Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Modern living involved a new division of labour. In a nineteenth-century Japanese household, cleaning, cooking and housekeeping had been shared among husbands, wives and male servants. By the 1920s, these had all become women’s tasks. In Japan, as elsewhere, middle-class families relied on fewer servants. Most shufus still had one or two female servants, but the household itself was contracting into a self-contained nuclear unit. The housewife took on hitherto unknown authority within her four walls. If she was still dependent on her husband, she was no longer subordinate to her parents-in-law or bound by traditional festivals and ritual spending. The promotion of housewives’ budget books in this period signalled the arrival of the Japanese housewife as a more independent consumer, in charge of family spending.

  Women today may wonder where all their promised leisure time has gone. Home economists were already asking the same thing in the 1920s. In 1929, the home economist Amy Hewes asked a national sample of female students at Mount Holyoake College to report on the electrical appliances their families back home had acquired. In 1919, most families had had either none or were limited to one or two appliances, especially an electric iron. Ten years later, most had five or more, most commonly fridges, washing machines, waffle irons, toasters and coffee percolators. Families were then asked to record changes in their daily routines. More than a third reported that they were doing more washing and ironing. Sewing and baking, too, had increased. Only one fifth said that they had saved any time to engage in outside activities. The actual time saved was clearly ‘disappointing as compared to the promises of things possible made by the salesmen of electric appliances’. At the same time, Hewes wrote, ‘[i]t may often happen that a women’s [sic] horizon is greatly widened by any outside activities.’ By making this possible, even if only in modest degree, appliances were good for housewife and family alike.108

  What we see here is the escalator of consumption at work. More possessions and domestic technologies induced new activities and raised standards and expectations, which opened the door for further technologies. Consuming was, as the economist Alfred Marshall had recognized, like climbing an infinite ladder, except that in this case activities did not lead to nobler activities but added new rungs of stuff. Cleanliness and pride in the home were not fixed states but infinitely expandable.109 Companies understood this. There was always ‘whiter than white’, to use the Persil slogan. Much has been made of ‘inbuilt obsolescence’ as the engine of consumerism. Equally important was the inbuilt intensification of norms and practices introduced by new durables. A vacuum cleaner and washing machine did save two to nine hours per week, studies found at the time. But this gain was virtually wiped out by more frequent hoovering and laundry and higher standards of cleanliness. Sheets and clothes were changed and washed more often. Within a generation of its adoption, the washing machine transformed how it felt to be clean or dirty; a mere 5 per cent of German men changed their underwear daily in 1966; by 1986, it was 45 per cent.110 In some cultures, women began to iron underwear. The sewing machine did not just make the same clothes with less effort. It encouraged more clothes and greater personalization, with diverse patterns and more ruffles, tucks and borders to be added. Housewives had long expressed their pride and care for the family in the state of their home. More goods and appliances multiplied the demands on their attention. Instead of throwing their energies into whitening the doorstep by scrubbing it with a soft lime stone, working-class housewives competed with each other about who kept the shiniest kitchen, the cleanest bathroom and the neatest parlour. Here was the cruel contradiction: new equipment promised to turn housework into leisure, but women had been brought up in a culture where idleness was considered unwomanly. Time saved went into another round of hoovering.

  In a later chapter we will need to look more closely at the changing nature of leisure time. Here we are concerned particularly with the effect of new appliances on female housework. The historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, whose influential work picked up where earlier home economists had left off, has argued that the domestic revolution meant ‘more work for Mother’. Studies from the 1920s showed that weekly housework took around forty-eight hours in urban and sixty-one hours in rural America. A 1965 survey clocked up fifty-four hours, with twenty-eight hours for housework and twenty-seven hours for childcare. New chores ‘cancelled’ any time gained.111 This is strictly correct, but such an aggregate view only goes so far. We need to ask about the quality of time as well as the quantity. Housework is not all the same. Most women said they liked cooking better than childcare. Ironically, and especially since the Second World War, American women have spent more time with their children and less time at the stove. What happened, then, was a redistribution of time at home, as well as a rise in the time spent at paid work outside it. In addition, tasks were coordinated differently. Listening to the radio while doing the laundry at home and keeping an eye on the kids at the same time is different from doing a single task or doing them sequentially, even if the hours spent are the same. The domestic revolution was probably as important in creating more intense clusters of parallel practices as it was for the overall use of time.

  Aggregates also hide class and regional contrasts. Research for Hoover’s conference on the home in 1932 showed that housekeeping differed hugely across America. In cities, homemakers spent half as much on laundering as did their rural sisters, yet twice as much on ‘care of family’. A woman in rural America was effectively on her own. By contrast, the urban housewife had twenty-seven hours of additional help. And labour-saving devices had different consequences for working-class and middle-class women. One reason why the hours of housekeeping appeared to stay constant was that the original data, like that on college families, was biased towards the middle class. Naturally, the time they spent on home-keeping did not decline: they lost their servants. For working-class mothers, the opposite was true: the washing machine saved them time, sweat and tears – as one 1950s housewife put it plainly, ‘You could take away my bed, but just don’t leave me without that automatic washing machine.’112 This class divergence had already been noticed by the Lynds in their research for Middletown in 1925. If labour-saving devices did not erase the ‘double burden’, time-use data since then suggests it at least reduced it for women in employment.113

  In general, the influence of appliances was probably smaller than often thought. The most extensive recent review of time-use data in twentieth-century America finds little evidence that the arrival of appliances prompted women to join the workforce. Female housework in the 1930s–’60s did shoot up, but this had less to do with hoovers and washing machines and more with the fact that single women were increasingly living in their own apartments rather than in boarding houses or with their families.114 There is no simple cause–effect relationship between what is done at home and what is bought in the marketplace. Yes, ready-made food and microwaves have led people to cook less. In other aspects of domestic life, however, the two types of provision have supplemented each other: people spend more money on children’s services, games and entertainment, but they also spend more time with their children.

  In some contexts, household appliances brought empowerment in indirect ways. When fairly poor families in 1970s–’80s Egypt and other developing countries were buying consumer durables, they were partly doing so to demonstrate their status within their neighbourhood. But they also boosted a housewife’s control over family finances. Putting spare cash into an instalment plan for a TV or a washing machine meant it could not be handed out to a needy neighbour or a cousin asking for help with wedding expenses or medical bills. Consumer durables locked in money, shielding their owners from the claims of customary reciprocity. When an opportunity for social improvement arose, such as a move to a better flat or the education of a child, they could be resold, releasing built-up capital.115 White goods were a savings account with a dividend of greater control for the housewife. This kind of consumerism, which is never talked about in conventional critiques an
d media commentary, encouraged both greater autonomy and care for one’s intimate family. Modern things could be a ticket out of the extended family and community into which one was born.116

  Men continued to spend less time on housework than women, but they had their domestic revolution, too. It just didn’t happen in the kitchen. It took place in the hobby basement, the garage and the garden. Mrs Clean was joined by Mr Fixit. Men and women came to the modern home from opposite directions. For women, industry came into the home, upgrading their domestic role to that of scientific manager. For men, on the other hand, the home and garden were refuges from the world of industrial labour. Several developments came together. The shift from artisan to factory worker or office clerk raised anxieties about masculinity. What did modern man actually accomplish, now that he was no longer homo faber? Do-it-yourself was a way to rebuild male pride. Hobbies and crafts, not the devil, would make work for idle hands. It also offered a moral defence of private recreation at a time when rising leisure time included the ‘involuntary’ leisure of high unemployment in the 1930s. Tools became consumer goods. By the middle of the century, Macy’s department store was selling motor-driven jigsaws and other power tools; Black & Decker introduced its small hand-held drill in 1946.

  As with the language of domestic appliances aimed at the modern housewife, the language of the male craft-consumer appealed to both rationality and fun. It was sold as an exercise in thrift and self-reliance. In truth, the average person would have saved money by buying a chair in a store rather than making it themselves. What mattered to many, however, was less the end result than the satisfaction of making things: ‘I am sitting on a home-made chair . . . [and] the greatest reward coming out of this piece of work was the fun of making it with my own hands.’117

  Gardening offered an increasingly popular way to consume the fruits of one’s own labour. With the help of both companies and trade unions, industrial workers discovered allotments and window boxes. The First World War gave a natural boost to allotments, but their popularity carried over into peacetime. In inter-war France, the Société d’horticulture et des jardins ouvriers de la region du Nord grew from a sapling into a mighty oak, with 700,000 members. For 8 francs 50 centimes a year, a French miner would receive fifty packets of seeds, the bimonthly magazine, lessons about gardening and a chance to shine in competitions and win more seeds at the tombola. ‘Auto-consumption’, according to these associations, gave workers moral and material roots in a competitive, commercial world. What the home and DIY were to the middle classes, the vegetable garden would be to the worker: a stake in the country and a chance to leave ‘his signature on the soil’. Care for plants heralded ‘attentive work, order and family discipline,’ garden magazines told their working-class readers.118 In times of crisis, they were also a major strategy for survival, and nowhere more so than in Nazi and post-war Germany. In the mid-1930s, about 10 per cent of all fruit and vegetables in the German Reich was grown in allotments. In the late 1940s, many Germans would not have survived had it not been for access to one of the 1 million allotments.119

  For most white-collar workers, a workshop at home remained out of reach. Recreational crafts were primarily a blue-collar and middle-class pastime. Still, the general phenomenon deserves recognition. American schools set up hobby clubs; big firms their own craft guilds. In Manhattan, the Museum of Modern Art even installed a woodworking shop for fathers and sons who did not have the privilege of their own hobby basement. In Europe, painting and wallpapering were increasingly done by husband and wife together.120 The home was not gender equal but it was more of a joint project than before. Men spent roughly twice as much time on domestic chores and repairs in 1945 as in 1900.121

  It is simplistic, then, to view consumer culture as passive and de-skilling. A good deal of the rise in consumption involved buying for the sake of making and personalizing the home. DIY, handicrafts and gardening attracted a sizable chunk of consumer spending, with their own magazines, stores and fairs. Consumerism encouraged new skills as often as it killed old ones. Men were drawn into a more active, home-centred culture. By the 1930s, most had a better grip on the hammer than their grandfathers. Perhaps Heidegger should have worried less. Machines were leaving their imprint on the home, but so was the hand. Ironically, homo consumens gave a helping hand to homo faber.

  How, then, should we interpret the domestic revolution in the longer history of consumption? At one level, we can see electric irons and washing machines as completing a trend stretching back to the eighteenth century: things took the place of servants and retainers. Households downsized their human staff and upgraded their material helpers. At another level, however, it should also be viewed as a counter-revolution. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had seen a shift from making to buying things. By 1900, urban Americans bought their clothes instead of sewing them. Outside remote mountain areas such as the Appalachian highlands, baking bread, canning and pickling, making soap and home medicines, were all losing ground to cheaper, more convenient and heavily advertised commodities.122 Commentators began to worry that the home was becoming an empty shell. What would be left of it when people’s lives were all about getting and spending in the marketplace? The twentieth century showed such worries to be unfounded. It is wrong to presume that a rise in shopping automatically leads to a decline in homemaking. In the most commercial consumer culture, twentieth-century America, time spent on homemaking has remained constant at around fifty-two hours per week.123 There are two main reasons for this. The first is the growing size of homes and the rise of ‘solo living’. There is simply more floor space for the individual to take care of. The second is the influx of appliances. Washing machines, floor waxers, electric irons and fruit-juice extractors, drills and sewing machines, all of these either restored activities or invented entirely new ones. Consumption became more productive.

  TUNING IN

  The domestic consumer revolution was one of the ear as much as the hand. Western cultures in particular had long encouraged sight as the first sense, and the diffusion of consumption in earlier periods had worked primarily through visual stimuli via fashion, shop-window displays and the bright lights of the city. The gramophone and the radio added an aural sensibility. They literally opened people’s ears. If the cult of cleanliness and domestic science looked inward, the radio reached out, carrying new dream worlds directly into people’s living rooms.

  The gramophone and the radio were not initially designed as instruments of domestic entertainment. The phonograph was first presented by Edison to the public in 1877. Early gramophones were used for a range of purposes, including dictation, court testimony, and to bring back the voice of loved ones from the dead. The Columbia Phonograph Company in 1890 advertised that it could give composers new ideas by allowing them to play music backwards. In France, Pathé introduced slot listening machines where people could listen to a song for 15 centimes. The Gramophone Co. and Victor had already opened recording studios in Singapore and Mexico in 1903–4, and it was at this time that Debussy was sufficiently impressed by the promise of immortality to record excerpts of Pelléas at Mélisande in the Paris studio. Mass-produced discs had started to displace wax cylinders just before the First World War. Still, as late as 1918, it was possible to record only three octaves.

  The breakthrough came in the 1920s. In 1927, record sales reached 104 million in the United States. The opera singer Enrico Caruso alone brought in $2.5 million for the Victor recording company. Some artists feared that private music boxes would be the death of public music. In fact, the opposite happened. The gramophone and radio boosted live-music performances by giving people a taste for the Charleston, the black bottom and other novelty dances that could be practised at home. In Malaya, the record industry used stadium events to promote the hugely popular Miss Soelami, the ‘undisputed Kronchong Champion of All-Java’.124

  The radio’s metamorphosis from boyhood gadget to family entertainment was more dramatic still. Between 1901,
when Guglielmo Marconi first sent signals across the Atlantic, and the First World War, boys in their thousands experimented with building single receivers and sending dot-and-dash signals. In 1920, the fifteen-year-old Harold Robinson managed to send a signal from his home in New Jersey all the way to Scotland. In the early 1920s, radios meant headphones attached to a self-assembled crystal set. It was a hobby for ‘hams’ and schoolteachers. Boys saved up their pennies to buy parts from the local ten-cent store. By 1922, there were some 600,000 radio hobbyists in the United States.125 An estimated 20,000 stations were operated by American kids on lower wavelengths. Gothenburg and other European cities had radio clubs with thousands of members. Schools were vital transmitters on both sides of the Atlantic. In Prussia, almost half of them participated in school radio, offering pupils a fairly balanced diet of music, literature, geography and languages; many of the sets belonged to teachers.126 In the States, ‘colleges of the air’ were run from universities and agricultural colleges. The radio was an unrivalled educator, the US Commissioner of Education, John Tigert, emphasized in 1924. In addition to whetting an interest in the world, it taught ‘lessons in thrift, in handiwork, and in science that the best teachers in the land might well contemplate with envy’.127

  A hobby page from a 1932 magazine for radiophiles in Luxembourg gives a sense of the skill and confidence required to set up a three-tube receiver with loudspeaker. To be able to listen to Strasbourg and Rome in the evenings, one needed an external antenna at least 25 metres long and 10 metres high with a minimum of 120 volts. If the volume was too low, the listener was encouraged to use a pencil and rubber to add or remove graphite on the individual resistors of the low-frequency amplifier. As anyone who has seen Laurel and Hardy’s Hog Wild (1930) will know, just putting up an antenna was fraught with disaster. Battery-operated radios frequently leaked acid on to sideboard and carpets. It was not until the late 1920s that fully electric models were introduced – for example, the Radiola 17 in 1927 – and that external cables, tubes and loudspeakers were absorbed into a finished mahogany body – as in the Telefunkensuper 653 in 1931 (see Plate 33). Encased and polished, the radio now sat neatly alongside other furniture, with simple dials for an easy listening experience for the whole family. The male gadget was fit to move from the attic to the sitting room.128