9 - Sources of power

Summary

My mother, born in 1903, possessed one cookery book, a weighty brown, gilt- engraved volume first published in 1927 to promote a new design of gas stove called ‘New World’. This stove was the first to possess a thermostat, enabling the temperature of the oven to be controlled; the Radiation group of companies, which produced the cookery book, created a new term in naming it a ‘regulo’. The photograph inside my mother's copy of the Radiation Cookery Book is an exact replica of the oven that stood in my childhood home, on which the flames would frequently and terrifyingly ‘light back’ in the draught from the open kitchen door: the new world of gas cooking clearly had some way to go.

This chapter looks at two of the most fundamental of all modern housework technologies: gas and electricity. Along with running water and sewerage, they form the ‘technological infrastructure’ of housework. The story of their evolution interweaves several themes that are central to the household science movement. One is the impact of scientific-technological developments. How core is technology to the doing of scientific housework? Has technology really reduced household labour? A second theme is how such developments have helped to shape women's position as workers both inside and outside homes. Third, there is the fascinating question of the relationship between scientific understandings of housework and the modern culture of mass consumption. In the period covered by this book, but particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, household work became decisively a matter of consumption. Homes obtained and thus ‘consumed’ externally produced supplies and services rather than generating their own. They became essential players in a vast market of mass- produced and mass- distributed products designed to be bought and constantly replaced, and that therefore required an equally vast empire of seductive promotional advertising.

In the conversion of ‘Mrs Housewife’ into ‘Mrs Consumer’, the struggle to be clean and healthy couldn't possibly be won without buying. And to buy into a state of proper modernity, to be regarded by oneself and others as thoroughly modern, it became necessary to live in a state of highly technologised domesticity. In order to achieve its aims, the industries that sold household technology used two rhetorical devices.