Editor's Introduction: Modern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

The domestic, as a modern American commonplace, was ambiguous territory for technology. The three articles in this issue began as papers for a conference at the Hagley Museum and Library in November 2000 called "Kitchens: Design, Technologies, and Work." They persist as meditations on how commercially driven design and mass-produced technologies settled into the kitchens of the United States in the twentieth century. Ideologically and spatially, these inquiries come to the kitchen from outside: from the institutional kitchens children encountered when they were seasonally set loose from the bounds of home, from the design divisions of domestic appliance manufacturers, and from home economics teaching faculties. Together they illustrate how the work of procuring and managing kitchen equipment manifested and remade American understandings of class and gender.

Kitchens share in the private-public ambiguities of modern domesticity generally. Does the design, technology, and work of the kitchen enable the associative chain good kitchen/good wife/good cook/good meals/good home? Or is it good kitchen/efficient production/nutritious fuel/productive citizens/strong nation? Plainly the answer is "both." Here the matter becomes interesting for students of kitchen technologies.

In the twentieth century, the political, pedagogical, and entrepreneurial interventions that made these kitchen functions compatible differed nationally. Nations' cooks and their kitchens were subject to hybrid influences, on contested boundaries of the home, the market, and the state. Their technologies were liminal signifiers of class difference. Their technical competence was adjunct to the engineer's. The mandates of cooks and their kitchens commonly were subsidiary to the prime goals of the institutions they served. The three articles collected here explore American kitchens. In the process they suggest national specificities in the relationships among technology, domesticity, and nation that prompt North Atlantic comparisons that help situate the United States case.

Abigail Van Slyck is interested in the architecture of summer camps for American girls and boys, and in how the technologies and practices of cooking and eating changed over time as organizers reconceptualized the camps' missions. Early in the century, when going to summer camp was about learning manly and womanly habits of industry, kitchen technologies were props to pedagogy, chosen (in the mode of the three bears' porridge bowls) to be not too cumbersome, not too laborsaving, but "just right" as introductions to self-reliance for novice rustics. By midcentury, such careful calibration about the meaning of machinery for food preparation was not required. Cooking was no longer a question of character for campers, and kitchen technology was hidden from view. Meal provision became an efficient service provided, transparently, by professional cooks. Dining then became the part of the food axis where campers learned social distinctions. These markers were of class rather than gender, carried in the gentility attributed to the campers' tableware and the architecturally achieved separation at camp between the places where meals were produced and consumed. Van Slyck's study underlines the significance of place and practice in the history of kitchen technology. Who should be aware that there are machines in the kitchen, and who appropriately might participate in the tending of those machines? When efficiency is not to be a homely virtue, or a lesson modeled for the young, architecture and case designs do social work keeping technology out of sight and mind.

Heretofore, the history of refrigerators in the United States and elsewhere has mostly been about case design. Shelley Nickles rereads a cluster of design icons from the kitchens of the United States in the 1930s and discerns in the streamlined kitchen a "compelling and contentious symbol of a modern American standard of living." Until the 1970s, the efficient plant size for producing refrigerators was larger than for any other domestic appliance. These long production lines meant that, of the boxes in the kitchen, refrigerators most urgently required mass-market appeal. Nickles explores how refrigerators, upscale goods in the United States in the 1920s by design, were made "average" in the economic crisis of the...