Preserving Women Summary

Veronica Tomchak
HIST 285
Final Paper

Analysis of ‘Preserving Women’

The article ‘Preserving Women’ by Shelley Nickles gives a thought-provoking history and analysis of the ways in which the modern refrigerator was developed and the many factors of class, sex, and advertising reform that played integral parts in this developmental history. In this Historical Perspectives on Technology class we learned to take a hard look at the “players” who were in a work, and this piece offered an interesting and complicated story of how the different players (advertisers, different classes of people, refrigerator companies, women, etc.) interacted with each other. The author talks about how many people bill this time as a time when women helped “develop
The mechanism on top was hard to clean and reduced storage space. The frivolous “aerodynamic design of stationary objects” described in the article can similarly be attributed to curved edges being faster and easier to clean. This brings us to our next thematic plot in this article. The refrigerator was highly political in that it was highly gendered (and class-defined). Dr. Winner talks about this in his essay entitled “Do artifacts have politics?” This article reminded me deeply of a Kurt Vonnegut story entitled “Jane.” In the story a traveling refrigerator salesman (similar to the traveling survey takers) ends up building a robotic wife named Jane out of one of his refrigerators. There is a theme of subservience there, the ultimate patriarchal fantasy is the fembot—a programmable sex-slave whose only purpose is to serve its master. And that aspect touches on the classism of the refrigerator—middle class white women were able to regain some of their privilege through the refrigerator by having it be the robot replacement for their servants they could no longer afford. But ultimately, the wife-made-out-of-a-refrigerator thing is symbolic of how closely the refrigerator is regarded as a symbol of femininity. The article talks about how advertisers used tactics such as telling women that they’d be able to “preserve the health of the house,” linking their desire to be maternal and feminine with their desire for a refrigerator. Furthermore, the refrigerator got some of its gender-identity only reluctantly. Male engineers were skeptical of the findings of surveys, and only wanted to focus on the mechanics of their designs instead of thinking of the lifestyles of women. In one instance, only when a woman designer wrote a report outlining how the inclusion of an “efficient” design feature would cost them sales did they relent to