Modern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation Joy Parr

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Modern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

J O Y PA R R

The domestic, as a modern American commonplace, was ambiguous territory for technology. The three articles in this issue began as papers for a conference at the Hagley Museum and Library in November 2000 called “Kitchens: Design, Technologies, and Work.” They persist as meditations on how commercially driven design and mass-produced technologies settled into the kitchens of the United States in the twentieth century. Ideologically and spatially, these inquiries come to the kitchen from outside: from the institutional kitchens children encountered when they were seasonally set loose from the bounds of home, from the design divisions of domestic appliance manufacturers, and from home economics teaching faculties. Together they illustrate how the work of procuring and managing kitchen equipment manifested and remade American understandings of class and gender. Kitchens share in the private-public ambiguities of modern domesticity generally. Does the design, technology, and work of the kitchen enable the associative chain good kitchen/good wife/good cook/good meals/good home? Or is it good kitchen/efficient production/nutritious fuel/productive citizens/strong nation? Plainly the answer is “both.” Here the matter becomes interesting for students of kitchen technologies. In the twentieth century, the political, pedagogical, and entrepreneurial interventions that made these kitchen functions compatible differed nationally. Nations’ cooks and their kitchens were subject to hybrid influences, on contested boundaries of the home, the market, and the state. Their technologies were liminal signifiers of class difference. Their technical competence was adjunct to the engineer’s. The mandates of cooks and their kitchens commonly were subsidiary to the prime goals of the institu-

Dr. Parr, Farley Professor in the Department of the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, lately completed a study of Keynesianism, modernism, and the design of domestic economies, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Economic 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 relationships 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 cooking and eating changed over time as organizers reconceptualized the camps’ missions. Early in the century, when going to summer camp was about learning manly and womanly habits of industry, kitchen technologies were props to pedagogy, chosen (in the mode of the three bears’ porridge 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 preparation 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 produced 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 elsewhere 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 discerns 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 polysemic mass good modeled an America not divided between the elites and the masses but multiply segmented. In this America, gender and class divisions were buffered by citizens’ participation in a variegated but recognizably common world of goods. These domestic goods, Nickles argues, formalized and thus made conceptually accessible a differently stratified capitalist nation.

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Home economics education was an American export, particularly in the interwar years. The engineering and kinesthetic study of domestic technologies that Lillian Gilbreth and Christine Fredricks began in the United States was institutionalized in the curricula and textbooks of Louise Peet and her colleagues at Iowa State. Amy Bix follows two strands in the work of Iowa State’s household equipment department. She shows how the Iowa program created an “alternate vision of gendered knowledge” that assumed that users of kitchen equipment were self-reliant because technically aware. Iowa home economics students were required to tear down equipment long after household appliances had outgrown the high-maintenance phase that challenged and frustrated early adopters. Yet faculty were circumspect about encroaching upon the domain of the engineer. While the technical teaching of the United States land grant schools defined the field internationally, the Iowa stance toward the consumption of household equipment was more distinctively American. Faculty cautioned about fads but “encouraged new generations to covet new equipment,” validated commercially driven obsolescence by warning student buyers “to doublecheck serial numbers” in order to guard against “unethical schemes to pass off prior-year models as new.” Peet herself rejoiced in the availability of the strongly colored refrigerators her European colleagues shunned. By close study, Bix reveals the multiple stances toward consumption, technology, and gendered citizenship schooled through the home economics curriculum at Iowa State. How do these three case studies inform the wider history of design, technology, work, domesticity, and nation? The improving designers of the interwar years, in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, gloried in the kitchen. The Americans Teague and Dreyfuss articulated their shared strategy: modernism in all its aspects would enter the whole dwelling through the kitchen door.1 To a large extent, American homes of today bespeak their victory while proclaiming the limitations of their achievement. Modernist improvers were conceded authority over the kitchen and, by engineering and organizational extension, over the other parts of the home that required plumbing in a bargain that disguised their influence elsewhere under muted, anti-industrial veneers. In 2000, the Canadian novelist Bonnie Burnard, interviewed about a book in which the kitchen figured prominently, asserted frequently and with enthusiasm: “I have never met a kitchen which I did not want to rip out.” 2 Readers, who’d have questioned her competence had she made this confession about most of her living space, chuckled and took her to their 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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hearts. Domestic chattels in most twentieth-century North Atlantic cultures were to be the very opposite of evanescent. Consider a famous passage on this question from Hannah Arendt: “[T]he things of the world . . . ‘stand against’ and endure, at least for a time the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users . . . [who], their ever changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is their identity by being related to the same chair and the same table.” 3 Similarly, homes were not to be momentary. Yet twentieth-century kitchens, by preference and idiom, were modern. As modern, momentary they were, a cluster of design and technological resolutions fetched up as definitive, contemporary, timely, and thereby transitory. This asymmetry between the kitchen and the home did cultural work. We might feature kitchens as supporting characters in the twentiethcentury drama about home and nation, articulating contradictions and heterogeneities that kept the main action moving along. For modern kitchens have been about bodies, both the bodies who have worked in them and the bodies this work was to produce. Kitchens have been about technologies, both technologies these workers, by tradition, recognized they needed and technologies they, for political or commercial purposes, were being informed they must need. And kitchens have been aesthetic statements, of both the homely and the mechanical. The camouflage required for this conflation in the 1930s took Loewy, Teague, and Dreyfuss to the top of the industrial designer profession, and diminished the case designers who were their progeny to mere decorators in the eyes their functionalist colleagues. Nickles complicates this older story by showing how the remade form of the refrigerator offered American purchasers a new way to think about class relations. Kitchens have fluctuated as denominated domains between places of production and consumption, appropriately singular or manifestly multiple in their functions. Whether the kitchen to best serve the needs of the family would be private, communal, or domestic has been a political question. Van Slyck shows how this question was reconsidered, first opening and then walling off the technologically aided work of the kitchen from youngsters’ experience of summer camp. The pantomime of citizenship to be performed in the kitchen has been variously, and often contradictorily, about women’s rights, family values, the productivity of women’s activity inside the home and of women’s employment outside it. Bix traces the limits home economics teachers negotiated on the technological adeptness they transmitted to their students, and through them into the gendered culture of competence beyond. The highly capitalized kitchen has been an affirmation of affluence and thus superiority in cold war politics, a sign of successful income redistribution in European socialist states, and the tiller, through malleable and responsive spending on bulky con3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), 137.

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sumer durables, of Keynesian economic politics nominally and instrumentally distinguishable as conservative, liberal, and socialist. Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky is said to have invented the modern kitchen.4 Her Frankfurt kitchen, modeled on the railway car galley, was designated by the modernist architects Ernst May and Alfred Loos to be fitted into the housing estates of ebbing Weimar Germany and vanguardist Red Vienna. The Frankfurt kitchens were part of a civilian reestablishment project in the wake of World War I, integral to housing initiatives designed to relocate and energize their residents as productive workers and engage Germans, as democratic citizens, in the better world of their new republic. The kitchens of Red Vienna were to be the template for the new sexual division of labor that early female socialist thinkers such as Alexandra Kolontai foretold. Similar influences informed the planning and regulation of Swedish kitchens in the thirties and forties. Sweden came comparatively late to urban life and to mass housing for industrial workers. Architects and designers showed small functionalist kitchens on the Frankfurt model at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. For Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, leading social democrats by this time and frequently away in America, such functionalist flats were the solution to the population question, with minimal kitchens above and commissary or cooperative kitchens on the ground floor, so that families might be out to work and school by day and return for evenings of shared leisure unmarred by the stress of meal preparation. As Van Slyck shows, by the 1940s the goals of American camp organizers were similar: separate the socialization of young people from the work of making meals. Dolores Hayden has noted like aspirations built into commissary kitchens for city apartments and suburban neighborhoods in the United States earlier in the century, although the class constituencies and gender aspirations scripted in America were quite different than those the Myrdals had in mind for Sweden. The Myrdals’ kitchens, and their resolution of the ambiguities between the good home and good nation, prompted a revolt while still on the drawing board. A strong industrial Sweden would need workers, which in Sweden, a country of emigration, implied working city couples in homes where they could welcome and enjoy children. Instead, concluded the Swedish Housewives Union, the Cooperatives, the State Domestic Science Service, and organized social democratic women, the Frankfurt kitchens would encourage a “birth strike.” These groups argued for spaces and technologies to enhance the dignity of the homemaker and domestic work, including a kitchen large enough to include a large table (now recognizable 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 housewife social democrats consolidated in a new women-run and state-supported organization, the Home Research Institute (HRI). This group turned 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 discourse of design and technology for kitchen work, stabilized around the body of the contemporary Swedish woman. Their interventions gave material 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 founding of the Women’s Engineering Society, a group funded by what their historian 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 electrical goods manufacturers better (as product users defined the term). The 5. Their bulletin of 1951 is a good example of this work: Hemmens Forskningsinstitut, Arsberattelse 1951 (Stockholm, 1951).

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EAW also borrowed from the technical and kinesthetic work of the American 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 recommendations for manufacturers. Through exhibitions they publicized the model kitchens being fitted into new council flats, and in 1935 planned and equipped an all-electric model house in Bristol. From 1933 they ran an Electrical Housecraft School, which certified the product knowledge of 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 consulted by electrical utilities, municipal councils, manufacturers, and consumer 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 technology 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 technological building of society?”—also focuses on the traffic through the open kitchen door. The Dutch route toward an appropriate design for an average 6. Suzette Worden, “Powerful Women: Electricity in the Home, 1919–40,” in The View from the Interior, ed. Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham (London, 1989), 128–47. 7. John Martin and George W. Smith, The Consumer Interest (London, 1968), 28–30. 8. Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 485–515.

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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 municipalities. Their members self-identify as housewives, which for our purposes makes their concerns an instance of the good home/good nation dialogue as well. The VAC are voluntary, self-appointed, and, except for their 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 American 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 willingness 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 accommodate 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, experience-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 persistent and domestically exceptional renovation shares many of these ideological elements: the household variations of industrial engineering practice promulgated at U.S. home economics departments; the fuel providers’ concern to increase their customer base with promises of laborsaving, energy-hungry tools; and the appliance manufacturers’ complementary drive to sell their own wares. But social housing was really a national priority 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 political 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 seasonal, 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 service advertisements broadcast in 1950s Canada. Enlisting householders in campaigns to reduce unemployment in the construction and materials sector 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 multiple 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 (Toronto, 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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The industrial revolution, though presaged in the National Policy days of the late nineteenth century, really came to Canada after World War II. Wartime breakthroughs in the processing of aluminum and wood products, particularly the manufacture and thermal-electric bending of plywood, set the agenda of the National Industrial Design Council. The NIDC was founded in the late 1940s as an imagined twin for secondary manufacturing of the National Research Council, begun in the 1920s to serve the needs of primary industry. Publicly assisted industrial design initiatives in Canada soon focused on product development, to broaden the markets for Canadian materials and increase the number and strength of firms. The policy goal was to employ more Canadians making domestic goods for sale into national, and eventually international, particularly U.S., markets. The Design Council, which early included an advisory committee of volunteers from the Consumers Association of Canada (CAC), held competitions and exhibitions to publicize design innovations in the consumer goods sector, including household appliances. The story of this asymmetrical collaboration is close to the British and Dutch histories, despite spirited early attempts from some CAC leaders to put forward the Swedish Home Research Institute path.11 By the early 1980s the CAC was a conservative, market-attentive organization, and design initiatives had been absorbed back into product engineering units of consumer goods manufacturers, now principally with headquarters in the United States and assembly plants north of the border. We have then, across national boundaries, a commonly open kitchen door. The histories are diverging and mutually informing. The relationships among design, technology, and work in the kitchen are multiple. American home economists, by measurement and movement studies, stabilized the body at work in the kitchen as female and northern European. Functionalist architects established a small, single-purpose room, which borrowed design influences from the railway car galley and the laboratory, as the prototype for the modern kitchen. The first excision did not become an issue in dispute. In an industrial culture unambiguously embracing mass production, manufacturing constraints required that the bodies of tool users be standardized. In this, unpaid kitchen workers would be no exception. The second excision stabilized meal preparation as a discreet and specialized fueling function, and featured the family as labor force participants sustaining the social and economic infrastructure of a strong nation. This excision was perpetually in dispute, and the functional irresolution between good home and good nation remained, even as the proportion of

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 University, Ottawa, 1986); Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto, 1999).

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mothers in labor forces around the North Atlantic increased. This ambiguity 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, fairskinned couples, broadly ratified as the fictive citizens of western social or liberal democracies, concede their kitchens alone, as the most highly capitalized part of their domestic space, to authorities whose commercial and economic policy priorities are implicitly, if not explicitly, unwelcome in the rest of the house.

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