"Mrs. Modern Woman": Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Haushaltstechnisierung (review)

Electrification changed ways of doing household labor, but it did not—has not—structurally changed the division of labor between men and women. Indeed, as Martina Heßler shows in this book, a dominant discourse about electricity and modernity reinforced the representation of women as housewives, mothers, and consumers. The debates and negotiations about electricity and the way this new technology could and should be used for household labor provide her central theme.

The mediation between production and consumption has become an important area of investigation in the history of technology. This "mediating of consumption" approach holds that consumers as well as producers negotiate the ways in which a technology will be used and with what social, political, or economic purpose. Heßler's book is an example of this approach. By describing and analyzing the mediation of electricity and its use for household tasks in the family home in Germany from 1919 to 1939, she presents a discursive history of the relationships among modernity, technology, and gender.

A central argument concerns a thesis in German and Dutch history of technology that the interwar period amounted to social and cultural preparation for the consumer society of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the diffusion of washing machines and refrigerators did not take place until then, women's organizations, architects, manufacturers, and public authorities worked hard to construct use and users before World War II. "Mrs. Modern Woman" shows that the modern German housewife was the product of the negotiation of consumption and technology during this period. A commonly shared discourse about modernity, prosperity, and electricity was the basis for a "congruence of interests," as Heßler calls it, aiming to electrify German households. But not everyone agreed on the way this should be done, and to what end. The National-Socialist regime tried to fight unemployment by stimulating household electrification; architects saw electricity in the home as a way to build a better society; and by using electricity in the household the German housewives organization (RDH) tried to professionalize household labor and create a model for German housewives. By presenting different perspectives on electrification, Heßler accentuates the internal dynamics within various groups. But by analyzing these groups of actors separately, she pays too little attention to the processes of negotiation and mediation, and to the dynamics between the participating parties. This is a missed opportunity.

By searching for continuity and discontinuity from one period to another, Heßler shows that consumption as the core of the state economy has its roots in the interwar years. Here, the case of the "Volkskuhlschrank" (the people's refrigerator) as equivalent of the Volkswagen is revealing. The argument for the 1920s and 1930s being a period of preparation for the later consumer society seems logical. Heßler concludes her book with a look at how the outcomes of the mediation process relate to what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. She sees a clear continuity in the way that consumption became dominant for Western economies. About the way this discourse materialized after World War II, however, she still owes us an answer. She states that the use of technology is based on the sum of many individual choices, and she shows us the boundaries of the "mediating of consumption" approach. This can tell us something about projected and represented users, but very little about actual use. Further research about the relation between the constructed and represented user and actual users is needed.