America at Home: A Celebration of Twentieth-Century Housewares

Prompted by feminist literature on housework and cultural studies of consumer society, a growing number of historians of technology and culture have turned their attention to the products of everyday domestic life, from plastics to Pyrex. These scholars will find Victoria Matranga’s popular chronicle of housewares a welcome addition to their reference shelves.

Written to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the International Housewares Show, America at Home revises and updates an earlier volume similarly commissioned and published by the National Housewares Manufacturers Association. Published in 1973, The Housewares Story: A History of the American Housewares Industry showed how retailing gave this group of seemingly diverse industries its coherence: housewares were whatever ended up in the “housewares department” of department stores, including small electrical appliances, cookware, bath accessories, outdoor furniture, and garbage pails. Written by Earl Lifshey, an industry insider, the earlier book was highly idiosyncratic, but indispensable for its encyclopedic detail. Where else could one find charts titled “Major Milestones in the Development of Metal Cooking Utensils in America” and timelines labeled “The Evolution of Shower Curtain Materials”? Lifshey not only included histories of the companies that made these products, but enlivened the book with lengthy personal anecdotes by the managers and retailers who attempted to sell these goods to the consuming public. Endlessly upbeat, The Housewares Story was a tale of America’s ever-increasing standard of living, in which the Great Depression was an opportunity for new housewares inventions.

Although Matranga’s coffee-table book is not a substitute for the more comprehensive earlier volume, three attributes justify its place alongside Lifshey on the reference shelves: its focus on women, its inclusion of contemporary developments, and its illustrations. Whereas Lifshey focused on male inventors and promoters, Matranga places the women who purchased and used these housewares at the center of her story. In chronological chapters, Matranga aims to show how houseware developments have accompanied changing domestic lifestyles and retail environments from the perspective of women consumers and housewives. Historians of gender and technology likely will find the results uneven, a consequence of the recurring tension between the author’s duty to produce a “celebration” of products and her attempt to incorporate scholarly insights. The influence of historians is mostly evident in the bibliography, where the number of revisionist titles on family, housework, design, technology, and consumer culture exceeds that found in the typical trade-sponsored publication. One of the few scholarly insights to inform the text itself is Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s influential More Work for Mother thesis, which over a decade ago launched a critical look at household technology. Matranga’s mere acknowledgment that “‘labor-saving’ devices actually increased housework” (p. 52) rings like a manifesto in this generally perky account, reminding scholars not to assume that such perspectives have become the norm in the public, much less corporate, arenas.

Matranga brings the housewares story up to the present, revealing how these products changed in response to environmental concerns and transformations in the mass market. A separate section profiling the history of individual manufacturers, complete with addresses and telephone numbers, is useful in sorting out the confusion of corporations, brands, and products created by years of merger mania. Unfortunately, this usefulness is tempered by the public-relations spin of all the entries (e.g., “distinguished customer service,” “innovation,” and “quality”), apparently written by company representatives.

Few scholarly tomes can afford to match the impressive quantity and quality of this book’s color illustrations. However, Matranga does not succeed as well as professional historians might hope in her stated aim of integrating these superb images into the story of changing lifestyles. Breezy historical narratives of chronological periods, such as “Hopes and Fears: Home Life during the Depression and World War II,” read like standard textbook chapter introductions, while discussions of products are largely confined to sidebars and separate illustration captions. For example, the caption accompanying colorful ceramic leftover...