexpert groups . . . influence the techno-
logical building of society?”—also focuses on the traffic through the open
kitchen door. The Dutch route toward an appropriate design for an average
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kitchen differs from that Shelley Nickles finds for the United States in
“‘Preserving Women,’” for the Dutch approached the question not through
the market but through consultative nongovernmental organizations.
The first Women’s Advisory Committees on Housing (VACs) were
established in 1946, and they exist now in more than half of Dutch munic-
ipalities. Their members self-identify as housewives, which for our pur-
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poses makes their concerns an instance of the good home/good nation dia-
2002 logue as well. The VAC are voluntary, self-appointed, and, except for their
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coordinating umbrella organization, without state funding. What authority
could Dutch women exert from this location over the design, technology,
and work of the kitchen?
As Bijker and Bijsterveld point out, there was no consensus about the
emancipatory objectives of the kitchens Dutch functionalist architects
designed. The same irresolution Dolores Hayden described in the Ameri-
can experiments characterized Dutch kitchen history, as Swedish social
democratic women were in their turn divided over whether reformed
kitchens were to free wives for paid employment, to increase their willing-
ness to bear and raise children, or both. In England, the genteel women
who offered advice to the equipment manufacturers in their social circles
were, by class position and marital connection, more likely to ratify than to
refuse proposals firms asked them to consider. In most of northern Europe,
the female voices involved in the kitchen debate were those of relatively
economically secure volunteers, akin in their class position to the faculty at
Iowa State.
Then consider: if technology is by association gendered masculine and
public, in what circumstances can women’s voices be heard through the
open kitchen door? In the United States, the articles in this issue argue, this
influence was exerted by the faculty and students of home economics
departments, by the women who debated with manufacturers trucking new
refrigerator models through their neighborhoods, and by the householders
who in-directed the market through their purchasing decisions.
Bijker and Bijsterveld conclude that the VACs have been able to effect
concrete, incremental improvements that are “not less relevant because
they are small,” changes akin to peacekeeping strategies, which accommo-
date and do not engage the architects’ foundational principles. The VACs
reinscribe the modernist functionalist kitchen, built to sustain the Dutch
nuclear family in fixed gender roles, while making these kitchens better
workplaces by successfully claiming attention for the daily, practical, expe-
rience-based knowledge that is the volunteers’ acknowledged sphere of
expertise. They have embraced the inclusivity of their mainstream political
culture, “closing in” the modern functionalist design and technology to
facilitate their own culturally specific kitchen labor and, in the process,
hardening and proliferating forms that close out other gender scripts for
domestic work. They successfully make their own performance in the
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kitchen more elegant. Yet their initiatives in these kitchens make anomalous
those, more numerous as the twentieth century closed, who did not live,
cook, or eat as members of nuclear families.
The Canadian case for the kitchen as modern and thus the site for per-
sistent and domestically exceptional renovation shares many of these ideo-
logical elements: the household variations of industrial engineering prac-
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tice promulgated at U.S. home economics departments; the fuel providers’
concern to increase their customer base with promises of laborsaving, DUCTION
energy-hungry tools; and the appliance manufacturers’ complementary
drive to sell their own wares. But social housing was really a national pri-
ority in Canada only in the 1960s and 1970s, and outside Quebec the
Canadian state has focused on immigration rates rather than birth rates to
achieve population growth. The other notable elements of Canadian polit-
ical economy that kept the kitchen door open and the kitchen in question
were a harsh northern climate, in which much work in the trades was sea-
sonal, and a resource-based economy struggling with a small population to
create and sustain a secondary manufacturing base. These public policy
issues were at work in the kitchen.
“Don’t wait for spring, do it now” was a jingle common in public serv-
ice advertisements broadcast in 1950s Canada. Enlisting householders in
campaigns to reduce unemployment in the construction and materials sec-
tor began in the mid-1930s. The Home Improvement Plan (HIP) provided
low-interest loans to tempt householders to modernize their homes. The
gendered remedies for unemployment in Canada during the depression of
those years resembled those in the United States: public works and publicly
assisted employment for men, ideological and regulatory disincentives to
female labor force participation.9 The HIP was sold through publicly and
privately financed advertising images of middle-class women in heels and
fashionable dress confronting the multilegged fragments of the interwar
kitchen and contemplating the gleaming, unified, modern lab that might
succeed it—more sanitary, more efficient, more standardized. The HIP
kitchen also shared the legacy of Frankfurt. It was of sole rather than mul-
tiple purpose—as its historians observe, “small, well-ordered and tidy . . .
stripped of its social functions and designed solely as a site of work.” 10
9. For the United States, see Winifred D. Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family
Values, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), and Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of
Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America
(New York, 2001). For Canada, see Ruth Roach Pierson, “Gender and the Unemployment
Insurance Debates in Canada,” Labour/Le Travail 25 (spring 1990), and James Struthers,
No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State, 1914–1941 (Tor-
onto, 1983).
10. Margaret Hobbs and Ruth Roach Pierson, “A Kitchen that Wastes No Steps . . .
Gender, Class and the Home Improvement Plan, 1936–40,” Histoire sociale/Social History
21 (May 1988): 8–38.
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11. John B. Collins, “Design for Use, Design for the Millions: Proposals and Options
for the National Industrial Design Council, 1948–1960” (master’s thesis, Carleton Uni-
versity, Ottawa, 1986); Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Econ-
omic in the Postwar Years (Toronto, 1999).
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mothers in labor forces around the North Atlantic increased. This ambigu-
ity remains inscribed in the material form of kitchens to this day, partly
because the female advisors to architects and equipment manufacturers
still have the abridged technical authority Bix describes. We renovate
kitchens more than any other room in the home because heterosexual, fair-
skinned couples, broadly ratified as the fictive citizens of western social or
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liberal democracies, concede their kitchens alone, as the most highly capi-
talized part of their domestic space, to authorities whose commercial and DUCTION
economic policy priorities are implicitly, if not explicitly, unwelcome in the
rest of the house.
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