INTRODUCTION

Modern Kitchen, Good Home,

Strong Nation

J O Y PA R R

The domestic, as a modern American commonplace, was ambiguous terri-

tory for technology. The three articles in this issue began as papers for a con-
ference at the Hagley Museum and Library in November 2000 called “Kitch-
ens: 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 institu-
tional 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 domestic-
ity 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/produc-
tive 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 influ-
ences, on contested boundaries of the home, the market, and the state.
Their technologies were liminal signifiers of class difference. Their techni-
cal competence was adjunct to the engineer’s. The mandates of cooks and
their kitchens commonly were subsidiary to the prime goals of the institu-

Dr. Parr, Farley Professor in the Department of the Humanities at Simon Fraser Univer-
sity, British Columbia, lately completed a study of Keynesianism, modernism, and the
design of domestic economies, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Eco-
nomic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
©2002 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/02/4304-0001$8.00

657
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U LT U R E

tions they served. The three articles collected here explore American
kitchens. In the process they suggest national specificities in the relation-
ships 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
OCTOBER
cooking and eating changed over time as organizers reconceptualized the
2002 camps’ missions. Early in the century, when going to summer camp was
VOL. 43
about learning manly and womanly habits of industry, kitchen technolo-
gies were props to pedagogy, chosen (in the mode of the three bears’ por-
ridge 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 prepara-
tion 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 pro-
duced 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 else-
where 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 dis-
cerns 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 1930s. In this
period, the efficiency of unpaid domestic work mattered more, as paid
work could be relied upon for less. The redesign of the refrigerator as a pol-
ysemic mass good modeled an America not divided between the elites and
the masses but multiply segmented. In this America, gender and class divi-
sions were buffered by citizens’ participation in a variegated but recogniz-
ably common world of goods. These domestic goods, Nickles argues, for-
malized and thus made conceptually accessible a differently stratified
capitalist nation.

658
 PARRK|KModern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

Home economics education was an American export, particularly in

the interwar years. The engineering and kinesthetic study of domestic
technologies that Lillian Gilbreth and Christine Fredricks began in the
United States was institutionalized in the curricula and textbooks of Louise
Peet and her colleagues at Iowa State. Amy Bix follows two strands in the
work of Iowa State’s household equipment department. She shows how the
INTRO-
Iowa program created an “alternate vision of gendered knowledge” that
assumed that users of kitchen equipment were self-reliant because techni- DUCTION
cally aware. Iowa home economics students were required to tear down
equipment long after household appliances had outgrown the high-main-
tenance phase that challenged and frustrated early adopters. Yet faculty
were circumspect about encroaching upon the domain of the engineer.
While the technical teaching of the United States land grant schools defined
the field internationally, the Iowa stance toward the consumption of house-
hold equipment was more distinctively American. Faculty cautioned about
fads but “encouraged new generations to covet new equipment,” validated
commercially driven obsolescence by warning student buyers “to double-
check serial numbers” in order to guard against “unethical schemes to pass
off prior-year models as new.” Peet herself rejoiced in the availability of the
strongly colored refrigerators her European colleagues shunned. By close
study, Bix reveals the multiple stances toward consumption, technology,
and gendered citizenship schooled through the home economics curricu-
lum at Iowa State.
How do these three case studies inform the wider history of design,
technology, work, domesticity, and nation? The improving designers of the
interwar years, in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom,
Canada, and the United States, gloried in the kitchen. The Americans
Teague and Dreyfuss articulated their shared strategy: modernism in all its
aspects would enter the whole dwelling through the kitchen door.1 To a
large extent, American homes of today bespeak their victory while pro-
claiming the limitations of their achievement. Modernist improvers were
conceded authority over the kitchen and, by engineering and organiza-
tional extension, over the other parts of the home that required plumbing
in a bargain that disguised their influence elsewhere under muted, anti-in-
dustrial veneers.
In 2000, the Canadian novelist Bonnie Burnard, interviewed about a
book in which the kitchen figured prominently, asserted frequently and
with enthusiasm: “I have never met a kitchen which I did not want to rip
out.” 2 Readers, who’d have questioned her competence had she made this
confession about most of her living space, chuckled and took her to their

1. Walter Dorwin Teague, Design This Day (New York, 1949), 61–62, 184; Henry
Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York, 1955), 74.
2. Bonnie Burnard, A Good House (Toronto, 1999).

659
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U LT U R E

hearts. Domestic chattels in most twentieth-century North Atlantic cul-

tures were to be the very opposite of evanescent. Consider a famous passage
on this question from Hannah Arendt: “[T]he things of the world . . . ‘stand
against’ and endure, at least for a time the voracious needs and wants of
their living makers and users . . . [who], their ever changing nature notwith-
standing, can retrieve their sameness, that is their identity by being related
OCTOBER
to the same chair and the same table.” 3 Similarly, homes were not to be
2002 momentary. Yet twentieth-century kitchens, by preference and idiom, were
VOL. 43
modern. As modern, momentary they were, a cluster of design and tech-
nological resolutions fetched up as definitive, contemporary, timely, and
thereby transitory. This asymmetry between the kitchen and the home did
cultural work.
We might feature kitchens as supporting characters in the twentieth-
century drama about home and nation, articulating contradictions and
heterogeneities that kept the main action moving along. For modern
kitchens have been about bodies, both the bodies who have worked in them
and the bodies this work was to produce. Kitchens have been about tech-
nologies, both technologies these workers, by tradition, recognized they
needed and technologies they, for political or commercial purposes, were
being informed they must need. And kitchens have been aesthetic state-
ments, of both the homely and the mechanical. The camouflage required
for this conflation in the 1930s took Loewy, Teague, and Dreyfuss to the top
of the industrial designer profession, and diminished the case designers
who were their progeny to mere decorators in the eyes their functionalist
colleagues. Nickles complicates this older story by showing how the remade
form of the refrigerator offered American purchasers a new way to think
about class relations. Kitchens have fluctuated as denominated domains
between places of production and consumption, appropriately singular or
manifestly multiple in their functions. Whether the kitchen to best serve the
needs of the family would be private, communal, or domestic has been a
political question. Van Slyck shows how this question was reconsidered,
first opening and then walling off the technologically aided work of the
kitchen from youngsters’ experience of summer camp. The pantomime of
citizenship to be performed in the kitchen has been variously, and often
contradictorily, about women’s rights, family values, the productivity of
women’s activity inside the home and of women’s employment outside it.
Bix traces the limits home economics teachers negotiated on the techno-
logical adeptness they transmitted to their students, and through them into
the gendered culture of competence beyond. The highly capitalized kitchen
has been an affirmation of affluence and thus superiority in cold war poli-
tics, a sign of successful income redistribution in European socialist states,
and the tiller, through malleable and responsive spending on bulky con-

3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), 137.

660
 PARRK|KModern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

sumer durables, of Keynesian economic politics nominally and instrumen-

tally distinguishable as conservative, liberal, and socialist.
Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky is said to have invented the modern
kitchen.4 Her Frankfurt kitchen, modeled on the railway car galley, was des-
ignated by the modernist architects Ernst May and Alfred Loos to be fitted
into the housing estates of ebbing Weimar Germany and vanguardist Red
INTRO-
Vienna. The Frankfurt kitchens were part of a civilian reestablishment proj-
ect in the wake of World War I, integral to housing initiatives designed to DUCTION
relocate and energize their residents as productive workers and engage
Germans, as democratic citizens, in the better world of their new republic.
The kitchens of Red Vienna were to be the template for the new sexual divi-
sion of labor that early female socialist thinkers such as Alexandra Kolontai
foretold.
Similar influences informed the planning and regulation of Swedish
kitchens in the thirties and forties. Sweden came comparatively late to
urban life and to mass housing for industrial workers. Architects and
designers showed small functionalist kitchens on the Frankfurt model at
the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. For Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, leading
social democrats by this time and frequently away in America, such func-
tionalist flats were the solution to the population question, with minimal
kitchens above and commissary or cooperative kitchens on the ground
floor, so that families might be out to work and school by day and return
for evenings of shared leisure unmarred by the stress of meal preparation.
As Van Slyck shows, by the 1940s the goals of American camp organizers
were similar: separate the socialization of young people from the work of
making meals. Dolores Hayden has noted like aspirations built into com-
missary kitchens for city apartments and suburban neighborhoods in the
United States earlier in the century, although the class constituencies and
gender aspirations scripted in America were quite different than those the
Myrdals had in mind for Sweden.
The Myrdals’ kitchens, and their resolution of the ambiguities between
the good home and good nation, prompted a revolt while still on the draw-
ing board. A strong industrial Sweden would need workers, which in
Sweden, a country of emigration, implied working city couples in homes
where they could welcome and enjoy children. Instead, concluded the
Swedish Housewives Union, the Cooperatives, the State Domestic Science
Service, and organized social democratic women, the Frankfurt kitchens
would encourage a “birth strike.” These groups argued for spaces and tech-
nologies to enhance the dignity of the homemaker and domestic work,
including a kitchen large enough to include a large table (now recognizable

4. Emma O’Kelly, “Galley Girl,” Wallpaper, July/August 2000, 133–34. On the kitchens
of Red Vienna, see Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–34 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999), and “Exhibiting Ideas,” Journal of Architectural History 57, no. 3 (1998).

661
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U LT U R E

on both sides of the North Atlantic as the kitchen table of IKEA catalogs),
one end up against the wall to save space, where the modern family could
gather as Swedes traditionally had come together at the end of the day. This
constituency prevailed in the Population Commission that reported in the
late 1930s.
During the years of the Second World War the position of the house-
OCTOBER
wife social democrats consolidated in a new women-run and state-sup-
2002 ported organization, the Home Research Institute (HRI). This group turn-
VOL. 43
ed to the technical examples of the home economics research units in
United States land grant colleges, among them Iowa State. The HRI hired
engineering staff and equipped laboratories to study the bodies of women
as they engaged in the labor processes of the home. From this base they
designed kitchen cabinetry and floor plans and then turned to redesigning
the machines and tools of the kitchen to rationalize the work of the room.
These included stoves with rims along the top high enough to hold mighty
spills, solid burners that were easy to clean, washers that saved water and
soap by tumbling rather than agitating clothes, knives with handles at an
angle from the blade to make chopping easier. Their standards, until the
late 1950s, were the specifications to which Swedish firms, often in muted
protest, manufactured.5 The Home Research Institute articulated a dis-
course of design and technology for kitchen work, stabilized around the
body of the contemporary Swedish woman. Their interventions gave mate-
rial form to a more conservative ideology of Swedish home life than the
Myrdals either lived or espoused. Through the Home Research Institute,
the Swedes, until the late 1950s, used the knowledge they gained at U.S.
land grant colleges to forge a substantially different relationship with
domestic appliance manufacturers. Whereas Bix shows the faculty as expert
interpreters of technological change cautiously tending the boundaries
between household equipment studies and engineering at Iowa State,
beginning in the early 1940s the home economists at the Home Research
Institute set the industry standards for Sweden for two decades.
The relationships among kitchen design, technology, and work emerged
differently in Britain in the interwar years. After World War I the concern to
increase female employment in the engineering industries led to the found-
ing of the Women’s Engineering Society, a group funded by what their his-
torian calls “society women,” keen to make more places for women as
salaried insiders in manufacturing firms. The good home/good nation
ambiguity led in 1924 to the formation of an offspring of this group, the
Electrical Association for Women (EAW), concerned from the perspective of
energy providers to electrify more homes and make the products of electri-
cal goods manufacturers better (as product users defined the term). The

5. Their bulletin of 1951 is a good example of this work: Hemmens Forskningsin-

stitut, Arsberattelse 1951 (Stockholm, 1951).

662
 PARRK|KModern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

EAW also borrowed from the technical and kinesthetic work of the Amer-
ican land grant schools. Their British publications reconstituted traditional
domestic labor on a scientific foundation. After circulating questionnaires
among their members about currently available models, they developed rec-
ommendations for manufacturers. Through exhibitions they publicized the
model kitchens being fitted into new council flats, and in 1935 planned and
INTRO-
equipped an all-electric model house in Bristol. From 1933 they ran an
Electrical Housecraft School, which certified the product knowledge of DUCTION
teachers and demonstrators for electrical appliance manufacturers.6 After
World War II some Englishwomen served in a similar advisory capacity to
the Council of Industrial Design and its successors.7 With the founding of
the Consumers Association and their publication, Which, in the late 1950s,
the British pattern came to resemble the American form Bix finds among
the faculty at Iowa State. Professionally trained home economists advised
industry and took jobs with private and public utilities. Consumers sought
advice on how to best fare in the market through the publications of their
own organization. British middle-class and professional women were con-
sulted by electrical utilities, municipal councils, manufacturers, and con-
sumer groups in a period when British kitchens became more laborsaving
and energy consuming. The authoritative voices over kitchen design and
technology in Britain remained the council architects and manufacturers.
In Germany, Austria, and Sweden social housing also was common, and
here too kitchens, provided to tenants fitted and equipped, were by tech-
nology and design soundly in the domain of local housing authorities.
Nowhere in western Europe after World War II was this relationship more
pervasive than in the Netherlands, where bombing had destroyed much
housing. Half of the residential stock built in Holland between 1946 and
1972 was commissioned by housing associations and municipalities. By
1992, 44 percent of all housing in the Netherlands was in the “social rent
sector,” three times the percentage in West Germany, Denmark, and France,
and twice that in the United Kingdom. Here, then, may be the European
test case for the question, “how much that comes in through the open
kitchen door is welcome?”
Wiebe Bijker and Karin Bijsterveld have tackled a variation of this query
in “Women Walking through Plans: Technology, Democracy and Gender
Identity,” an article that appeared in a recent issue of this journal.8 Their
question—to what extent can “nonexpert groups . . . influence the techno-
logical building of society?”—also focuses on the traffic through the open
kitchen door. The Dutch route toward an appropriate design for an average

6. Suzette Worden, “Powerful Women: Electricity in the Home, 1919–40,” in The

View from the Interior, ed. Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham (London, 1989), 128–47.
7. John Martin and George W. Smith, The Consumer Interest (London, 1968), 28–30.
8. Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 485–515.

663
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U LT U R E

kitchen differs from that Shelley Nickles finds for the United States in
“‘Preserving Women,’” for the Dutch approached the question not through
the market but through consultative nongovernmental organizations.
The first Women’s Advisory Committees on Housing (VACs) were
established in 1946, and they exist now in more than half of Dutch munic-
ipalities. Their members self-identify as housewives, which for our pur-
OCTOBER
poses makes their concerns an instance of the good home/good nation dia-
2002 logue as well. The VAC are voluntary, self-appointed, and, except for their
VOL. 43
coordinating umbrella organization, without state funding. What authority
could Dutch women exert from this location over the design, technology,
and work of the kitchen?
As Bijker and Bijsterveld point out, there was no consensus about the
emancipatory objectives of the kitchens Dutch functionalist architects
designed. The same irresolution Dolores Hayden described in the Ameri-
can experiments characterized Dutch kitchen history, as Swedish social
democratic women were in their turn divided over whether reformed
kitchens were to free wives for paid employment, to increase their willing-
ness to bear and raise children, or both. In England, the genteel women
who offered advice to the equipment manufacturers in their social circles
were, by class position and marital connection, more likely to ratify than to
refuse proposals firms asked them to consider. In most of northern Europe,
the female voices involved in the kitchen debate were those of relatively
economically secure volunteers, akin in their class position to the faculty at
Iowa State.
Then consider: if technology is by association gendered masculine and
public, in what circumstances can women’s voices be heard through the
open kitchen door? In the United States, the articles in this issue argue, this
influence was exerted by the faculty and students of home economics
departments, by the women who debated with manufacturers trucking new
refrigerator models through their neighborhoods, and by the householders
who in-directed the market through their purchasing decisions.
Bijker and Bijsterveld conclude that the VACs have been able to effect
concrete, incremental improvements that are “not less relevant because
they are small,” changes akin to peacekeeping strategies, which accommo-
date and do not engage the architects’ foundational principles. The VACs
reinscribe the modernist functionalist kitchen, built to sustain the Dutch
nuclear family in fixed gender roles, while making these kitchens better
workplaces by successfully claiming attention for the daily, practical, expe-
rience-based knowledge that is the volunteers’ acknowledged sphere of
expertise. They have embraced the inclusivity of their mainstream political
culture, “closing in” the modern functionalist design and technology to
facilitate their own culturally specific kitchen labor and, in the process,
hardening and proliferating forms that close out other gender scripts for
domestic work. They successfully make their own performance in the

664
 PARRK|KModern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

kitchen more elegant. Yet their initiatives in these kitchens make anomalous
those, more numerous as the twentieth century closed, who did not live,
cook, or eat as members of nuclear families.
The Canadian case for the kitchen as modern and thus the site for per-
sistent and domestically exceptional renovation shares many of these ideo-
logical elements: the household variations of industrial engineering prac-
INTRO-
tice promulgated at U.S. home economics departments; the fuel providers’
concern to increase their customer base with promises of laborsaving, DUCTION
energy-hungry tools; and the appliance manufacturers’ complementary
drive to sell their own wares. But social housing was really a national pri-
ority in Canada only in the 1960s and 1970s, and outside Quebec the
Canadian state has focused on immigration rates rather than birth rates to
achieve population growth. The other notable elements of Canadian polit-
ical economy that kept the kitchen door open and the kitchen in question
were a harsh northern climate, in which much work in the trades was sea-
sonal, and a resource-based economy struggling with a small population to
create and sustain a secondary manufacturing base. These public policy
issues were at work in the kitchen.
“Don’t wait for spring, do it now” was a jingle common in public serv-
ice advertisements broadcast in 1950s Canada. Enlisting householders in
campaigns to reduce unemployment in the construction and materials sec-
tor began in the mid-1930s. The Home Improvement Plan (HIP) provided
low-interest loans to tempt householders to modernize their homes. The
gendered remedies for unemployment in Canada during the depression of
those years resembled those in the United States: public works and publicly
assisted employment for men, ideological and regulatory disincentives to
female labor force participation.9 The HIP was sold through publicly and
privately financed advertising images of middle-class women in heels and
fashionable dress confronting the multilegged fragments of the interwar
kitchen and contemplating the gleaming, unified, modern lab that might
succeed it—more sanitary, more efficient, more standardized. The HIP
kitchen also shared the legacy of Frankfurt. It was of sole rather than mul-
tiple purpose—as its historians observe, “small, well-ordered and tidy . . .
stripped of its social functions and designed solely as a site of work.” 10

9. For the United States, see Winifred D. Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family
Values, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), and Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of
Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America
(New York, 2001). For Canada, see Ruth Roach Pierson, “Gender and the Unemployment
Insurance Debates in Canada,” Labour/Le Travail 25 (spring 1990), and James Struthers,
No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State, 1914–1941 (Tor-
onto, 1983).
10. Margaret Hobbs and Ruth Roach Pierson, “A Kitchen that Wastes No Steps . . .
Gender, Class and the Home Improvement Plan, 1936–40,” Histoire sociale/Social History
21 (May 1988): 8–38.

665
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U LT U R E

The industrial revolution, though presaged in the National Policy days

of the late nineteenth century, really came to Canada after World War II.
Wartime breakthroughs in the processing of aluminum and wood prod-
ucts, particularly the manufacture and thermal-electric bending of ply-
wood, set the agenda of the National Industrial Design Council. The NIDC
was founded in the late 1940s as an imagined twin for secondary manufac-
OCTOBER
turing of the National Research Council, begun in the 1920s to serve the
2002 needs of primary industry. Publicly assisted industrial design initiatives in
VOL. 43
Canada soon focused on product development, to broaden the markets for
Canadian materials and increase the number and strength of firms. The
policy goal was to employ more Canadians making domestic goods for sale
into national, and eventually international, particularly U.S., markets. The
Design Council, which early included an advisory committee of volunteers
from the Consumers Association of Canada (CAC), held competitions and
exhibitions to publicize design innovations in the consumer goods sector,
including household appliances. The story of this asymmetrical collabora-
tion is close to the British and Dutch histories, despite spirited early
attempts from some CAC leaders to put forward the Swedish Home Re-
search Institute path.11 By the early 1980s the CAC was a conservative, mar-
ket-attentive organization, and design initiatives had been absorbed back
into product engineering units of consumer goods manufacturers, now
principally with headquarters in the United States and assembly plants
north of the border.
We have then, across national boundaries, a commonly open kitchen
door. The histories are diverging and mutually informing. The relation-
ships among design, technology, and work in the kitchen are multiple.
American home economists, by measurement and movement studies, sta-
bilized the body at work in the kitchen as female and northern European.
Functionalist architects established a small, single-purpose room, which
borrowed design influences from the railway car galley and the laboratory,
as the prototype for the modern kitchen. The first excision did not become
an issue in dispute. In an industrial culture unambiguously embracing
mass production, manufacturing constraints required that the bodies of
tool users be standardized. In this, unpaid kitchen workers would be no
exception. The second excision stabilized meal preparation as a discreet and
specialized fueling function, and featured the family as labor force partici-
pants sustaining the social and economic infrastructure of a strong nation.
This excision was perpetually in dispute, and the functional irresolution
between good home and good nation remained, even as the proportion of

11. John B. Collins, “Design for Use, Design for the Millions: Proposals and Options
for the National Industrial Design Council, 1948–1960” (master’s thesis, Carleton Uni-
versity, Ottawa, 1986); Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Econ-
omic in the Postwar Years (Toronto, 1999).

666
 PARRK|KModern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

mothers in labor forces around the North Atlantic increased. This ambigu-
ity remains inscribed in the material form of kitchens to this day, partly
because the female advisors to architects and equipment manufacturers
still have the abridged technical authority Bix describes. We renovate
kitchens more than any other room in the home because heterosexual, fair-
skinned couples, broadly ratified as the fictive citizens of western social or
INTRO-
liberal democracies, concede their kitchens alone, as the most highly capi-
talized part of their domestic space, to authorities whose commercial and DUCTION
economic policy priorities are implicitly, if not explicitly, unwelcome in the
rest of the house.

667