Brilliant (20 page)

Magazine articles declared that the electric life would bring unimaginable ease. In 1904
Scientific American
published "Electricity in the Household," which described an electric iron, griddle, toaster, and cereal boiler, along with a chafing dish, about which the author claimed: "A traveler will find this stove particularly useful. It can be carried in the overcoat pocket." He also described a sewing machine, the speed of which "can be very delicately regulated.... The operator can assume any easy, comfortable position as the only duty required is to steer the cloth under the needle." In the accompanying photograph, a woman dressed, it seems, for a social occasion, is half turned away from her work. Her legs are crossed casually to the side, and she's guiding material toward the needle with her left hand while her other is free and draped over the chair back. She could be chatting with a friend. The author asserts, "Even an invalid can safely operate a machine thus driven."

In these early decades of the twentieth century, electric light bulbs were sold as both a brilliant mystery and a mystery attached to the past. The earliest print ads for them had been straightforward, simply stating their wattage and size. They would often be accompanied by a line drawing of the bulb, base, and filament. But particularly after the development of the brighter, more efficient, and longer-lasting tungsten filament in 1911, the ads became more elaborate. General Electric, still by far the largest manufacturer of light bulbs and lamps, launched a new trademark: Mazda, named after Ahura Mazda, the Persian god of light. Some of the ads for Mazda bulbs featured a reclining woman, draped in flowing robes, who held a light bulb aloft in her outstretched hand and gazed at the lifted brilliance. The bulb itself glowed without any connection to wires and sockets. Not even the filament was obvious, as if to suggest that the new was not so different from the old after all, for nothing in the ads hinted at the way light was now tethered to a growing industrial grid.

Electric lines eventually made their way into middle-class urban and suburban neighborhoods, spurred by Samuel Insull's adoption of the demand meter in Chicago. The meter encouraged use because it allowed power companies to charge lower rates to customers who consumed more than the minimum amount of electricity. Insull, as president of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, had foreseen increased domestic demand for electricity and actively sought out suburban customers, offering cheap wiring for their homes. Historian Harold Platt notes that Insull "went after every kind of customer from the biggest to the smallest. Maybe the smallest was the household and the housewife. In one famous campaign, he brought in 10,000 GE irons and gave them away free, so to speak, to anyone who would sign up for service."

When electricity finally arrived at their doors, families usually bought smaller appliances first, though not entirely because they were less expensive and easier to bring into their homes than larger ones. A refrigerator wasn't all that essential in a time when corner stores flourished—women shopped almost daily—and milkmen came to the door. As well, the advent of refrigerators spurred icebox manufacturers to improve their goods, and icemen stepped up their home delivery service. As for stoves, gas had already revolutionized cooking for city women. They didn't have to load fuel or tend a flame, and each individual burner operated at the turn of a switch, so they could use one burner at a time rather than heat up the entire stove for a can of soup or a tin of beans. Tin cans had come into their own by then, though there were no standards there either. As Christine Frederick observed, "A tin can is literally a dark, sealed mystery until it is opened."

Women knew what they wanted, and as Insull had foreseen, most purchased an electric iron first. The ads for them always showed a contented, well-dressed housewife effortlessly running an iron over her family's clothes. This was a stark contrast to the old chore, for there was no greater symbol of household drudgery than the "sad-iron"—"sad" in its archaic sense, meaning "heavy" or "dense." Traditional irons, made of cast metal, usually weighed four or five pounds, though some weighed as much as ten. The heavier the iron—and the more a woman pressed down on it—the more efficiently it worked. On ironing day, a woman would heat four, five, or six irons on her gas or wood stove. Before using one of the hot irons, she'd wipe the bottom clean, rub it with beeswax, and try it on an old piece of cloth to make sure it wasn't so hot that it would scorch the cloth. Then she'd press it onto a Sunday shirt, all the while taking care not to transfer any soot to the clean shirt and not to burn herself or the cloth. Once off the heat, the iron would cool down quickly, and in no time at all she'd have to return it to the stove and replace it with a hot one, which she would clean, wax, test ... Given the mountains of wrinkled cotton clothes and linens to be ironed, the job would take all day. And all the while, the woman would be standing next to the hot stove, even in high summer. One electric iron replaced every sad-iron in the household, and not only did it save time, but it was also far cleaner and more predictable, since the iron kept a constant temperature.

After irons, women most frequently purchased vacuum cleaners. Electricity was sometimes called "white coal," part of its allure being that all the attendant work and grime of production existed somewhere out of sight, so that people could believe the claim that "electricity, the unseen and the unknown, is absolutely clean." While electricity didn't produce the household smoke and residue of gaslight or kerosene lamps, what dirt there was now lay exposed by the increased candlepower of the tungsten filament, and dirt seen was dirt that had to be dealt with.

Woman has been a dirt eraser for so many ages with no relief in sight and no hope of anything better than beginning again at the moment of finishing.... [The vacuum cleaner] has a gigantic value in lifting the woman from her long and seemingly doomed relationship with dirt in the wrong place.... The machine that removes it, sucks it right out of the house altogether ... and is used in the average home about two hours a week. The old broom had at least a half day record. About the same intelligence is needed in the operation of each, although the cleaner requires far more thought and care to keep it in fitness and can be as successfully handled in a dinner or calling costume as with apron and cap.

It was a boon to all but the broom makers, who were taken to task by one advocate of sweeping as he made a desperate pitch for tradition: "They have let go, unchallenged, that sweeping is drudgery until the present generation thinks and talks of sweeping as menial labor, unpleasant and to be performed with reluctance. What a misconception! The medical profession in numerous instances advises women to take up housework, especially sweeping, to offset their ills. Sweeping is exercise of a highly beneficial nature." He was a voice crying in the new wilderness.

In this new wilderness, nothing was more complicated than time. But time—though no less an obsession than cleanliness—being abstract and malleable, couldn't be confronted in a straightforward way. Within more affluent homes in the first decades of the twentieth century, women were often thought to have too much time on their hands.
Ladies' Home Journal
declared: "As a matter of fact, what a certain type of woman needs today more than anything else is some task that 'would tie her down.' Our whole social fabric would be the better for it. Too many women are dangerously idle." But these same women felt pressure to make the most of time. The domestic science movement had taken hold, and its proponents advocated efficiency in household chores, the same way Frederick Taylor, writing in 1911, advocated it for factories: "We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient or ill-directed movements ... leave nothing visible or tangible behind them."

Electric appliances could help women be more efficient with housework and brought with them a dream of liberation. But advocates of domestic science believed that efficient work in and of itself was a kind of liberation: "The cry of the home honored woman to be released from the dish pan, the tub and the kitchen range is answered. It is now a matter of how far she will go on the new road and what amount of culture she can and will take on in the performance of the common task. From a musical standpoint she can move as far as time, tune and rhythm can be made to play upon her daily routine. Artistically we find every effort being brought to bear upon the home to give it the atmosphere it deserves."

Yes, electric appliances saved time. Washing clothes in the age-old way had taken an entire day, traditionally "Blue Monday." With an electric washer, a woman could clean clothes at odd times throughout the week—a load here, a load there—in between other tasks. But for some women, the arrival of electricity ushered in more work than before. The availability of electric appliances put more pressure on women who had relied on domestic help or services to accomplish these tasks themselves. And although the labor of washing had disappeared, so had the community of it. Women who'd previously washed and hung their clothes in the backyard could gossip with hired help or neighbors as they did so. Electric washers and dryers confined them, often alone, to the house. The new efficiency also created new expectations.
Ladies' Home Journal
observed: "Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after the dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for a daily immersion. If our consciences don't prick us over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking."

Electric light was now but one of many things that made life easier and also seemed to define what it meant to be modern. These things were inextricably linked to the imagination reaching for the future—much like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, in the unquiet darkness, stretched toward the single green beacon in the bay who, as young Jimmy Gatz, sought to remake himself: "Rise from bed: 6.00
A.M.;
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling: 6:15–6:30; Study electricity etc.: 7:15–8:15."

Electric light, however, also brought its own particular changes into homes. Although gaslight had fixed the flame at specific points throughout each room, mantle gas lamps, like kerosene lamps, still provided a living warmth around which people could gather: "When the gas was turned on in the evening, the whole room was bathed in a soft yellow light," remembered one Englishwoman. "Round Aunt Ada's gas mantle was a gas shade made of long crystal glass drops that caught the light and danced like a thousand tiny stars." When gaslight and kerosene lamps disappeared, so did the last vestige of a central fire in the home. Electric light was everywhere, yet concentrated nowhere; everyone sat in the halo of his or her own lamp. The flameless light also brought with it myriad possibilities never before imaginable, since it could be placed where an open flame could not. For instance, one guide to electricity in the home suggested: "In the parlor an illuminated painted vase, lighted from within, may vie in attractiveness with the pictures on the walls, whose colors are almost as readily appreciated by incandescent as by day light, while opalescent globes of varied shade tone the brightness everywhere into subdued harmony.... On the veranda the lamps shine heedless of the wind. A very pretty effect can also be produced in conservatories, by suspended lamps of different colors half hidden in the foliage."

Yet electricity did provide a new hearth: the radio, which was also among the most popular electric appliances. The family gathered around voices that broke the membrane between home and the world—voices coming from everywhere, bringing them music, news, weather, farm reports, and preachers. "When they say 'The Radio' they don't mean a cabinet, an electrical phenomenon, or a man in a studio," writer E. B. White said of his community; "they refer to a pervading and somewhat godlike presence which has come into their lives and homes. It is a mighty attractive idol. After all, the church merely holds out the remote promise of salvation: the radio tells you if it's going to rain tomorrow."

By 1920 electric service reached 35 percent of urban and suburban homes. The advent of electric trolleys and the automobile had spurred the move of many middle-class families from the cities to newly built neighborhoods on the outskirts, which had electric service included. Meanwhile, many poor city neighborhoods, home to immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and rural people who'd moved to the city, remained relentlessly in the dark. They had about as much expectation that electric light would come to them soon as an Aleutian Islander did. The social surveys of the time—such as those from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence, Massachusetts—which took stock of the deteriorating conditions in crowded city neighborhoods, investigated the lack of natural light, the poor sewage and water systems, and the questionable cleanliness of the milk supply. The surveys didn't mention the dearth of electricity, for not even social scientists yet imagined that access to electricity might be the right of every citizen.

For many immigrant and black city dwellers, the electric life could be quite proximate: poor neighborhoods could exist in the midst of some of the wealthiest sections of a city. In Washington, D.C., they were hidden in plain sight:

Walk around the outside of this block and you will see nothing peculiar about it. There are two imposing apartment buildings, the former residence of a senator, a handsome club house, several stylish boarding establishments and a number of three and four story, wholesome private houses. Your attention would have to be directed specifically to the four narrow wagon ways which run inward irregularly from the four sides of the square. A visitor from another city would take these to be passageways merely for the removal of refuse from back yards. But walk a hundred feet down one of these obscure byways and you find yourself on the borders of a new and strange community ... little wooden or brick houses whose rear doors point toward the rear entrances and separate yards of palatial residences.