Power Trip by Amanda Little

Author:Amanda Little [Little, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Nature, Environmental Conservation & Protection
ISBN: 9780061885143
Google: 87hTEo9ENa4C
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2009-11-03T05:36:02+00:00

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As with everything else about the 1950s—the era of chrome-finned cars and suburban utopias—America’s embrace of electricity use in that decade was wholehearted and lavish. Electrical appliances began to pervade American homes. Window air conditioner units appeared, with sales escalating from 74,000 in 1948 to 1,045,000 in 1953. Vacuum cleaner models were upgraded from costly, clunky units rarely found in homes to powerful, svelte, standup devices. New and improved refrigerators were billed as “quiet marvels of convenience.” Television came of age: in 1946, fewer than 1 percent of American homes owned TV sets, while by 1962, that number had reached 90 percent. Specialized widgets were invented for virtually every domestic chore imaginable, from electric can openers to plug-in baby-bottle sterilizers to chafing dishes advertised as “perfect for Welsh rarebit.” “In 1960, the average American home sported a dozen electric appliances,” noted historian Richard Munson, “double the number of a decade before.”

Despite its promise to liberate women from housework, the Golden Age of electricity created so many more household tasks that at first it actually tethered them closer to home. Betty Friedan wrote of this constraint in her 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique, in which she chronicled the “nameless, aching dissatisfaction” of the American housewife in the 1950s: “Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their station wagons full of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day.”

Rather than creating a female workforce, electricity initially served to create a female consumer force—vastly multiplying the number of products available, while television ads lured housewives to shopping malls. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the novelty of electrified goods had worn off, that the social benefits of electricity began to emerge. Between 1955 and 1975, women’s participation in the workforce jumped from 40 percent to 55 percent. This was a revolution tied in part to social trends, including the feminist movement Friedan helped to foster, but technology also played a role: the average amount of time women spent on domestic chores in the 1960s and ’70s dropped “from 52 hours a week in 1965 to 45 hours per week in 1975, and stayed relatively constant after that,” according to a study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

Electricity also led to a shift in the types of positions held by working women. The number of people employed in housekeeping jobs dropped precipitously throughout the 1950s and ’60s, a result both of the increased use of home appliances and the emergence of better-paying skilled jobs in the booming manufacturing sector. The possibilities created by the power industry in this era of change seemed limitless. The sixties brought with them the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, and other legendary

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