Machine Liberation: Inventing Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France

Abstract

French society entered a period of protracted cultural crisis at the close of the First World War. This was caused in part by France's slow economic development and could not be resolved until French society sustained a systematic renovation in politics, social values, economic practices, and popular mentalities. Modernism as we shall use it in this context represents all of the values so explicitly held by a Jacques Delors, Laurent Fabius, or a Giscard d'Estaing: that bigger is better, that technology (divorced from a coherent social context) is the basis of prosperity and prowess, and that there is but one single path to the brave new world of the future, a world managed by engineers and experts.' It is an ideology rooted in the objectivism of the French Enlightenment, the Prometheanism of the Industrial Revolution, and the audacity of the industrial rationalizers in this century. French social discourse had long counterpoised the rational with the sensual, the modern with the traditional, the empirical with the spiritual, the male with the female, and the mechanical with the organic, bifurcating much of the modernization debate around two irreconcilable poles. Interwar supporters of the modernization vision, despite cultural