From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America (review)

From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America. By Priscilla J. Brewer. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Pp. xix+338. $29.95.

It has been quite a long time since cookstoves received serious scrutiny. For almost two decades, we have had to rely for the most part on Susan Strasser's Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982) and Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother (1983). Here, finally, is a book that focuses exclusively on the development of the cookstove, and it covers some impressive new ground. As a social and technological artifact, cookstoves are closely intertwined with many important debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the role of women; the definition of social class; the impact of industrialization and the development of a consumer economy; the meanings of "domesticity"; and the role of conservative Anglo-American values in defining and preserving a middle-class "American" culture. By looking at cookstoves in the context of these debates, Priscilla Brewer shows that adapting to technological change in the home has never been easy.

From Fireplace to Cookstove is organized chronologically. For context and comparison, she begins with Americans' use of and attitudes toward the fireplace at the beginning of settlement and also includes the development of gas, oil, and electric ranges in the twentieth century. Because of the historical connections, she also covers heating stoves up to the advent of central heating. And she focuses primarily on developments in the northern states, where most stoves were made, sold, and used.

We learn that cookstoves were never overwhelmingly popular. From the beginning they entailed a multitude of adjustments and embodied problems that were never totally resolved. As stoves improved, Americans' ambivalence toward them actually increased. There were the functional reasons: they were awkward, hard to control, dangerous, unhealthy, and in need of constant maintenance. Then there were the social reasons: they marginalized the ideal home, contributed to the breakdown of the family, and reinforced the struggle between mistress and servant. They were considered a man's invention that intruded upon a woman's world. An interesting point here is that stove ownership was not strongly associated with wealth. In fact, families displayed status by not owning cookstoves. This was in keeping with other laborsaving technologies in the home during the nineteenth century, which were more widely embraced by women who could not afford servants to do the more laborious tasks.

By the end of the century, some Americans celebrated stoves as a symbol of progress, and some thought that they elevated the status of women. But most Americans remained ambivalent. People too young to remember the reality romanticized the glowing fireplaces of an earlier time, and "colonial kitchens" became all the rage at expositions and in newly founded museums. Even more significant were the new oil, gas, and electric stoves, which presented such serious competition that they almost completely replaced wood- and coal-burning cookstoves by 1930.

It was not until the era of cookstoves was long past that they were finally accorded reverence--ironically, in much the same way that fireplaces had been revered a century earlier. Brewer concludes her book with a somewhat sketchy yet fascinating account of the reawakened interest in cast-iron cookstoves, beginning with the oil crisis of the 1970s. While many historians would avoid trying to synthesize events as recent as this, I applaud Brewer's attempt to cover this topic within the broader context of an emerging concern about the environment and growing interest in alternative technologies, subjects for the most part untapped and crying out for scholarly attention.

In addition to drawing on scholarly works that synthesize the historical debates of the era, Brewer makes excellent use of a vast array of primary sources: letters and diaries, probate inventories, census records, patents, advertisements, account books, advice literature and cookbooks, and fiction. Almost one hundred illustrations--including...