Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [70]
In this new wilderness, nothing was more complicated than time. But time—though no less an obsession than cleanliness—being abstract and malleable, couldn't be confronted in a straightforward way. Within more affluent homes in the first decades of the twentieth century, women were often thought to have too much time on their hands. Ladies' Home Journal declared: "As a matter of fact, what a certain type of woman needs today more than anything else is some task that 'would tie her down.' Our whole social fabric would be the better for it. Too many women are dangerously idle." But these same women felt pressure to make the most of time. The domestic science movement had taken hold, and its proponents advocated efficiency in household chores, the same way Frederick Taylor, writing in 1911, advocated it for factories: "We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient or ill-directed movements ... leave nothing visible or tangible behind them."
Electric appliances could help women be more efficient with housework and brought with them a dream of liberation. But advocates of domestic science believed that efficient work in and of itself was a kind of liberation: "The cry of the home honored woman to be released from the dish pan, the tub and the kitchen range is answered. It is now a matter of how far she will go on the new road and what amount of culture she can and will take on in the performance of the common task. From a musical standpoint she can move as far as time, tune and rhythm can be made to play upon her daily routine. Artistically we find every effort being brought to bear upon the home to give it the atmosphere it deserves."
Yes, electric appliances saved time. Washing clothes in the age-old way had taken an entire day, traditionally "Blue Monday." With an electric washer, a woman could clean clothes at odd times throughout the week—a load here, a load there—in between other tasks. But for some women, the arrival of electricity ushered in more work than before. The availability of electric appliances put more pressure on women who had relied on domestic help or services to accomplish these tasks themselves. And although the labor of washing had disappeared, so had the community of it. Women who'd previously washed and hung their clothes in the backyard could gossip with hired help or neighbors as they did so. Electric washers and dryers confined them, often alone, to the house. The new efficiency also created new expectations. Ladies' Home Journal observed: "Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after the dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for a daily immersion. If our consciences don't prick us over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking."
Electric light was now but one of many things that made life easier and also seemed to define what it meant to be modern. These things were inextricably linked to the imagination reaching for the future—much like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, in the unquiet darkness, stretched toward the single green beacon in the bay who, as young Jimmy Gatz, sought to remake himself: "Rise from bed: 6.00 A.M.; Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling: 6:15–6:30; Study electricity etc.: 7:15–8:15."
Electric light, however, also brought its own particular changes into homes. Although gaslight had fixed the flame at specific points throughout each room, mantle gas lamps, like kerosene lamps, still provided a living warmth around which people could gather: "When the gas was turned on in the evening, the whole room was bathed in a soft yellow light," remembered one Englishwoman. "Round Aunt Ada's gas mantle was a gas shade made of long crystal glass drops that caught the light and danced like a thousand tiny stars." When gaslight and