The EAW were concerned with the social condition of working class women, but had a slightly superior philanthropic attitude towards them. It never seemed to see woman as a homogeneous group, but always made a class differential, between itself, and ‘the working-class’.
In its concern, it closely reflected the issues of the time, possibly because of the feeling of the potential ‘threat’ of the masses, but also partly out of what John Burnett describes as almost a national “guilt”, at the quality of working-class life.
Women were encouraged to see the city as their own house and to tend to its upkeep as they would to their own
The EAW’s definition of working-class seems to have been extremely broad, inclusive of anyone who occupied five rooms or less, making no distinction between bought property or rented, or by calculating annual income or occupation; the other criteria was whether they employed others to do housework. This broad band was inclusive of the ‘new’ middle-class who were buying their own homes in the suburbs and those who were being moved by recent slum clearance and overcrowding acts, treating them equally as an homogeneous group with the same needs and means.
The national concern with “raising” the working-classes out of the slums, was often expressed through the ideology of ‘better’ design, thereby allowing for a more egalitarian spread of comfort and convenience; within this ideology, the EAW saw electricity as the particular salvation of the working-class
electricity has been spoken of as an essential condition for the amelioration of the slums
There was a feeling that electricity had the power to free the working classes from turning the new tenements into slums, thereby raising their standard of living, but this was also a cosmetic solution protecting middle-class values by projecting their ideology onto working class homes,
I notice, too, how the appearance of an electric cooker alters even a poor type of house, so that one cannot think of it as a slum
However the EAW also state that the working class woman’s interest in electricity was not the same as that of the middle class woman, being only interested in the cost of electricity, not its convenience
Where, however she has tried electricity at an economic rate the working class housewife likes it...
The EAW members were also working within the already established area of working class housing needs from the “woman’s point of view”, traditional gender roles for women were still being taken for granted, and could almost seem to have been given a stamp of approval by socially philanthropic women, although they were also legitimising the role that women could play in government, and even introducing militant factions of the women’s movement.
In 1918 the Government had set up an all-women committee for the ‘housewife’s’ needs; the Women’s Housing Sub Committee. This consisted of women chosen for their general domestic experience rather than for their knowledge of architecture, and included Mrs. C. S. Peel, expert on labour-saving devices, and author of The Labour Saving Home (1918).
However they approached and exceeded their brief in a consciously feminist way; setting out to make proposals with their ‘sisters’, by discussing with working-class women their needs and wants, and researching the technical facts of house design such as different means and costs for water heating. Women were encouraged to organise, meet and discuss the kind of houses that they wanted, although the working-class women tended to express ideas that reinforced traditional patriarchal ideas about women’s role in the family and home, particularly in their antipathy to communal living which the Housing Sub-Committee had investigated. Although the committee were very much in favour, and had seen the long term benefits that would go some way towards making changes in the traditional gender relations and work relations in the home having visited communal estates for both working class and middle class families, they were sympathetic to the desires of the working class women, and did not include the option of communal living in their final report.
Opportunities for communal life in England and Wales are as yet so rare that it is impossible to do more than suggest lines along which experiment might move. There is no doubt that much labour and fatigue might be saved to the housewife by communal washing and cooking, and that pleasure and holiday making could be much more easily and cheaply obtained by communal arrangements, but in a country like our own where communal life generally is at present practically unknown. Successful experiments can only be made after consultation with the working woman and in full cooperation with her, and it will be of little use to decide upon any measure of communal life until she has seen its desirability and is willing to make the experiment.
The lack of response of working-class women to shared facilities was possibly because of the degrading communal facilities of the past, such as the shared sculleries, washhouses and soup kitchens, as described by contemporary investigative writers such as Marjorie Spring Rice who similarly to the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee and Charlotte Perkins Gilman proposed communal amenities instead of isolated facilities; wash-houses, bake-houses and sewing rooms for a minute charge. Facilities that were labour- saving and time-saving, and also brought her into contact with other women doing the same work. She also suggested a woman’s club for rest, companionship, and a change of scene; and an annual paid holiday.
The working woman’s rejection of communality seems equally to have been as Ruth Schwartz Cowan writes, a desire for privacy and to no longer wash their dirty linen in public.
The Women’s Housing Sub-Committee felt that women should have a parlour in which to rest at the end of the day, unlike the Tudor Walters Committee, set up in 1917 and consisting entirely of men, which aimed to cut costs through better design. In the Tudor Walters Report, the architect Raymond Unwin , appears to have put forward the view that working-class homes should be identifiably different from middle-class homes. He stated that there was no need for a parlour, it’s only function was of status - a best or Sunday room, costs would be saved and space gained by its’ elimination. Unwin with no consultation with the working-class, put forward his ideas about the way they should live.
The Women’s Housing Sub-Committee also believed that cooking should be removed from the family living room, because these rooms had different functions
The living room is needed for nursery, meal and sitting room - it should not be the workshop of the home. All hard and dirty work should be done in the scullery, both to ensure the comfort of the family and to save the housewife by grouping together all the tools of her industry in one conveniently planned place.
The Committee were also interested in limiting the amount of energy women expended in housework, and examined labour-saving ideas such as a kitchen range which didn’t involve stooping, and was easy to clean. They were particularly concerned to find a cheap, convenient way of heating water
A great part of the everyday work of the house. as well as the laundry work, is doubled by the lack of a proper supply of hot water. The extra strain on the woman’s strength, coupled with the waste of time, leaves her without either the opportunity or energy to attend to other household tasks or to secure any form of recreation for herself
The Committee were concerned with cutting costs for women who ran the home, not necessarily those who built it (unlike the Tudor Walters Committee).
Through the work of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee, working-class women had stated their needs and made many vital criticisms about a traditional woman’s role in working-class housing conditions. Their requirements for change, however, showed a desire to fit the house better to the traditional roles of housewife and mother rather than in questioning the potentially oppressive nature of this role.
The EAW and the Working-Class Woman
In 1931 the EAW exhibited a model all-electric working class kitchen, based on the kitchens installed in some of the flats of the St. Pancras House Improvement Society at an exhibition of working-class housing conditions held by the voluntary housing societies at Central Hall, Westminster.
The kitchen featured a whistling kettle, cooker, bungalow fire, water heater, iron and wash boiler (shared between 3 or 4 tenants). Actual figures and running costs were obtained from some of the tenants, and it was found that the average weekly cost was about 4/3d., including 1/5d. for the hire of all the electrical appliances. The model was later borrowed for demonstrations and put on tour around the country.
The exhibition seemed to have been aimed at the middle classes, to publicise and draw attention to the housing conditions and shortages, overcrowding and lack of facilities suffered by the working-classes. This was part of the EAW’s stated campaign aim that “the time has now come when electricity should be available at an economic rate to the homes of the working people”. The exhibition showed improvements in living standards that could be made, and drew particular attention to the use of electricity for the improvement of lifestyle; interestingly not only for working classes, but also for middle classes, and those not usually considered as having special economic or design needs; for example, single women; by the inclusion of a lecture programme, with topics such as “Electricity and the Working Woman”, “Electricity and the Bachelor Woman”,“Cost of Running a Home Electrically” and “Keeping the Home Clean Electrically”. Possibly this was encouragement of a form of social snobbery to increase sales - if the working classes could now afford electricity, then the middle-classes could not be seen to be without electricity.
However, the EAW also tried to make practical suggestions for giving a “measure of comfort” to the working class family at little extra expense. They did recognise that electrical appliances were beyond the means of working-class families unless builders, landlords, housing committees could be made to put in wiring and certain apparatus, when building, and costed into the property. The main value of the EAW for the working classes was their lobbying of the building industry to include electric appliances into the costing of a new building.
Using the Ministry of Labour estimate of 4s 6d per week for fuel and light expenditure the EAW made the somewhat naive recommendation that when new flats and houses were built, the money saved from not constructing chimneys and fireplaces, could be spent instead on washboilers and cookers installed as part of the fixtures and fittings of the building, the price included in the rent or the selling price, and the bait of electricity would attract the customer.
The EAW also recommended that simple hire schemes should be offered across the country (not just hire-purchase), as well as the assisted wiring schemes, with a longer amount of time in which to pay for hire purchases, as well as the development of cheaper apparatus.
Since its inception, one of the chief aims of the EAW has been to create better living conditions for the working-men and women who most need the benefits which electricity can bring, and who at present dwell in an atmosphere far from conducive towards the establishment of a happier, healthier nation.
The EAW had been campaigning for 10 years, and this was the first real attempt to move away from the concerns of the middle-class life-style. Reflecting the wider concerns of their class and the industry, the EAW couched the phrase in nationalistic terms; the creation of a better Britain through a stronger workforce, dragging the nation out of the years of depression through increased productivity.
The Electrical Age published an article entitled “Is Electricity a Practical Proposition for Domestic Use in Working-Class Houses?” which encouraged the electrical industry and electrical consumers to view electricity as a service for all. As the article then goes on to admit,
That the time has now come when electricity should be available at an economic rate to the homes of the working people.
Indicating that it had been viewed as a luxury, exclusively for the use of the wealthy; if the unenlightened and socially unsophisticated working-classes were to be “allowed” the use of electricity, they would have to be “electrically educated”, thereby extending the role of the EAW.
Today the supply of electricity is essentially a service, and the authorities responsible for that service must take it to the people....the facility for the use of it must not be withheld.
The Working-Class Housing Report 1935
Elsie E. Edwards’ Report on Working-Class housing seems to have been completed without any contact or discussion with working-class women, unlike the earlier report of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee. The only source of information that the EAW seems to have used was through letters sent to an EAW member collating data about washing-machines; all of course expressing pleasure in the help and benefit derived, and estimating in a haphazard way the time saved by using the machines; this anecdotal framework and the dubious questionnaire seems to have been the basis of the “facts” on which Elsie E. Edwards based her supposed scientific report claiming:
The aim of this is to show that electricity is a time saver. To say so is easy; but it is the object of this enquiry to prove it, and to form some reliable estimate of the amount of time saved.
In the few articles published in The Electrical Age, which are supposedly written by, or interviews with working women, the language used is a mix of regional cliché and standard English, suggesting that the interviews were ghosted, and suggestive of the patronising attitudes and caricatures that the EAW members held of the working women that they did come into contact with.
The content of the report seems to have been directed at the building industry, rather than the working classes , in much the same way that the earlier campaigns were directed at the building trade, although the report was commissioned by the electrical industry to find the weekly amount that was spent on heating and lighting, and to assess whether it would be feasible to supply electricity to the working-class.
The encouragement of the widespread use of electricity would mean additional sales for the industry and a corresponding reduction in cost for the present electrical consumers (the middle-classes).
But there also seems to be a ‘them and us’ mentality; a fear of contact or interaction with the working-classes, and no attempt to change the social position or even economic condition of the class. Whilst part of the rationale for ‘giving’ working-women electricity was to make their lives easier, it was not to give them more leisure time. Instead the report stated that the time gained was to be used to increase the family income, or even to become financially independent, and whilst this seems to be a laudable aim, the means for the extra income was not through outside the home to work for a decent wage, but to work in the home, particularly with the acquisition of a washing machine, to carry on doing what working-class women had always done,- other (middle-class) people’s washing. By 1937 the EAW were writing that electricity and its labour saving properties would allow the working class woman to have more children, and to combine both a job and family, and although this seems to be an enlightened view for the period, enabling the generation of extra income for the household; the increased workload would not have improved their lifestyle, but maintained it at the previous level.
The time saved was to be used to get through more domestic tasks than before, “It’s not so much leisure the working woman wants from electricity, as time to get through all the jobs she has to do” .
Dirt
Most of the housing reports (not just the EAW ) were concerned with the working-class having a plentiful supply of hot water, and whilst this was a time-consuming, physically demanding and tedious task without some sort of automatic heating system, it also seems to tie in well with the concept of being able to carry out more housework with hot water on tap, of scrubbing more often, washing more often and concepts of disease control, and germ theory, thereby preventing contamination between classes. Mary Douglas writes that dirt is essentially disorder, and constant cleaning is a way of ordering the environment, making it conform to an ideal. Imposing order can also be a creative moment.
There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment.”
She also writes that in a language of mutual exhortation pollution beliefs reinforce social pressure, influencing one another’s behaviour. In an ideal order of society, danger beliefs, as found in pollution, are used by one to coerce another, therefore moral values are upheld and social rules defined by beliefs in contagion and pollution; danger helps to impose system.
This offence against middle-class ideals of order can also be seen in the Political and Economic Planning Report of 1945, which stated:
it cannot be too strongly emphasized that lack of hot water greatly adds to the labour and time involved in washing clothes and dishes and cleaning and scrubbing the house, besides acting as a deterrent to personal hygiene.
The Political and Economic Planning Group (PEP), were established after 1931, as an independent research and intelligence unit, believing that lack of long-term planning had led to the failure of Britain’s economic system, and a National Plan was needed to aid economic recovery. The PEP were closely involved with the social hygiene and eugenics movement which was also involved with questions of economic efficiency, productivity and the development of capitalism. They believed that the ultimate solution to Britain’s ailing industries was rationalisation; the amalgamation of industries, the planning of purchasing and distribution, scientific research, scientific management and the co-ordination of marketing. They used the rhetoric of national unity, of science as a device to transcend class struggle and planning as politically neutral. The EAW had a similar basis and aims as the eugenicists; essentially middle-class, representing the technocratic and pro-science stream which maintained that British society would be reformed through the application of scientific principles, particularly in public health . Science and efficiency were the key, irrationality and rule-of-thumb were a waste. Eugenicists’ conception of health improvement focused on the individual and domestic behaviour of the poor, believing that hygiene and good domestic management were part of the process by which the poor would be civilised, disciplined and
made into a rational and economic populace, health had sociopolitical importance, and improvement in health would lead to social regeneration. It was a widely held view in some circles that slums (like poverty) were not so much due to an unsatisfactory environment as to individual failings of personality. Slum dwellers were seen as thriftless, shiftless, intemperate and undisciplined. Domestic science instruction was an obvious solution, “teaching” the poor to live within their means, and to aspire to “right-living” the way that the middle-classes lived.
Working-class women were rarely able to afford domestic electrical appliances, even if their homes had been wired for electricity. The hire purchase schemes that were offered after 1929 were for the middle-classes, requiring a large initial payment. The main contact that the working-class woman seem to have had with electrical labour-saving appliances was when employed as servants, or when employed to produce the appliances in the new industries and factories that grew during the inter-war years , or if they had been moved to the new municipal housing schemes during the inter-war slum clearance.
Catherine Hall interviewing “Married Women at Home in Birmingham” , discovered that women living on the new municipal estates in Birmingham had gas and electricity laid on by the council, though often families could not afford it. The first appliances that they purchased if they could afford them, were irons and vacuum cleaners, often they were not prepared for the life of a “housewife”, even if prior to marriage they had been employed as domestic servants, the skills that they had learnt were not transferable skills.
Mrs. Gardiner and Mrs. Foley had both learnt skills in service. Unfortunately these skills were not always useful. Mrs. Foley was a parlourmaid and consequently when she got married had no idea how to cook - she relied entirely on a cookery book and also had to learn how to look after the whole house rather than cleaning the silver and polishing glasses
Very few transferable skills would have been learnt in domestic service, and very few working class homes had vacuum cleaners or other labour saving devices that they may have used in domestic service, so the only skill or labour saving technique that they could have transferred into their own home was that of organisation. Rosemary Crook writes
Women not only set one another standards in cleaning but in the whole domestic routine. There was an order about every part of housework and a set day for each task.
In general it was middle-class women who were the major consumers of electrical appliances , working class women were only able to buy the smaller, cheaper mass produced commodities.
The EAW presented electricity as a necessity for working-class women in a very basic manner. Whilst middle-class women made the association of appliances with luxurious status symbols, as well as labour-saving devices, where to own more would increase the labour saving potential allowing for increased leisure-time in which to broaden her intellect; the working-class woman with no representation or consultation was presented with what the middle-class EAW considered to be the ‘minimum’ amount necessary for a superficial improvement in lifestyle which would enable her to do more housework. Appliances were symbols of social superiority and of the taste of the middle-class over the working-woman, but also symbolic of the projection of middle-class concerns onto the working-class with no real perception of working-class concerns. Electrical appliances were a visible symbol of modernity, for the middle-class woman symbolic of her new found ‘clean’ managerial position; but for the working-class woman, none of the middle-class ideology of the “expert in the home” and scientific management existed, almost as if the working woman was interested in only one very basic fact - the cost, that somehow she was not discerning enough to appreciate the more intangible qualities such as labour-saving. Appliances were a cosmetic and superficial answer to the true nature of poverty and slum conditions and the working woman would need to be educated to appreciate the ‘value’ of the appliances that would somehow magically enable working-class families to drag themselves out of the slums and become ‘valuable’ members of society helping to create a better, wealthier nation. The EAW acknowledged that the working-woman in using electrical appliances would be able to do more whilst using the same amount of time and energy, and thus raise her standards of cleanliness to be nearer to those of the middle-class. Appliances were also presented by the middle-class as necessities for the working-class to enable them to enter the workplace to service the needs of the middle-classes, as well as to increase electrical consumption for the industry.