The following is the transcript of 'Electricity is the modern Lincoln, General Electric is the modern emancipator!': Electrical appliances and race in the 20th-century American Home," a talk I gave at the University of Roehampton on 28 October, 2020, as part of the English and Creative Writing Department's series, "Literature and Race."
The ideas I am presenting in this talk came out of the research for my forthcoming book, All-Electric Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020. In this book, I examine how US writers since the Second World War have engaged with the racialised, gendered, and class-based meanings attributed to appliances by advertisers, home economics experts, social reformers, utilities providers, and governments from the late nineteenth century onwards. I show how writers introduced appliances into their narratives to make particular points about gender, race, class, American identity, and/or the changing nature of “home”. My research has in fact unearthed a whole gamut of meanings attributed to these objects between the late nineteenth century and today, and my basic argument is that:
(a) the history of appliances in the United States is inextricable from the history of US race, gender, and class relations—not to mention the history of US “soft power”, i.e. the way the US promoted the so-called American way of life to the rest of the world and
(b) US writers have long engaged with this fraught history. There is a rich tradition of what I call appliance writing. And that tradition is really important and has enduring ramifications.
As a warning, several of the images I’ll be showing are extremely racist.
Today I am focussing on one aspect of appliance history—race—but as you’ll notice, unpicking this aspect from issues of gender and class is actually quite difficult. The gendered, racialised, and class-based meanings of appliances are in fact mutually constitutive. I’ll be spending the first part of this talk discussing the historical roots of this mutual constitution. In the last part I make a leap to 2020 however to apply these ideas to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s music video, #WAP, or Wet Ass Pussy (this isn’t a still from the video—it’s just a brilliant image of Cardi B in her grandmother’s kitchen). I’ll be showing how knowledge of the racialised dimensions of the “all-electric” home, and the history of domestic servitude in the United States, can disclose important, hidden, aspects of this (to my mind) ingenious video and song lyrics. I read the video’s depiction of Black women frolicking in a white mansion as a radical upending of the power dynamics of the Southern plantation house and a twentieth-century American home long codified as white. So I’ll be showing why the emancipatory aspects of this song about Black women’s sexual pleasure substantially hinges on a rupture with conventional notions of domesticity.
The story of appliances starts in the second half of the nineteenth century, which came to be known as the “Electric Age” due to the proliferation of electrical inventions it spawned. In this period, commentators argued that slavery would eventually be replaced by the technologies that electricity made possible (Nye, 247-8). These ideas continued to hold sway long after the abolition of slavery. The first domestic appliances in the early twentieth century were originally marketed to upper-middle-class households as both liberators of women’s time and energy—and of course by women they meant white women—and as replacements for human labour. A study of electricity consumption in the 1920s thus described electricity as the “‘willing slave’” of any “‘household operation’” (qtd. in Nye, 314). Compliant electrical power could replace unruly Black labour power.
Appliance ads in the first three decades of the twentieth century are rife with references to modernity and efficiency on the one hand and the so-called “servant problem” on the other—that is, the shortage of domestic workers. While in the industrialised European countries this shortage was a result of the growth of factory work, in the US the “servant problem” referred to the exodus of white working-class women in the Northern cities from domestic service to industrial and white-collar jobs, and the conterminous influx of Black women migrants from the South during the Great Migration. The servant problem in the US, as scholars such as Victoria Wolcott have shown, was in fact about the shortage of white servants—and the anxieties of white middle- and upper-class households about the reliability, efficiency, and “civilisation” of Black servants (Wolcott, 115).These anxieties were paradoxically amplified by the efforts of reformers in Northern cities who sought, throughout the 1920s and 30s, to counter negative perceptions of Black female migrants from the South by training them to use washing machines and vacuum cleaners, thereby transforming them into good workers, good housewives, and “civilised”citizens, even as actual ownership of such objects remained out of reach (Hay, 153; Wolcott, 84). The “electrical servants” promoted in appliance ads in this period effectively promised to do away with these issues.
Note that Black people are entirely absent from appliance ads in the 1910s and 1920s: these ads sell a fantasy of whiteness, aristocratic finery, and leisure. The ads in this period emphasised the distance between the housewife, who would merely direct her servants’ work, and the gadget. The women in them are often in evening clothes or dressed to go out, and children rarely feature. One has to read around these images to detect the racial subtext.
Race becomes a prominent motif instead in appliance ads of the 1930s. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, appliance ownership and domestic electrification more broadly were reframed as a democratic right, and as evidence of the State’s commitment to elevating the quality of life of all Americans, through policies that extended credit for appliance purchases and subsidised the electrical wiring of all new homes. “All Americans” again meant “white people”. Black Americans were excluded from these policies (Tobey, 156; 165; 197-206). Appliance ownership did not become commonplace in Black households until the end of the 1950s (Tobey, 165; Mock, 73-108). (There’s a really moving moment in James Baldwin’s novel, Just Above My Head, where the narrator interrupts an excruciating account of his childhood friend’s trauma to note that refrigerators were uncommon in Harlem in 1949). The image of an electrically connected nation whose wires linked cities to farms and East Coast to West, rendering modernity available “to all” was thus implicitly racialised. And access to “modern electric living” became one further way for white working-class households to distinguish themselves from Black households, and to position themselves as part of the white middle class. Indeed, as Shelley Nickles has shown, it was in the 1930s that the yellow tinge of the first refrigerators was replaced by DuPont’s “sparkling white” “Dulux” refrigerator finish. For Nickles, this marks the moment that the refrigerator itself came to be associated with whiteness:
““At a time when the middle class […] feared slipping to working-class status, and when popular culture portrayed the working class, immigrants, and nonwhites as having lower standards of cleanliness,” the purchase of a white refrigerator and “ability to keep the refrigerator white and devoid of dirt” both “suggested that women could maintain themselves and their family’s standards through thrift and hygiene” (Nickles, 705).
Such an association was based on “the conflation of non-white skin with dirt” codified in the eighteenth century to justify the expansion of slavery (Zimring, 137). By whiteness, here, both I and Shelley Nickles are referring to a socially constructed category—which also goes some way towards explaining why other groups in the United States have been historically treated as “not white.” My focus in this talk is on the representation (or non-representation) of Black people—and Black women—but I want to make clear that I am approaching these as social constructions rather than biological realities.
I would add that the conflation of appliances with whiteness and modernity also becomes a way in this period to promote middle- and upper-middle class households’ reduction of their domestic staff as a choice, rather than an economic necessity. The references to race that begin to appear in appliance ads of the 1930s, and the sudden appearance, too, of Black women servants, function to reassure white households that there is someone to whom they are still superior. These ads have a placating effect that serve to re-inscribe ideas about whiteness, femininity, class, and plenitude than in turn reverberate across the media landscape of later decades and whose echoes can be felt even today.
The ads I have recovered over the course of my research render these ideas explicit.
The most extreme example of this trope that I have found is the ad I quoted in the title of this talk:
The slogan for this ad is “You shall NOT enslave our WOMEN! Free them! With the 10 BEST HOME SERVANTS.” The ad copy then proclaims that the last frontier for human rights is that of housewives’ rights. It invokes the end of slavery, and—this is interesting—the passing of laws limiting the number of hours that women can work. And it explicitly positions the brand as a vehicle of emancipation. Now this is interesting for all kinds of other reasons, including as an early example of what Anna McCarthy calls the “alchemy of goodwill” that runs through corporate communication strategies across the 20th century, and that involves the corporation positioning itself as benevolent, a bastion of morality, and as important as the state (McCarthy, 38). This is an early instance of brand personification, wherein the wizened, bespectacled old man stands in for General Electric, Abraham Lincoln, and Uncle Sam, thus conflating corporate and state power.
But the ad also re-inscribes particular ideas about domestic servitude and unpaid labour. Firstly, the reference to labour laws is telling. As labour historians and historians of housework can attest, the labour laws passed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that purported to protect children and women’s health were also aimed at defending men’s wages (since women and children received lower pay than men). The rise of home economics, the application of scientific management to the home to promote the intrinsic value of housework, and the promotion of electric servants as emblems of modernity were as much a response to the need to keep white working-class and lower-middle-class women at home as they were an effort to appease middle- and upper-middle class anxieties about the shortage of white servants. The version of history this ad is promoting is thus very much of a piece with these decades-long efforts.
More importantly, the ad both invokes and suppresses the spectre of race. Firstly, it appropriates the language of abolition to position the purchase of appliances as a feminist act that will save women from both drudgery and the nuisance of Black help. In doing so, the ad assumes the category of “women,” or as the ad calls them, “human females,” to contain only white women. In doing so, it follows a long tradition: as bell hooks notes in Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981), Black women have long been excluded from the category of “woman.” The women’s suffrage movement in the US was characterised by the dehumanisation of Black women, whose historical sexual exploitation by their male owners and, later, male employers, was long considered a threat to the white nuclear family, nation and race. Secondly, in positioning white housewives as slaves to their housework and General Electric appliances as “the 10 best home servants,” the ad at once invokes and erases the material history of those who were actual slaves until very recently, who now work in menial jobs—and whom, the ad suggests, can be replaced by a commodity that is as good if not better than they were. If, as a number of scholars in critical race studies and material culture studies have argued, the first commodity was the slave, then this ad is tacitly offering white housewives a way out of treating once-slaves-now-servants as employees. It is offering a way to avoid engaging with Black people entirely.
The of the retrograde Black servant in turn surfaces in other ads from this period. Thus Belden’s 1936 ad for durable electrical cords features a gross caricature of an angry Black servant (huge lips, handkerchief, hoop earrings, and heavyset figure) tangled up in a vacuum cleaner cord and suffering from “corditis”—a “dangerous disease” resulting in “severe mental irritation and violent nervous disorders among electrical appliance users.” The ad capitalised on the entrenched belief that Black servants were too feral to be allowed to use appliances unsupervised:
This notion of the appliance as contributing to the civilisation of retrograde Black women is apparent in Kelvinator’s 1935 ad, “Four Refrigerators in One Cabinet” (1935). Here the white woman of the house explains the attributes of her new refrigerator to her mammy-like Black servant. The overlaying of an image of the adoring servant on the bottom left corner of a larger image of her white employer conveys the former’s lower status to both employer andappliance, while appealing to antebellum fantasies. An ad for a General Electric washing machine goes even further: here is the Black servant, portrayed once more as uneducated and a bit dim, crowing at how much easier her job is (Incidentally, I’ve established that this ad is the basis for the racist washing machine ads in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which was based on the period he worked in General Electric’s publicity department).
Crucially, the Black servant in these last three ads, like the spectre of the slave in the first ad I mentioned, also functions to reassure the white consumer of their own status, and education. By equating fear or suspicion of appliances with a Blackness understood to be retrograde, these companies countered any uncertainty, intimidation, or fear their white customers might harbour toward these objects. Domestic electrification in the 1930s was still new—and suspect. These ads deploy Blackness to render untenable anything but the wholehearted embrace of domestic technology. Because to be suspicious of that technology would not be “white.”
These ideas are rife in the literary texts and biographical anecdotes I examine in my book. I don’t have time to examine them in depth, but I want to mention one. This is Toni Morrison’s account of appliances in her 2017 essay, “The Work You Do, the Person You Are.” Here Morrison describes her after-school job as a cleaner when she was 11 or 12 years old:
"All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with […] a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine […] I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire."
Morrison reveals appliances to be co-conspirators in the social construction of a domestic space replete with technologies available only to white people. Meanwhile her focus on relations between a woman servant of colour and white female employer complicates the straightforward narrative of many white first- and second-wave feminists, whose focus on patriarchy’s oppression of white housewives overlooked the role that white women themselves played in maintaining racial hierarchies—and, indeed, the ways in which dehumanising Black help provided a means for white women to assert at home the authority they were denied in public. As Saidiya Hartman describes in her (archive-based) speculative history of early twentieth-century Black American women, “wage labor, servitude, improper guardianship, failed maternity, chance coupling … marked the difference” between the lived experiences of Black and white women.
While the imagery of Belden and Kelvinator’s ads abated in the post-war era, it was replaced by another trope: the invocation of Black people’s progress.
For example, Frigidaire’s first ad to feature a Black model, which appeared in the June 1961 issue of Ebony, showed a (light-skinned) Black woman cleaning her “Pull ‘n Clean Oven” juxtaposed with a call-out image of the same woman wearing a turban on her head and scrubbing a different oven’s interior. The ad thus posited the Frigidaire oven as the purveyor of freedom from both the drudgery of cleaning one’s oven, and a history of domestic servitude. Just to be clear – there are no images of white housewives with handkerchiefs covering their heads, let alone doing housework on their hands and knees, until the end of the 1970s, when advertisers clumsily attempt to speak to the concerns of second-wave feminists.
A similar tone-deafness is apparent in “Today’s toasters put their best face forward,” an ad Toastmaster ran exclusively in Ebony in 1962, and whose celebration of the brand’s new toaster design featuring “Controls ‘up front,’ where they rightfully belong” gestured to the achievements of the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956).
So far, I’ve shown how domestic appliances were both explicitly and implicitly framed as replacements for Black female labour, and emblems of white middle-class sophistication. Appliance literacy was a further means to demarcate white women from Black women. Well into the 1960s, the “all-electric” home was equated with whiteness. Ads for the “all-electric home”, I have argued, contributed to the erasure of Black bodies—the suppression of the history of first unwaged and then underpaid Black labour on which the American home was premised. Appliance advertising until the late 1960s in turn contributed to the social construction of American femininity as inherently white.
Now with the time that remains I want to make an imaginative leap to 2020, and from print advertising to the music video and lyrics of #WAP, which I mentioned earlier.
For a scholar of American homes, housework, and electricity, what stands out most about Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s depictions of female sexual pleasure is less their explicit discussion of female genitalia and the biological manifestations of pleasure—wetness—than the way these descriptions involve the subversion of the tropes I have just discussed. Put differently, where critics have—understandably—focussed on the video’s references to videos like Britney Spears’ Toxic, J-Lo’s Love Don’t Cost a Thing, Sir Mix-A Lot’s Baby Got Back, Nicki Minaj's Anaconda, the 2001 remake of Lady Marmalade, or, like, every Gwen Stefani video ever made, I’m struck by the video’s placement of Black women in relation to the opulent home at the video’s centre.
The white mansion populated by Black women in elegant and sexually provocative evening dress, like courtesans, bears more than a trace of the slave-owning plantation and the brothel.
But there are neither white people here, nor men. While there is a transactional dimension to the sex described in the lyrics—Cardi B. is expecting expensive gifts—the source of those gifts, which the lyrics imply is male, is invisible. While the lyrics focus on heterosexual sex, the absence of men and relations between women implies something distinctly queer. More to the point, while the lyrics repeatedly refer to male genitalia and various kinds of sex acts, the video itself paradoxically seems less concerned with sex than with the Black female body’s unapologetic occupation and control of space, and, in particular, of opulent domestic spaces that have historically been associated with whiteness. In this, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s very size is noteworthy: these are curvaceous women, whose revealing costumes and heavy makeup emphasise the very features that were used to degrade and dehumanise Black people via caricatures like the Mammy figure, which I mentioned earlier, and the Jezebel—an overly sexualised Black woman portrayed as corrupting white men (for more on this, I would recommend reading the work of PhD student Renée Landell [@Nay_Landell], who is writing her thesis on the Jexebel, the Mammy, the Mandingo Buck, and the Sambo). The video of #WAP reclaims these features.
#WAP is also distinctly preoccupied with defining what kinds of things the Black female body in these spaces will and will not agree to do: she’ll “cream” and “scream” with pleasure but “I don’t cook, I don’t clean.” Meanwhile the refrain, “There’s some whores in this house,” both renders explicit and re-frames the historical sexual objectification and exploitation of Black women in the white home. Where the Black female slave was frequently subjected to rape, the sex in this white house is consensual—if it even happens (personally, I think it’s significant that for all its explicitness, this video only features intimations of sexuality). Long vilified as a leaky, filthy vessel, its anatomy historically the source of incredulity and eugenicist experimentation, the Black female body is reframed here as endowed with agency, a site of pleasure, and a source of authority. Indeed, the lines “get a bucket and a mop / for this wet ass pussy” subvert the historical association of the female body with disgust and shame, while simultaneously placing white hegemonic culture in a position of servitude. These lines—which I should mention, I have been singing to myself since the song was released—effectively put that culture on notice. The Black female body is transformed, here, from vessel for white male pleasure and servant to white women to a recipient of pleasure, a source of adulation, awe, and respect. She will orgasm, and you will clean up the by-products.
Even Kylie Jenner’s much-maligned cameo, it seems to me, has a part to play. Many Black women viewers were angered by Jenner’s appearance, because they saw it as fundamentally undermining the video’s emancipatory aspects. The Kardashians, for these women, have long exploited Black identity politics for profit—and the physical attributes they sell—the bodacious bottom, full lips, and so on—are the same ones historically used to debase and dehumanise Black women, as exemplified by the Mammy trope I mentioned earlier. My colleague Chisomo Kalinga notes that “there is an important discussion about who gets to represent the grossly exaggerated features of a Black woman: it’s emancipatory when it’s done by Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion, but exploitative when it’s done by the Kardashian-Jenners.”
From my perspective, Jenner’s presence alerts us to the fact that the deconstruction of television’s all-white American family and all-American white house is already underway, as exemplified by the pageantry of the decade-old Keeping Up with the Kardashians—however problematic that pageantry may be.The dream of the “all-electric” kitchen and white family that replaced the dream of Antebellum America is, itself, fraying at the edges (the image below is not of Jenner, but of one of her sisters--but I think it exemplifies the kind of shift that I'm talking about).
Ultimately, if—as I think—the basement in #WAP is a bizarre, and very possibly unintentional, conflation of the sexualised Black woman servant and the appliances that replaced her, then it is the most radical engagement with the “all-electric” home I have yet encountered. It reflects, refracts, and bends a series of myths about the American home in popular media, injecting the domestic space with an eros—dare I say an electricity?—of which mainstream popular culture has long sought to divest it. In rapidly oscillating between the mechanised basement of gyrating women in uniform and the luxurious upstairs, the video seems to communicate something about the emergence of both repressed desires and repressed histories, and to suggest that the unearthing of once-invisible labour might be made gloriously, consensually, and affirmatively, erotic.
#WAP seeks to make us at home in the dream of Black female desire. It positions the vagina itself as a hospitable place. And it offers an alternative dreamscape to an American dream long codified as white. The Black female body and female sexuality are shown to be uncontainable, indeed, impossible to mop up—and the Black woman is portrayed as one who transcends all of the categories to which she was historically confined. Ultimately, in foregrounding both the mechanised foundations or underside of the white house and the luscious luxury above, #WAP insists we acknowledge the Black female labour on which the white American home has historically been premised, the conflation of the idea of the American home with whiteness, and the anarchic potential of Black female sexuality, when freed from the constraints of a white hegemonic culture or the shackles of a white heteronormative sexual economy. I would further hazard that given the video’s release not only in the midst of Black Lives Matters protests, but during an election year, the racialised meanings of this “white house” are, if not intentional, then certainly apt.*
*I am all the more convinced of this after seeing Ariana Grande's new music video, Positions, in which Grande similarly moves between the Oval Office and the White House kitchen, her flour-covered table, gyrations in front of the oven, and 1960s hairstyle recallingJessica Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sofia Loren's longstanding love affair with pasta, and the mythos of Jackie Kennedy.
Acknowledgements: Heartfelt thanks to Chisomo Kalinga for her help both on the chapter in "All-Electric" Narratives on Black American writing, and on this talk. Thanks as well to Alberto Fernandez-Carbajal and David Fallon for their suggestions, and to Alice Bennett, Stephen Shapiro, Kathy Mezei, Chiara Briganti, Benjamin George, Karina Jakubowicz, and Giorgio Mariani for their invaluable suggestions on the different drafts of the book manuscript. Thank you to Marc Ricard for alerting me to the kitchen imagery--or as he put it, "oven discourse," in Ariana Grande's video!
Works Cited:
B., Cardi and Megan Thee Stallion. "#WAP." Atlantic Records, 2020.
Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. New York: Penguin, 1994 (1979).
Grande, Ariana. "Positions." Republic Records, 2020.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton, 2019.
Hay, Vanessa. Unprotected Labor; Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina Press, 2011.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Landell, Renée. Twitter Thread 18 June 2020. https://twitter.com/Nay_Landell/status/1273641196016095232.
McCarthy, Anna. The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. New York: The New Press, 2010.
Meyers, Dave. Positions. Republic Records, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcYodQoapMg.
Mock, Michelle. “The Electric Home and Farm Authority, “Model T Appliances,” and the Modernization of the Home Kitchen in the South.” The Journal of Southern History 80. 1 (February 2014): 73-108.
Morrison, Toni. “The Work You Do, the Person You Are.” The New Yorker. June 5-12, 2017.
Nickles, Shelley. “‘Preserving Women’: Refrigerator Design as Social Process in the 1930s.” Technology and Culture 43.4 (Oct. 2002): 693-727.
Nickles, Shelley. Object Lessons: Household Appliance Design and the American Middle Class, 1920-1960. PhD thesis. U of Virginia, 1999.
Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Tilley, Colin. #WAP. Atlantic/Boy in the Castle Productions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmZlUdXVpHA.
Tobey, Ronald C. Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home. Berkeley: U of California Press,1996.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. London: Vintage, 2000 (1973).
Wolcott, Victoria W. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina Press, 200.
Zimring, Carl A. Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States. New York: NYU Press, 2015.
Ads Cited:
Belden Electrical Cords, “Is Your Vacuum Cleaner Crippled with Corditis,” Good Housekeeping (April 1936): 259.
Frigidaire, “Only Frigidaire offers the new 1961 ranges with the PULL ‘N CLEAN OVEN!” Ebony (February 1961): 24.
General Electric, “You Shall Not Enslave Our Women!” Woman’s Home Companion. 1933. 58-59.
General Electric, "I'se Sure Got a Good Job, Now!" Fortune (January 1937): N.P.
Kelvinator, “Yes, mam, that’s right. We sure do need four refrigerators!,” Good Housekeeping (June 1935): 176.
Toastmaster, “Today’s toasters put their best face forward” Ebony (November 1962): 62