Common wisdom has it that the objects of everyday life, particularly the most banal ones, have acquired their specific form and meaning because they are designed with direct functional purposes in mind. According to this perspective, for example, a washing machine has its specific design because it simply "works best" that way. Implicit in this belief is a sort of technological Darwinism, a presumption that in the early life of any object there is a period both of conceptualizing several designs for the same function and of trial-and-error, but that the fittest design ultimately survives and become a non-controversial standard. Corollaries of this theory often admit that what is functional in one environment might not be functional elsewhere. Hence, barring for the moment diseconomies of scale for the environments too small to produce their own functional designs economically, different contexts will generate different versions of the same object. By this approach, we can easily see why American cars were for many years different from their European counterparts: the former were a good fit where fuel was cheap and trips tended to be lengthy, hence yielding a larger, smoother-riding car in North America. At a deeper level, one can also recognize that because Europe has always had a denser population that made collective transport more economical, European cars would be mostly what Americans would see as "commuter" vehicles--small, light, and easy to park. This would relegate larger European cars to the luxury category, in part as status symbols. In our analysis of the washing machine in the interwar era, we shall discover not only the shortcoming of a functionalist approach, we will see how a social constructionist analysis leads us to a more accurate description of technological change, and how the invention of specific technologies prescribes specific users and venues of utilization.

A functionalist framework makes analysis relatively easy, for all one needs to do is `read' the environment that is to be `innovated toward' and then actually predict what will succeed and what will not. However, two problems immediately come to mind. First, since we know that needs, particularly for consumer goods, are in some part created by industry, we have to recognize that in a sense, the marketer invents the user as s/he advertizes the object, and that for the object to make any sense to the user, its meaning must also be invented.[2] Secondly, it is also woefully unclear in this framework what is meant by functional. Defining functionality rapidly becomes an operation of limiting parameters in order for coherent analysis to proceed--functionalism is, in part, therefore, a technique of exclusion and marginalization. Should the analyst take into account the functionality of an object in terms of its ability to reinforce or reproduce relations of gendered or class power, for example? What of the power of a specific social group to transform or retranslate power relations, using social agendas incribed in the object? Once we start introducing this genre of non-engineering parameters, we become social as well as technical analysts. Finally, if we propose that the social meaning of an object is important--that objects, from bibelots to personal computers, do more than simply technically functional tasks--, we have to flee the safe, easy territory of functionalism.

Madeleine Akrich offers a telling case study of how the introduction of an object into a new environment requires a reshaping of the new context. Many people might imagine that electrifying a village in the tropics is merely a problem of building essentially standardized generating and transmission facilities, then running lines to homes and installing meters, junction boxes, and outlets. But it is not so easy. Meters have to be installed on "solid" walls, so pole-constructed buildings have to be replaced with concrete or finished wood structures. Moreover, electrical services require that fees for service be demanded from a responsible party. This means that the user must not only enter a modern bureaucracy, s/he must also be recognized as a legally independent unit, not a member of a traditional collectivity with strong ties of mutual dependence. The user must hold a valid title or lease to his residence, with all of the legal and political implications they imply. In short, the villager must "westernize," because the simple act of acquiring electrical services means that the user cannot simply acquire the parts of industrial society s/he wishes. S/he must acquire "western" social and legal practices while acquiring electricity. The electrical system that seemed at the outset to be a merely "technical" entity requiring only "technical" criteria on the users' side becomes a mechanism for entirely recasting traditional social relations.[3] Moreover, as `westernization' is an eminently social process, Akrich implicitly recognition that Paul Rosen has stressed, that relevant social groups, like technologies, are themselves socially constructed.[4]

Following Akrich's analysis, we can see that rather than an object simply adapting to a fixed environment, it transforms that environment through a set of prescriptions inscribed into the object by its designers. By this logic, a personal computer defines the actions that are required to make it work and one must follow those prescriptions lest the machine be entirely non-functional. When an MS-DOS computer proposes "C>" to the user, the latter must respond with something the computer is willing to accept--"B" simply will not do, though many might presume "C>B." Langdon Winner has pointed out that for all of the power automobiles are claimed to have in terms of transporting people, they require that (with few exceptions) one travel on roads and that drivers not stop to talk with another.[5] Some technology analysts refer to the set of "demands" made on the user that are inscribed into an object as prescriptions, hence acknowledging that objects in some way dictate what users must do. In this fashion, as Arnold Pacey has indicated, snowmobiles prescribe the existence of filling stations, dealerships, repair shops, and the like so that Inuit society doesn't simply replace the dog sled with the snowmobile, but needs to have an entire system associated with the snowmobile.[6] If we are to pursue this direction of our argument to its end, we can predict that closure of design of the snowmobile-operator dyad will be complete when the Inuit have installed the system necessary for making the snowmobile work. Closure in this sense refers to a stabilization of design parameters and of the social meaning of a technology.

Yet our analysis so far only permits us to see the imposition of social practices by the object itself; it does not explicitly allow us a more symmetrical picture, one that will allow us to see and analyze an interaction between the demands of the object and that of the user. Clearly, if the demands of the object are too strict, the user will simply not comply. The user, indeed, begins a process of implicit negotiation as s/he contemplates a technology. Wiebe Bijker and Bruno Latour have pointed out in their respective ways, that there are battles among social forces over the shape and meaning of objects, and these conflicts are played out according to the resources each contestant can mobilize to impose his or her agenda.[7] We can extend this to characterize the shape and meaning of the object itself as the product of contention between promulgators and possible users. For example, in the US, the Bell System envisaged the telephone as essentially a messaging system, and this conception was based on experiences with the telegraph, where the time required to code and decode communications precluded a particularly interactive or synchronous mode of communication. Along these lines, the domestic telephone was conceived as a device for people at home to send messages to grocers, cabbies, spouses, and others, and the early systems were wired accordingly, presuming calls of short duration and thus envisioning a limited number of trunk lines. American housewives, ensconced in their middle-class, owner-occupied homes as they were, soon reappropriated the telephone as a way of maintaining social relationships while staying at home--implying longer communications and a need for more lines. AT&T initially resisted, seeing little interest in making new investments merely so housewives could chatter, but it soon relented and redesigned the system to accommodate.[8] Closure for the American telephone system then occurred around a design that was more polyvalent, allowing conversations as well as messaging--and later, radio, data, and fax communication. In this case, the shape of the system was the product of implicit negotiation between promulgators and users.

Lest one believe, however, that the negotiations occur on an equal basis, with all parties having equal power, we must recognize the power one side might have to impose its agenda. Were an inventor to try to introduce yet another VCR format with only marginal operating advantages over the current system, users' past investments would make them indifferent to the new system. On the other side, despite a current consumer interest in electrically-powered commuter cars that is large enough now to make their production economic, few automakers would be willing to accept the small profit margins the public would expect on such items. In this context, indifference is also power: either side can ignore the other and render the object or the user irrelevant.[9] Hence, for successful negotiation to proceed toward closure, both sides must be active; incomplete or falsified negotiations over the meaning and design of objects can render the object misshapen, dysfunctional, or irrelevant. Closure requires these implicit negotiations.

So far, however, we have only tangentially recognized the social and cultural agendas over which negotiation might proceed. Some of this can be remedied simply by recognizing that many objects have dual material and social functions--the Mercedes-Benz 450 SL certainly provides transportation, along with a smooth ride and considerable horsepower, but it also tells observers that the owner is wealthy. Bryan Pfaffenberger has elegantly shown how personal computer designers and potential users negotiated over the meaning of the PC within a strong set of social and cultural parameters, and this yielded a machine whose social meaning was decidedly non-revolutionary, despite the initial intentions of both parties. He pointed out that indeed, the over-arching social and cultural context sets the boundaries of possible negotiations of meaning. The personal computer could not be liberating in part because American society had only a very impoverished notion of what technological empowerment could be.[10] Into this set of problems we can look at the gendered objects of domestic life, from the feminine machine used to sew fabric to the masculine machine used to cut grass. With the sewing machine, if it is found in a commercial establishment, particularly a tailor-shop, it is generally masculine, but in the home, it is feminine. The overall set of cultural meanings and ways of constructing the world, as well as conventional social practices, prescribe the possible meanings of objects as well as the forms they might take. For example, most forms of birth control require intervention on the part of the woman (contemporary counsels to American women even urge them to have condoms on hand) not because it is somehow scientifically easier for women to be responsible for birth control, but because they have to assume that males are irresponsibile. Research in new birth control methods has followed a similar path. For our purposes, we will see that different notions of privacy, cleanliness, and wardrobe purchasing prescribed different designs for washing machines in the USA and France. Each country reached closure on washing machine designs with entirely different configurations. Even when the advantages of some aspects of European design are obvious--energy efficiency, better cleaning--the social and material momentum of existing washing machine designs in the USA precludes reopening the design of an object that long ago attained closure.[11]

Indeed, the case of the washing machine in interwar France provides an opportunity to examine a broad set of issues, from the problem of inventing a user while inventing an object to that of how closure is achieved. In our discussion, we will see that the promulgators of washing machines in interwar France were trying to introduce an American socio-cultural artifact into a vastly different environment; at the same time, they tried to reinvent the French middle-class woman largely as a cultural clone of her American sister. That was not an absurd position as the starting point for the negotiation over the shape and meaning of the washing machine. However, French laundering practices had already attained a closure of their own around the low-cost lessiveuse, a device that was well suited to the domestic infrastructure and incomes of French families. The material prescriptions of the lessiveuse were far less demanding than that of the washing machine and what is more, the lessiveuse better corresponded in France to popularized notions of how clothes were rendered clean. Prescriptions for the washing machine extended to the privatized, domestic placement of the lessiveuse, but culturally loaded laundering with a modernist agenda and provided new "scientific" and consumerist meanings for it. Ironically, a key social prescription of the washing machine in ithe US--that laundering be done privately and at home, with private energy and water--was accomplished by the lessiveuse in France.[12]

In our analysis, we will use a notion of closure that describes a synthesis of the design of the washing machine, the social meanings prescribed for it, and the cultural agenda it was intended to foster. Because few French families purchased washing machines--the French public perceived it with a mix of indifference and disbelief--the opportunity for negotiation was minimal and instead of design and meaning closure there was a proliferation of designs. This meant that the initial idealized cultural scenarios and prescriptions of washing machines could not be brought down to earth. The culturally modernist agenda of the washing machine survived a lack of social practice with the artifact itself in large part because no negotiation over design or meanings occurred. Ironically, the perpetuation of idealized scenarios of domestic liberation unencumbered by contact with the quotidian allowed an idealized vision of the future (and of America) to become part of the political-economic agenda for postwar France. The washing machine could transform French visions of possible futures in a way that the lessiveuse could not. Its lack of functionality in the historical context of interwar France allowed its broader cultural and political inscriptions to survive.

Laundering in late nineteenth century France for the bulk of the population was infrequent and arduous. As most of the population lived in villages or small towns, women of the popular classes could be seen on most Mondays at the fountain or public laundering area, or lavoir. Members of the bourgeoisie avoided the lavoir as a mark of inferior social status and would either send their laundry out if they could afford it, have their servants do it, or launder in the privacy of their homes. The lavoir afforded women of the popular classes a place of conviviality and community, and an opportunity to participate in local rituals of gossip and advice-giving. It was a feminine space at the center of the village. As each maîtresse de maison performed her laundering on a regular schedule (with children performing auxiliary activities), Mondays would find a predictable group of local women together. Depending on the region, women would launder anywhere from weekly to bi-annually.[13] Cold running water and the lavoir itself were provided by the local governmental authorities.

Before the introduction of the lessiveuse in the last decades of the century, laundering required considerable manual labor. It involved sorting clothes according to color and fabric type, treating stains with savon de Marseilles, then soaking laundry in warm water with washing soda for several hours. The laundry was then beaten, boiled, rebeaten, bleached (if necessary) and rinsed many times with gradually cooler water. The laundering task continued with wringing out the water by hand, hanging the laundry to dry, then sorting again and ironing with a passively-heated iron. The entire series of operations often took two days or more. While the entire process tended to be hard on the clothes--particularly the wringing, beating, and chemical treatment--most textile goods used by the popular classes were made of linen or cotton that were strong enough to withstand the process. In addition, given the infrequency of laundering, most items did not have to withstand the process many times.

Through the processes involved in laundering circa 1870, we can identify the salient aspects. Laundering relied on the chemical actions of washing soda and heat, as well as the tendency of the soda to precipitate out the dirt, which allowed re-use of the wash water. Indeed, in some areas, ashes were mixed with the washing solution as a precipitant.[14] Water requirements with respect to rinsing were considerable, yet wash water with soda was carefully preserved. As rinse water was supplied free of charge by the community, there was little incentive to minimize its use. Finally, the heat source for boiling could be anything burnable, from coal to coke or wood. The entire process hinged upon a traditional notion of cleanliness. Items were usually not washed according do whether they were "clean" or "dirty"--notions that are quintessentially socially constructed--but according to whether or not they were scheduled to be washed. The notion of "dirty" was defined only visually--by stains--and then only on socially visible clothes.

Already, however, the bourgeoisie was developing a new sensibility toward odors, and it was beginning to identify itself as a social group by its very odorlessness.[15] According to Alain Corbin, the bourgeoisie's lack of odor distinguished it from the aristocracy (with its thick scents of musk and heavy perfume) and the popular classes (which "stank" of bodily odors). Slowly, a new notion of cleanliness emerged, one that stressed visual cues and relied increasingly on olfactory ones. This tendency had been developing since the Revolution of 1789, but it became a discernible social tendency when the public health movement of Villermé and Parent-Duchâtelet combined with the germ theory of disease and the social Catholic movement of Le Play to yield the modern public hygiene movement during the last decades of the nineteenth century.[16] Through public schools and other paths for imposing bourgeois values, the French sense of scent defined not only social standing but general health as well. Germ theory especially led to new fears: the lavoir was increasingly viewed as a site for the diffusion of disease and methods for sorting laundry reflected a new sensitivity to keeping clothes to be worn next to the body apart from other items. Gradually, laundry was washed less according to a fixed schedule and more according to its degree of odor. In time, this meant a rescheduling of washing according to the type of the item: underwear and table napkins were placed on a frequent-wash schedule, sheets on a less frequent one, and other linens on a seldom-wash rotation.[17] Along with the gradual decline of the rural communities generally, use of the lavoir began to disappear, replaced by more private laundering practices.

The privatization of laundering found its object with the development and diffusion of the lessiveuse in the 1870s (see Fig. 1). Dependent upon the emerging steel industry and sheet-metal trades, the lessiveuse was well adapted to the French context (lessiveuses were almost unknown in the USA). The lessiveuse performed its task by percolating boiling, soda-treated water through the laundry, thereby performing two of the key aspects defined as laundering--boiling and chemical treatment. As clothes were getting washed more frequently, the traditional method of brushing and beating began to take its toll on the clothes more rapidly, and the lessiveuse avoided almost all direct physical attacks on the fibers. In addition, as running water became available and widespread in the home and families had to pay for water all of the themselves, the lessiveuse reduced potential expenses by its parsimonious use of both washing and rinsing water. The lessiveuse would also work on any number of combustible fuels (the same ones used in the family parlour stove) and many models could be placed on iron cook-stoves. Finally, the purchase price of the lessiveuse and its absence of moving parts (which minimized maintenance) made it highly economical (Fig. 1).

The social meaning of the lessiveuse was determined in a smooth dialectic between users' practices and preconceptions and producers' notions of functionality and affordability. It effectively adhered to contextually contingent notions of cleanliness, it was cheap, and it easily fit into the material environment of the typical family of the popular classes. As a result, closure in the large sense (material, social, and cultural) was achieved by 1880 and with only minor changes it remained fixed until well after the Second World War. It remained socially invisible as a largely unquestioned and naturalized object of everyday life for half a century. The privatization of washing associated with the lessiveuse meshed well with the growing sense of privacy in social life--with the lessiveuse, one needn't worry about the "promiscuous" mixing of one's laundry with that either of strangers or of social inferiors.[18] One must keep in mind that the lessiveuse only facilitated washing and rinsing; in general, the same practices of sorting, soaking, bleaching, bluing, wringing, drying, and ironing remained. Finally, the definition of cleanliness remained class-bound; at minimum, it meant having boiled and hot-ironed clothes, but for the bourgeoisie, it meant a lack of odor. More frequent bathing among the bourgeoisie reduced the odor of the clothes it wore as well.

Laundry practices remained relatively stable from about 1880 until after the war of 1914-1918. Washing was, as a rule, a strictly feminine activity performed on Mondays whenever possible, and on Sunday afternoons by women who worked outside the home. Once basic hygienic practices for laundry were diffused throughout society, few contested them. War changed such practices. First, as many women moved from jobs with flexible schedules to the rigorous scheduling and long hours of work at an often-distant war matériel factory, laundering became more difficult to schedule. Secondly, many women who had worked as domestics and laundered for the bourgeoisie ceased such activity and sought industrial work, leaving the bourgeoises to do their own laundry. Finally, women's clothing styles changed considerably; not only did women begin to wear shorter and simpler dresses, they began to own more of them. In addition, as incomes rose and a new middle class began to emerge, French families on average purchased more clothes and linens. The bourgeoisie began to imagine that there had to be a better way to do laundry.

World War One opened a long period of redefining femininity in France. Coming out of the war, French women and a number of their progressive male allies pressed for woman suffrage, only to be defeated in 1920. Nonetheless, as a result of their activity in the war, women began to demand not only a greater place in public life--no longer accepting servility in the parlour or loneliness in the maids' quarters--they demanded and received greater education and training. While women's participation in the paid labor force remained largely constant in the interwar period, their actual jobs shifted. As overall pay levels improved and the traditional sectors of women's employment--primarily textiles and garments--declined, middle class jobs as secretaries, teachers, and salespersons increased. Most importantly for our purposes, bourgeois families began to complain of a "crisis of domestics."

As the tables below indicate, there was almost no decline in the number of domestics, but a considerable growth in the number of people in the middle and upper social strata.

Source (both tables): Bulletin de la SGF (juillet et octobre 1924), cited in anon. "L'<<embourgeoisiement>> des ouvriers et paysans français," Dossiers de l'Action Populaire, 10 janvier 1925, p. 5.

Other designs bespoke a more clearly American inspiration. The Nec Plus Ultra and Lavandière design, common among manufacturers of the Nord and placed on a pedestal (or altar) high above the 1925 Salon, offered a wooden-stave half-barrel tank with a wringer on the top and a geared mechanism to agitate the laundry and washing solution (see Fig. 4). These and other early designs were based on American, not French, understandings of correct laundering procedures, relying largely on agitation and hot--but not boiling--water to perform the basic tasks. Time saving was a priority, so agitation was to accelerate the task performed by soaking. Bernège was careful to prescribe a cornucopia of modern washing chemicals[30], yet the prescriptions did not correspond to existing French conceptions of laundering, which insisted upon long soaking and boiling with a minimum of agitation. Despite scientific and technical counsels that soaking and boiling were unnecessary, few housewives seem to have been convinced.

Several later designs modernized the basic principles of the GYOR and Nec Plus Ultra, yet only in part departed from earlier American preconceptions. The GYOR design saw the addition of a firebox below for boiling the laundry. Norge, Miele, and others modified the Nec Plus Ultra design, based around a tub and a vertical agitator shaft, by making the tub from steel and adding a firebox. Conord developed a model that combined a wringer at the top and a firebox below with the conventional percolation approach of the lessiveuse. Motolaveur offered a square tub with an inner basket that was agitated back and forth, and it sported an extractor on the same frame (machine pictured in Fig. 2). Some of the later designs relied on gas, electric and/or piped hot water supplies. None of the later designs, save the Rotolaveuse (see below) adequately spoke to the cultural preconceptions of the meaning of "clean" laundry, and those that came close to doing so merely reinvented the lessiveuse in a treacherously tortured fashion. The firm Frères Lemercier updated the lessiveuse with an electrified model in 1935, thus offering the practicality a washing machine could not achieve.

These designs also failed to meet French criteria because they simply could not fit in the material environment. Most of the machines were quite large, requiring a floor space of 2 m² or more and, if they were integrated into a rational home laundry according to Bernège's prescription, an entire room--this at a time when domestic space was sadly lacking, even for the more comfortable social classes. Its mass and the creeping movement it would do because of its agitation often demanded that it be bolted to the floor.[31] In addition, unless the internal water heaters were methane-fired, they required chimneys and proper venting, both of which demanded considerable inconvenience and cost. For many models, electricity was needed, yet the percentage of households with electricity remained quite low.[32] Promotional efforts by utility companies, which even included free instructional services and manuals as well as preferential tariffs, did little to expand consumption.[33] Most poignantly, however, for all of the efforts to invent around or reinvent the lessiveuse, one paid dearly: a lessiveuse cost from 80 to 90 francs, while a Lavandière of the most basic design cost 455 francs. Neither sales of washers on credit nor rental arrangements could circumvent consumer resistance to high prices.[34] The lessiveuse could be purchased at a hardware store or a popular department store (BHV in Paris), yet the washing machine could be had only from the manufacturer or a limited number of agents. Finally, for all of the claims of automation, most designs required filling and emptying tanks by hand several times, transferring the wash to an extractor (or feeding it through a wringer several times), and proceeding with the usual old steps of hanging to dry and ironing. Time, not labor, was reducedCritic C notes that this is a dicey point--and she is correct--and wonders how this jives with the opposite conclusions of Cowan, Vanek, Wajcman, and Nyberg.[35] Moreover, as only middle-class or bourgeois families could afford washing machines, and as many such families had servants, there was little incentive to economize on the efforts of servants, who were often assumed to be lazy enough in any case.[36] When fully loaded, the lessiveuse usually weighed over thirty kilograms and manipulating it was an arduous task, but the washing machine required considerable physical effort as well. The real labor savings came from the new, plumbed infrastructure of pipes and drains, not from the washing machine itself.

The washing machine failed on a more symbolic and cultural level as well. The extremely mechanical surface of the washing machine, replete with its gears, motors, levers, and controls rendered the middle-class wife-operator a defeminized factory worker, not a white-shirted taylorist manager overseeing manual or automated operations.[37] As new hygiene practices were more broadly diffused through unions and public schools, the insistence on odorlessness as a sign of clean laundry became stronger and this was to be achieved by long boiling and soaking.[38] Moreover, time spent on washing was also associated with the cleanliness of the laundry, so modernizers' promises of time-saving were often read as promises of unclean laundry. Finally, efforts to use machines in place of domestic servants as markers of social status failed, despite the denigration of bonnes. Washing machines thus failed on all fronts: housewives became defeminized by their association with elaborate mechanical devices, the laundry did not emerge "clean," economic and space requirements were often prohibitive, and servants were neither functionally nor symbolically replaced. Functionally and socially, the discursively open washing machine offered preciously few advantages over the solidly closed lessiveuse. In a broader sense, none of the washers sold in France reflected the Fordist agenda very closely, as none were mass-produced. Instead, they were manufactured in the small, skilled artisan shops so characteristic of French industry at the time.[39]

Ironically, washing machines succeeded on two counts in the interwar era, as institutional machines and as powerful symbols of a world that could be. In 1928 Rotolaveuse developed what was to become a successful institutional washing machine (Fig. 5): plumbed to water and gas supplies and a drain, and wired to an electrical service, it had an integral extractor and was largely automatic. The price was quite out of reach for the home, yet it was highly economic for hotels, hospitals and the like, and it became the starting point for the contemporary European washing machine. Its horizontal shaft made the load tumble through wash water without harmful agitation and its spinning extractor avoided the destructive wringer. It could boil the laundry and assure that it was germ-free. Starting in the late 1920s, institutions began to purchase this type of "domestic" washing machine. The electricians' trade journal, L'Électricien, announced the advent of useful hotel equipment in 1931:

It is clear to us that a whole vast market is now opening up in terms of supplying hotels, rooming houses, and restaurants with up-to-date appliances, [including] ranges, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and floor polishers. The French hotel industry is now, to our elation, modernizing itself to the level of its needs and to meet foreign competition, and to do that it has sufficient resources for credit. Electricians and power company officials should now work together in order to `electify' these important customers, and as a result, we can all come out ahead.[40]