Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The problem was that housewives were not robots. They lived in enormously diverse conditions, with different ideas about what a kitchen should be. Enamelled sinks were better than steel, and ironing boards should be mobile, the Dutch housewives’ organization told urban planners in The Hague.86 Nor did builders, producers and ideal-home promoters agree on a shared design. The modern kitchen advertised in Shanghai in the 1920s looked very different from that in Frankfurt. It featured an electric range that stood alone in a sizable kitchen, with a sink and running water but without either continuous worktops or cupboards. Ideal-home shows in inter-war London advertised American labour-saving devices, but continuous kitchen surfaces were equally lacking here; the L-shaped kitchen first appeared in 1949. Even in California, adjoining counters spread only slowly. In Paris, organizers at the annual Salon des Arts Ménagers found that pure functionalism did not go down well with the bourgeoisie: modern kitchens were flanked by Louis XV parlours and dining rooms.87

  The Frankfurt Kitchen was the culmination of modern functionalist design. To people’s lives it was marginal. Barely 10,000 of its type were installed. For the vast majority of people (and housing associations) this cuisine Porsche was out of reach; it would have taken the average Frankfurt worker a year’s income to buy one. As late as 1968, only every third German home had a standardized, built-in kitchen. The idea of the kitchen as a place of beauty and entertainment similarly encountered considerable resistance. At the German ‘Informa’ ideal-home show in 1963, Grete Meyer-Ehlers, the first female professor for home and design in Berlin, insisted that the kitchen, in the first place, was a ‘workspace’. She found it hard to imagine how housewives would possibly prepare liver dumplings and potato pancakes in front of brushed-steel and plastic surfaces.88

  For working-class people in the 1930s, a more normal domestic scene was that of the Mann family in Berlin, who shared an apartment with four other families. To get to their bedroom, the Manns and their two young daughters had to cross a communal corridor. The toilet was shared, as was the cleaning of the corridor, which caused endless friction. The Manns had their own kitchen, with water on tap and metered gas but no refrigeration: ‘Everything that was bought was eaten instantly, so that nothing could spoil,’ Hilla, one of the daughters, recalled. The kitchen was for much more than cooking. It was where the Manns mainly lived. It was the only heated room and included a bed, with a pillow embroidered by their mother, and a wall hanging with birds and flowers – ‘that looked cozy’. Opposite the curtained windows was a table, built by their father, with a rinsing bowl underneath. Next to it stood a white cupboard, with glass doors on top, to show the good porcelain for guests, and wooden doors at the bottom to hide aluminium pots, day-to-day crockery and onion-patterned cutlery bought with loyalty stamps at the Kaiser’s Kaffee chain. For light, there was only a petroleum lamp. The inventory shows how ordinary people relied on a mix of bought and home-made goods. In their living room, they had a mirrored wardrobe for their clothes, hand-woven chairs, a Rembrandt reproduction next to family photos and landscapes painted by their father, books, records and a self-assembled gramophone – the neighbour would knock at the walls and shout ‘Encore!’ when the music stopped.89

  It was not just in Berlin that modern consumer goods were entering the home, only to come to some accommodation with local culture. In the early twentieth century the appeal of new goods was palpable across the globe. In Cairo, the bourgeois home was promoted as the microcosm of a new nation, leaving behind traditional culture and polygamy. Advice literature praised Western-style furnishings and warned against oriental carpets as carriers of disease. Over-stuffed and over-decorated foyers were out, comfortable chairs in. Modernity did not have to be austere, though. Louis XIV furniture and English tea services were prized. It was screens and other objects ‘usually placed at the door of a harem’ that were to be avoided at all costs. In reality, many middle-class families added an Ottoman touch to these Western ideals. Fashions followed the Paris look but were made of smooth and glossy ‘oriental cloth’ rather than British ripple wool. Daughters played on pianos ornately decorated with mother-of-pearl inlay and carved mahogany mouldings, and sometimes fitted with an additional pedal for mandolin sounds.90

  Western goods spread much further across African societies than is commonly recognized. In sub-Saharan Africa, the Duala, a local ethnic elite who were traders and worked as clerks for the French colonists in inter-war Cameroon, spent substantial sums on houses, motorcars and bicycles.91 Rooiyard in Johannesburg was a slum of 1,000 square yards, which has long since been demolished. In the early 1930s, it was the site of a material culture in rapid transition.92 The longer people had lived there, the more Western objects they tended to have. These included beds and sideboards, tables and chairs, pianos and gramophones, chintz curtains and linoleum floors, all the way to framed pictures of movie stars looking down from wallpapered walls. The majority of families had either a gramophone, a bicycle, a sewing machine or a combination of these. Embroidery was a popular leisure activity among women. Younger girls wore lipstick. Men drank beer. How people sat, slept, ate and looked was changing. Pots and pans for the ‘ready-prepared mealie meal’ were taking the place of wooden mortar and pestle. Ellen Hellmann, an anthropologist who lived in Rooiyard and the first woman to receive a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand, was repeatedly assured by the local inhabitants that ‘the Europeans’ manner of cooking meat is a great improvement upon Native preparation of meat.’ New goods and habits were financed through a daily struggle with money. Hardly anyone saved. Most families spent what they could scrape together from their miserly 20-odd shillings weekly pay on instalment plans for gramophones or furniture. One Southern Soto couple spent as much on the instalment for their sideboard as on rent. It is tempting to view this scene as another sad comment on the conquest of traditional culture by Western consumerism. Hellmann resisted this. What was emerging was a ‘new composite culture’, not the West transplanted. Half the families had children in the country and maintained contact with tribal life, sending clothes and furniture back home. Amongst the poor in Johannesburg, as amongst the rich in Cairo, pieces of consumer culture were fitted into local culture, creating a mix of new values and behaviours in the process.

  The sanitary city created a favourable environment for new domestic technologies by diffusing a culture of hygiene and cleanliness. It is an illustration of how changes in private consumption were enabled by prior public reforms. In showrooms and demonstrations, producers advertised washing machines and electric stoves as clean technologies that allowed women to fulfil their role as guardians of private and public health. Durables spoke directly to a sense that the home and its contents were private and had to be shielded from outside pollution. This was evident in the growing aversion to sending out one’s dirty clothes, or having a collective wash-day with neighbours and family. ‘I can stand my own dirt but I can’t stand the dirt of someone I never saw,’ as one American housewife put it in 1934.93 By the end of that decade, the washerwoman, a dominant and imposing sight only a generation before, had all but disappeared in the United States. In Europe, collective laundry facilities in working-class housing blocks faced a similar fate in the next generation: ‘It is better to wash one’s dirty clothes in one’s own home!’ a woman in Turin explained in 1956.94 Hard-to-wash items and the sheer increase in people’s wardrobes threw a lifeline to commercial laundries, but these were often avoided for personal clothes and underwear. Laundries were routinely blamed for destroying heirlooms, fading favourite blouses and much else. In return, commercial laundries made much of the dangers of the new machines to life and limb. Whether automatic or semi-automatic, early machines still required hands-on attention. Tubes needed to be changed and the spinning movement had to be kept in check. The laundry industry warned of women who had been scalped or electrocuted.95 In Canada, wringer washing machines still outsold automatics in the late 1960s. Canadian women preferred durability and distrusted compli
cated machines with multiple cycles.96

  In Japan, consumer magazines initially advised against washing machines: most people did not have enough clothes to fill a whole drum, and so the few items would merely be rubbing against water instead of getting clean. In cities, there were plenty of washerwomen who charged a pittance. In the countryside, salesmen of electrical appliances ran into all sorts of obstacles. Electricity needed to be shown to be safe. Then, custom dictated that men’s and women’s clothing and upper and lower garments be washed separately. Before there was any market for their washing machines, companies concluded, lifestyles had to change.97

  The perhaps decisive factor, however, was a revaluation of housework itself. To buy labour-saving devices it was necessary in the first place to believe that labour was worth saving. The back-breaking routine of wash-day had been a feature of women’s lives for a very long time. Why change it? In South Africa today, where homes have colour TVs and fridge freezers, many women insist on performing their duty as wives by washing by hand; the machine is denounced for tempting girls and daughters-in-law into laziness and disrespect.98 New technologies required a willingness to transfer work done by hand to a machine. They asked people to see the home a bit more like William James did, and a bit less like Heidegger. And this meant appreciating that a housewife was worth more than her physical labour. Critics have said that consumer durables still left women enslaved – ‘crypto servants’, according to J. K. Galbraith.99 This is, strictly speaking, true, but it misses a profound change in the nature of this subordination, as women turned from physical labour to household management.

  The appeal of the modern home went hand in hand with the rise of the modern woman. We are so accustomed to thinking of the home as a site of female subordination that it is easy to forget that previous generations looked for empowerment and liberation within the home as well as outside it. The new wave of women’s magazines of this period advertised the modern home as much as cosmetics and cinema stars. They were all part of the same dream of a freer, more consumerist modernity.

  The campaign to brighten the housewife’s lot began before the washing machine. In 1907, the washing powder Persil was born. In the next few decades, the German parent company Henkel created an international empire that promoted its magical ‘self-acting’ powers (see Plate 32). Instead of endless scrubbing, the laundry was left in a soaking lye of cold water overnight, then put to boil the next day, gently rinsed (first in warm then in cold water), and voilà, the previously dreaded white wash was done. Better powders and soaps saved the housewife precious time and money by protecting the fabric against aggressive scrubbing – Sunlight, the product of its main rival, Lever, promised the same. Unfortunately, this sequence ran entirely counter to established routines. Salesmen endlessly complained of the misapplication and ‘prejudice’ they encountered. New customers had to be ‘enlightened’, for example, Frau Meier of Cologne who complained that Persil had turned her clothes grey. Others continued to scrub in spite of the new powders and then blamed the holes in their handkerchiefs on Persil.100 The celebration of washing as joy, then, was more than advertising whitewash. It had a practical purpose: for a new household product such as Persil to be effective, women had to learn to use their hands less and accept cleanliness as a result of technology instead of exertion.

  In the inter-war years, Persil’s empire grew threefold; over 100,000 tons were produced in 1938.101 The company ran an evangelical campaign of missionary proportions. Henkel set out to persuade all housewives that they had a right to joy and that they could have it, too, as long as they followed the Persil way of washing. It sent flappers on stage in front of wash buckets. At home shows, Henkel had its own pavilion fronted by a gigantic, bubbling foam fountain, which attracted over 3 million visitors at the 1926 Gesolei exhibition for health, welfare and sport. It ran flying wash-advice bureaus and gave practical demonstrations in shops, pubs and schools, in small towns going door to door, and in apartment blocks. In 1928, alongside the pudding and baking-powder giant Dr Oetker, Persil started its own schools, where housewives received twelve hours of free instruction in the art of modern washing and cooking, including a chance to handle appliances. For young children, there were doll’s clothes to wash. Henkel even had UFA, the leading movie studio in Germany, produce a film on the art of soaking. Its films reached an estimated 19 million housewives. One central feature of the campaign was the link between laundry and hygiene: charts illustrated that washing powder reduced infant mortality. To fight germs, the modern housewife needed modern products. ‘Wäsche, Waschen, Wohlergehen’ – laundry, washing, well-being – advertising vans blasted through their loudspeakers. The campaign was universal in its ambition: all housewives, rich and poor, rural and urban, young and old, needed to be carried into the modern age. Some salesmen recognized that in a country like Greece, where households lacked the necessary clothing for a whole Persil-white wash, it might be wiser to focus on the cold laundry of more delicate wool and silk clothes. In general, however, progress was open to all cultures, from Algeria and West Africa to rugged Sardinia, where, it was said, local women were unable to contain their joy about its magic power: ‘Our laundry is now whiter than the snow of Gennargentu!’102

  It would be a revolution without class struggle, turning hard work into joy. The housewife no longer returned from wash-day exhausted and irritable, but relaxed and happy, able to devote herself to husband and children: this was how advertisers imagined the modern home across the developed world. In reality, chores did not vanish. Still, the boundaries between production and consumption were blurred. There was glamour in the laundry, good housekeeping guides cheered. Women were entitled to leisure in the home. This was why many women home economists, although sceptical about the time-saving promises, supported the industrial revolution in the home. Together with greater comfort and better planning, ‘economical equipment’ would help align the home to ‘the needs and wishes of every member of the family’ and lead to more ‘agreeable mutual relations and mutual help’. It would provide ‘an outlet for the spirit of service that is the basis of a happy home’.103

  Everywhere, liberation from traditional norms came with a new responsibility of care: to provide a modern home. It was too easy to blame technological obstacles for past difficulties, home exhibitions told the housewife. She should also blame herself ‘as customer and consumer’ for not making the most of new machines and training.104 The housewife was elevated to a super-minister of health, nutrition and culture.

  In Japan, this ‘promotion’ was reflected in the shift in meaning of shufu. Originally shufu had referred to the proprietress of a business. By the early twentieth century it meant ‘housewife’. In Japan, as elsewhere, the new science of hygiene and nutrition gave housekeeping public and scientific authority. Being a housewife became a profession. A clean home and nutritious home-cooked food saved men from dirt, disease and drink, keeping family and nation healthy.105

  The Japanese redefinition of women’s roles was a joint project of housewives, civic organizations and the state. The four most popular women’s magazines together had more than 1 million readers, professional women and housewives alike. One wife wrote to the magazine Fujin koron in 1920 that the time had come to overthrow the ‘old-fashioned lifestyle’ and eliminate the ‘tremendous waste around us’. ‘Among the many things we should learn from the American family’s lifestyle, most important, I think, is that the housewife’s duty is to make her home a happy and beautiful place to live.’106 The home was rebranded as a space of scientific management and family-centred happiness (see Plate 37).

  The push for modern living came from national policy and embourgeoisement as well as women’s groups. Home science was already part of the school curriculum for girls at the end of the Meiji period (1868– 1912), when Japan embraced modernization. The First World War turned it into a plank of national policy. In 1919, the Everyday Life Reform League (Seikatsu kaizen dō meikai) was set up, a body initiated by the Hom
e Ministry with support from women’s schools, architects and middle-class reformers. National survival required thrift and health. Traditional living, with its elaborate ceremonies, gift-giving and dress codes needed to give way to a simpler life. ‘Reform of the Home Begins with the Kitchen,’ the League’s posters and flyers told city dwellers. Instead of kneeling in a dark, dirty kitchen covered in soot and open to the environment, the modern housewife stood in a clean, enclosed space with electricity, running water and continuous worktops. From here, the modern spirit of rational and family-centred life spread. The poster ‘Family Gathering rather than Tinkering with Antiques’ showed how men in traditional dress, indulging in private hobbies, were transformed into doting fathers and husbands wearing Western suits. The League targeted domestic dwelling in all its dimensions. It championed chairs and sought to eliminate useless ornamentation. Gardens were to be practical, not decorative. The self-proclaimed motto was ‘health and safety’, but it also required thorough mental reformation. ‘Everyday life is the expression of the nation’s thought,’ as the government official Tago Ichimin put it.107