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By Root 911 0

they were less expensive and easier to bring into their homes than larger ones. A refrigerator wasn't all that essential in a time when corner stores flourished—women shopped almost daily—and milkmen came to the door. As well, the advent of refrigerators spurred icebox manufacturers to improve their goods, and icemen stepped up their home delivery service. As for stoves, gas had already revolutionized cooking for city women. They didn't have to load fuel or tend a flame, and each individual burner operated at the turn of a switch, so they could use one burner at a time rather than heat up the entire stove for a can of soup or a tin of beans. Tin cans had come into their own by then, though there were no standards there either. As Christine Frederick observed, "A tin can is literally a dark, sealed mystery until it is opened."

Women knew what they wanted, and as Insull had foreseen, most purchased an electric iron first. The ads for them always showed a contented, well-dressed housewife effortlessly running an iron over her family's clothes. This was a stark contrast to the old chore, for there was no greater symbol of household drudgery than the "sad-iron"—"sad" in its archaic sense, meaning "heavy" or "dense." Traditional irons, made of cast metal, usually weighed four or five pounds, though some weighed as much as ten. The heavier the iron—and the more a woman pressed down on it—the more efficiently it worked. On ironing day, a woman would heat four, five, or six irons on her gas or wood stove. Before using one of the hot irons, she'd wipe the bottom clean, rub it with beeswax, and try it on an old piece of cloth to make sure it wasn't so hot that it would scorch the cloth. Then she'd press it onto a Sunday shirt, all the while taking care not to transfer any soot to the clean shirt and not to burn herself or the cloth. Once off the heat, the iron would cool down quickly, and in no time at all she'd have to return it to the stove and replace it with a hot one, which she would clean, wax, test ... Given the mountains of wrinkled cotton clothes and linens to be ironed, the job would take all day. And all the while, the woman would be standing next to the hot stove, even in high summer. One electric iron replaced every sad-iron in the household, and not only did it save time, but it was also far cleaner and more predictable, since the iron kept a constant temperature.

After irons, women most frequently purchased vacuum cleaners. Electricity was sometimes called "white coal," part of its allure being that all the attendant work and grime of production existed somewhere out of sight, so that people could believe the claim that "electricity, the unseen and the unknown, is absolutely clean." While electricity didn't produce the household smoke and residue of gaslight or kerosene lamps, what dirt there was now lay exposed by the increased candlepower of the tungsten filament, and dirt seen was dirt that had to be dealt with.

Woman has been a dirt eraser for so many ages with no relief in sight and no hope of anything better than beginning again at the moment of finishing.... [The vacuum cleaner] has a gigantic value in lifting the woman from her long and seemingly doomed relationship with dirt in the wrong place.... The machine that removes it, sucks it right out of the house altogether ... and is used in the average home about two hours a week. The old broom had at least a half day record. About the same intelligence is needed in the operation of each, although the cleaner requires far more thought and care to keep it in fitness and can be as successfully handled in a dinner or calling costume as with apron and cap.

It was a boon to all but the broom makers, who were taken to task by one advocate of sweeping as he made a desperate pitch for tradition: "They have let go, unchallenged, that sweeping is drudgery until the present generation thinks and talks of sweeping as menial labor, unpleasant and to be performed with reluctance. What a misconception! The medical profession in numerous instances advises women to take up housework,