WHY HOME LIFE IS NO LONGER A CHORE
Kitchen appliances transformed the lives of women, freeing them from the shackles of daily housework. None more so than the trusty Kenwood Mixer which is so famous it has its own PhD study...
THREE months and several baking frenzies into lockdown, we now all know our kitchens better than ever. Particularly our household appliances, given the many extra hours we’ve spent cooking and cleaning, tackling previously put-off chores – a day spent washing curtains perhaps, or making and freezing meals for the week ahead.
The changes have echoes of the past when women were tied to the home by large stacks of ironing or the tedious ritual of washing day. So what happened to free those women from the shackles of housework?
The trusty old kitchen appliance is what, starting with the widespread installation of electricity and gas into homes in the 1920s and 30s.
“Power companies were keen to sell power to people, helping to fuel a need for household items, and government and local councils really pushed the installation,” explains Dr Helen Peavitt, curator of consumer technology at the Science Museum.
“Anyone getting a council house in the 1930s would have found that it came with a gas cooker or electric lighting for the first time.”
AS WOMEN were freed from domestic service and more housewives were now encouraged to do their own chores, a boom in time-saving and labour-free deviances followed. Washing machines replaced the old coppers, vacuum cleaners overtook carpet beaters and fridges were marketed as appliances for everyone rather than just for the rich.
But the real game changer was the Kenwood Mixer in the 1950s – still a staple feature of British kitchens today. In fact it proved so popular a PhD study costing £68,000 has been launched by Portsmouth University and London’s Science Museum to find out exactly why.
“There are a lot of people out there still using their Kenwoods from the 1970s,” says Dr Peavitt, one of the academics tied to the study. “There is a real nostalgia to them, they’ve been handed down in families and featured on many wedding lists throughout the 1950s and 1960s. They’re fabulous machines that were built to last and not break down.”
Here museum curator Helen reveals how this coveted kitchen aid changed our lives, along with four other household inventions that transformed once arduous chores into lightweight tasks:
THE KENWOOD MIXER: THE COMMIS CHEFS OF KITCHENS:
It can do anything – slicing and dicing, mixing, grinding coffee and mincing meat. There are all sorts of add-ons, even an ice-cream maker.
The beauty with the Kenwood is that you can still get most of the accessories these days and they’ve kept on supplying them so it increases the longevity of it. I can name on one hand the brands that we have that work that way.
Modern versions have remained broadly the same as industrial designer Kenneth Grange’s original version with a slightly squared-off look to it.
The Kenwood mixer is beautifully engineered and mendable but it’s easy to replace a part, as well as being easy and practical to use.That’s one of the things that comes out firmly if you see it demonstrated – which is how Kenwood’s founder, Kenneth Wood, got people to buy into it.
His quote “Eye appeal is buy appeal” is why our study is called “Eye appeal is buy appeal: The design, mediation and consumption of Kenwood’s kitchen appliances, 1947-2020”.
WASH COPPER TO THE WASHING MACHINE:
Automatic washing machines that function in the way they do today arrived in the 1930s but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that UK households got them in any great numbers.
The change was dramatic if you think about all the laundry tasks involved before that. Washing was previously back-breaking work that could take days. Out of all the tasks that women were asked to do this is the one they hated most, which is why there were so many songs about laundry time and clothes washing, so they could pep themselves up for the communal yet pretty tough activity.
Before washing machines arrived, women pumped and carried the water, sorted and soaked the clothes, chopped up soap, lit fires under the copper to boil the water, scrubbed the clothes, wrung them out and then hung them out to dry. That’s not to mention the ironing.
Out of a week, women probably spent two days sorting, washing and drying. On the downside, people now expect clothes to be cleaner so we tend to do more washes than we used to as it’s easier.
CARPET BEATER TO VACUUM CLEANER:
Prior to the arrival of vacuums, carpet beating was hard work. Rich households had maids to do these jobs. Poorer households just had a few rag rugs anyway. They put them over the washing line and hit them with a cane beater, broom
‘There’s a real nostalgia for Kenwoods. They’re fabulous machines that were built to last’
or a brush. Carpet beaters and later rolling carpet sweepers did the job pretty well. In fact, rolling carpet sweepers are making a slight comeback. But they were not nearly as efficient as a vacuum cleaner.
When these were introduced it changed spring-cleaning entirely. Before, whole households used to be vacated so everything could be cleaned from top to bottom, but it now became a regular job fitted around what people were doing.
Like the washing machine, vacuum cleaners took a while before they became affordable. The first one which worked well was British, invented in 1901 by engineer Hubert Cecil Booth.
It was huge – the size of a small car – and was horse-drawn, driven through the streets for hire. Booth brought it to rich households for a “vacuum party”. Pipework and tubing were fed through the windows and up through the house to clean it. Booth had previously designed suspension bridges and ferris wheels – including Vienna’s famous Riesenrad – and came up with the idea after watching a demonstration of John S. Thurman’s blown air design, which blew out dirt instead of sucking it up. He decided he could do something better.
He later designed smaller cleaners for the house but they were still whacking great machines. They got slightly smaller and more manageable around 1910 onwards. The first vacuum cleaner sold as the brand Hoover in the UK was in 1919.
CAST-IRON TO ELECTRIC IRON
There were “irons” before irons but they were cumbersome. The modern appliance is probably the only one still named after its form – a slug of iron. It weighed six to seven pounds and had to be heated over a fire or on a kitchen range. Charcoal was put into a hollow inside to heat it up. The alternative was a dangerous gas-flamed iron. They were hard to use and, if heated over a stove, left clothes sooty and smelling of smoke. Some of the old Viking irons were made out of slick stone or even out of glass.
Ironing used to be associated with status so if you pressed clothes it showed you were wealthy. It wasn’t something that many people had.
Electric irons were transformational in the late 1890s. They were smaller, more affordable and meant poor households could iron those clothes more efficiently and cleanly in a way they had never been able to before.
ICEBOX TO THE REFRIGERATOR
Refrigerators revolutionised the spaces in our homes, how kitchens work, how we store our food – and our diets. Before then people had a larder or a north-facing pantry if they were lucky.
Really rich people had a traditional icebox, a sealed box with multiple layers that kept it insulated. There was space for a block of ice too.
Refrigerators were a gamechanger because they got rid of the daily shop. People could buy provisions every few days and totally rethink how and what they had to cook and when. Produce started arriving globally as refrigerators were introduced all the way through the food chain. It freed women slightly from being housewives at home as food could be prepped in advance allowing them to hold down a job or have time to do other things.
CASTIRON RANGE TO GAS COOKER
Before gas cooking, rich households used an expensive, heavy cast-iron range. They were huge beasts requiring much cleaning and maintenance.
Staff blackened and cleaned the range, stoked the fires first thing to get the temperature high enough for cooking and boiled water. Smaller, poorer households had an open fire with a spit over it.
Gas cookers arrived in the 1920s and were one of the first household appliances as they were often installed by councils who were keen to fit houses with gas and electric supplies. They fitted into smaller places and were easier to maintain. Many were enamelled all over so were easy to clean and stayed in good condition. They were so popular that by 1939, there were about 10 million gas cookers in the UK.”
APPLIANCES OF THE FUTURE – WHAT CAN WE EXPECT? NATURAL MATERIALS OR PRODUCTS BUILT TO LAST
We could see a return to things that are pared down, simpler and designed to last. There is a growing sense in product design that we need to think about smart materials.
One example to come out of development is mycelium, made from the tissue of mushrooms and used to make packaging and materials.
Things will be made in a more environmentally-friendly way so they can be taken apart or reused.
SMART TECHNOLOGIES
We will also see the continuation of smart technology and joined-up appliances “speaking” to one another.
●Discover more about the Kenwood Mixer online at sciencemuseum.org.uk/objectsand-stories/everyday-technology