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From Stoves To Juice Squeezers: Technology In The Modern Home, 1869-1999, Lauren Gallow

Lauren L. Gallow

“The factory and the household have only one factor in common, but a crucial one. Both must improve organization and curtail waste labor.” So Siegfried Giedion opens the chapter ‘Mechanization Encounters the Household’ in his 1948 seminal text, Mechanization Takes Command. Likening the household to the factory in its ever-present quest for organization and labor efficiency, Giedion places technological advancements at the center of this domestic mechanization, a progression that he identifies as beginning in the 1860s. Technology has played a central role in how writers from the late nineteenth century onwards have envisioned the home. Beginning with Catharine Beecher …