From Curlers to Chainsaws is a groundbreaking collection of lyrical and illuminating essays about the serious, silly, seductive, and sometimes sorrowful relationships between women and their machines. This collection explores in depth objects we sometimes take for granted, focusing not only on their functions but also on their powers to inform identity.
For each writer, the device moves beyond the functional to become a symbolic extension of the writer’s own mind—altering and deepening each woman’s concept of herself.
From Curlers to Chainsaws is a groundbreaking collection of lyrical and illuminating essays about the serious, silly, seductive, and sometimes sorrowful relationships between women and their machines. This collection explores in depth objects we sometimes take for granted, focusing not only on their functions but also on their powers to inform identity.
For each writer, the device moves beyond the functional to become a symbolic extension of the writer’s own mind—altering and deepening each woman’s concept of herself.
From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines
335
From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines
335eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
From Curlers to Chainsaws is a groundbreaking collection of lyrical and illuminating essays about the serious, silly, seductive, and sometimes sorrowful relationships between women and their machines. This collection explores in depth objects we sometimes take for granted, focusing not only on their functions but also on their powers to inform identity.
For each writer, the device moves beyond the functional to become a symbolic extension of the writer’s own mind—altering and deepening each woman’s concept of herself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628952490 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 335 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Jennifer Cognard-Black is professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Elizabeth Macleod Walls is dean of University College and teaches at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
Read an Excerpt
From Curlers to Chainsaws
Women and Their Machines
By Joyce Dyer, Jennifer Cognard-Black, Elizabeth MacLeod Walls
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2016 Michigan State UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-249-0
CHAPTER 1
Maytag Washer, 1939
Norma Tilden
The Alliance of Art and Industry: Toledo Designs for a Modern America opened last month. The focus is on the 1930s and '40s, when the Ohio city emerged as a hotbed of product design. ... A 1939 Maytag washing machine was so smoothly rounded and practical that its design remained unchanged for 40 years.
— Washington Post, 6 APRIL 2002
Maytag, you crafty girl, you got your picture in the papers. You got them to look at you, coolly appraising your rounded, "practical" curves, your tapered legs and porcelain skin. Maytag — ingenious lovely thing — you worked your way out of the basement.
* * *
In "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," writing in the wake of what was then regarded as surely the last Great War, poet William Butler Yeats mourned the passing of "many ingenious lovely things," delicate old masterworks of art and intellect that now lay buried under the brute rubble of history. These were ornamental things that once had seemed "sheer miracle to the multitude" — polished ivory statues, beribboned dancers, bronzed peacock feathers — refined and precious monuments to a view of civilization that should have been "protected" from the routine violence that "pitches common things about." Or so the poet thought.
By the beginning of the next war, the multitudes were turning to the more practical miracles of "common things," mass-produced and easily replaced. Already in 1934, Philip Johnson had gathered hundreds of ingenious lovely things for a show of masterworks of design at the Museum of Modern Art. He called these democratized treasures "Machine Art" — industrial bolts and screws, household tools, electrical coils, incandescent bulbs, bronze bearings, tire treads — all of them showcased as organic forms, at once functional and beautiful. Except that by the 1930s Yankee ingenuity had managed to collapse the distinction: these things were beautiful in use.
It was Yeats again who, early in the century, had invented a "beautiful mild woman" to speak for him on the beauties of industry: "To be born woman is to know / Although they do not talk of it at school — / That we must labour to be beautiful." Yeats called this labor "Adam's Curse," and spoke of it as the fine and difficult work of poets and women.
You knew about Adam's curse, Maytag, ingenious and lovely thing, rocking in rhythmic labor in the steamy basements of Ohio — that 1930s "hotbed" of industrial design. And in your presence, clustered around you with our mothers, their faces blushed with steam, we would learn what it meant to be born a woman: the intricate mechanics of beauty and use. In those days, to find a mother — usually any mother would do — we raised the heavy trapdoor to the cellar, making our way through the canopy of dripping clothes suspended over a delicate cat's cradle of waxy rope. The clotheslines were themselves ingenious webs, crossing over and under each other in that cramped space, lowered to receive the dripping weight of the laundry, then hoisted toward the basement ceiling on flimsy notched poles. Although they had not learned of it at school, our mothers understood this levered counterpoise of heft and height: lifting the newly laundered sheets above the floor on sagging stilts, then lowering them dry and almost weightless. Briskly, they would pinch off the colored plastic clothespins, folding the sweetened basement air into the sheets as they wrapped them loosely into themselves, then nestled them, like bunting, in the wicker laundry baskets.
Any Monday, we could follow the sounds of the Maytag down through the veils of linens and delicately patterned housedresses, the stiff dark cotton of uniforms and "work clothes," the soft muslin diapers and summer-printed sunsuits. We followed the rhythmic humming and the heavy smells of potions until, somewhere below that damp canopy, we found our mothers gathered — Pauline, Yolanda, Josephine, Nelda, Connie — with the Maytag wringer washer, rocking as it worked, all of them beautiful in use.
The mothers were busy mixing lotions and powders with modern chemical names, their faces reddened in the warm fog of perfumed salts: "Oxydol" for heavy-duty cleaning, its name a potent blend of chemistry and girlish play; "Fels Naptha," to be scrubbed with wiry brushes over grass stains and the greasy knees of work pants. For whiter whites, there was the mystery of "Rinso Blue," which came in two forms: a thick, cobalt-stained syrup or a tidy wafer, like a poker chip, dissolving in a whirlpool of molten blue when dropped into the churning cauldron of the Maytag.
The gentle washing of fine things required a box of "Ivory Snow," which, even before we peeled back the cover, seemed buoyant, a cache of paper thin, luminescent flakes. Each of us begged to be the helper chosen to drift the flakes in a simulated blizzard over the tub. There they would quickly melt into a layer of yellowed suds, swirling back and forth in the repeated, half-circular motion of the Maytag's busy agitator. Delicate garments were tagged "Ivory Washable, 99 44/100% pure." But Ivory was not just for lingerie. For a few weeks back in 1940, eight hundred people a day had visited the "Ivory Washable House" at Radio City in New York. Garishly colored ads in House Beautiful touted "the famous house that could be washed from front door to back," but only with Ivory Soap, 99 44/100% pure. Those lucky New Yorkers who toured the house must have left Radio City with a deep appreciation of Adam's curse. "As practical as it is decorative," the ads proclaimed. Like other miracles of machine art, the Ivory House promised to be beautiful in use.
* * *
My mother and I worried that impurities might lurk in the remaining 56/100 of 1 percent. For us, then, there was a dangerous white jug of "Clorox Bleach," surely 100 percent pure. Clorox represented the epitome of better-living-through-chemistry, so powerfully clean that they called it "Ox" — or so I thought. My mother stirred it into the washtub with a sawed-off section of broomstick, scrubbed to the color of raw oak by its weekly plunge into the rinse water.
When the Maytag's churning action stopped, our mothers used the broomstick to fish the sodden fabrics from the sudsy mix and move them to the rinse, lines of bluing running up their arms toward the caplet sleeves of their housedresses. Then, one piece at a time, they fed the dripping laundry through the hard rubber lips of the wringer. Behind it, one of us was stationed to catch the flattened garment, pull it through in a ropey twist, and layer it like ribbon in the basket, ready for the clothespins and a space on the line.
Fels Naptha for work clothes ... Rinso for whites ... a heady mix of chemical smells, dampened voices, and steady industrial sounds that I remember still, fifty years later, as both sweet and strong. In the cellar, as they scooped and measured potions, even their language seemed to be processed through the pursed lips of the Maytag: "That bitch Marie — she put my brother through the wringer. And now, mark my words, she'll take him to the cleaners, too." Tide for colors ... Dreft for baby things. "'Hazel,' I told her, 'don't you let that man soft-soap you.'" Giggles bubbled up through the mass of steamy ringlets bobbing over the tub. Someone replied, "Listen to me, honey. You need to put some of that starch in your undies." The vaned agitator, metal before the war but now a rugged plastic, forced water through the clothes. These were the luxurious, sloshing sounds of your labor, Maytag. Always you seemed overfull.
* * *
Pictured here in the morning paper, you are still lovely, though no longer in use. The stuff of your labors is hidden now, injector hoses coiled behind the tub, agitator finally at rest in the gray, freckled cavity beneath the porcelain lid. "Well-rounded design, then and now: A 1939 Maytag Washer." With a mild shock, I realize that I am looking at a crude metallic rendering of a woman, solid and big-bellied. Her slim legs barely support her swaying girth. She stands on exhibit at the Toledo Museum of Art, turning slightly to the side, a pregnant woman, at once proud and bashful. Her shapely legs, smooth and white, thicken into thighs where they extend up the side of the tub. These are legs "that go all the way up to her ears" — the manly compliment I overheard from my uncles, laughing on the porch stoop where they huddled after work. Four legs, not two; this design was an improvement on nature: two legs to support the heavy belly, two to hold up the wide hips at the back. From the base of the tub, they taper to slim ankles banded in chrome bracelets, then slip into tiny round-toed shoes on black castor heels. Against the stark backdrop of her museum perch, the Maytag poses hieratically, like an Egyptian wall princess, all four small feet fixed at the same sharp angle perpendicular to the body, as if to prevent her from slipping away. Circling the top of the tub, a girdle of bright chrome holds the enormous, bulging cavity in place. Squarely in its center is a protruding black navel — a plug of some sort — for filling and emptying the tub.
And there, above the enormous belly, is the small head of the Maytag, its mouth a wide black hole hooded by a red metal lipstick smear. Just visible inside that chasm are the tight, rolling lips of the wringer. At once prim and merciless, those lips could pull you in, then send you out stiff and one-dimensional. A single arm holds the head in place. Above it, instead of an ear, rests the tiny mind of the clutch. The Maytag's head can be moved aside for easier access to her trunk. The only other flash of color is a word in neat, feminine script, written in lipstick cursive across the tub: "Maytag," your name, a game for girls in spring.
* * *
When the wash was done, the fierce agitation finally quiet, the clothes, still heavy with sweet-smelling water, sagging just above the cement floor, my mother would rinse the Maytag with Clorox and polish it dry. She would leave it, cool and empty, prepared for tomorrow. Immaculate metal — you could see yourself in it.
CHAPTER 2My Mother's Singer
Joyce Dyer
My mother's Singer folds down into a little wooden cabinet, completely out of view. It had become for me no more than a piece of bedroom furniture — a sort of table for my pills, a water glass, and whatever book I was reading to help me fall asleep at night. One day last March, soon after I had finished reading Jonathan Rosen's book about birds, The Life of the Skies, I lifted the Singer out of its cabinet for the first time since the machine had come into my house. Three Men and a Truck had delivered it to me in 1991, right after I sold the small Tudor house my mother couldn't live in anymore.
For years my husband had been suggesting that I fix Annabelle Coyne's old machine. I'd known he was right, but machinery has always intimidated me, and my mother's Singer was such a heavy thing. I had no idea what I'd be facing once I peered into the dark interior and saw the sewing machine hanging there, upside down, like a roosting blue jay, or a bat.
"You should do it," he'd say.
"I will," I'd reply. But I never did.
Until I read Rosen's book. He drew a connection between the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker and the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The juxtaposition surprised me, and I rubbed my sleepy eyes. Rosen alluded to land where, seventy years before, the last official sighting of an ivory-billed occurred — wooded property in Louisiana once owned by the company and known as the "Singer Tract." In 2000, Rosen traveled south to do a story for the New Yorker about an unofficial sighting in a different area of Louisiana, and in 2005 he went to Bayou de View in Arkansas after other sightings were reported there.
How odd, I thought, that the last confirmed sighting of the ivory-billed took place on property that Singer owned.
I kept glancing at the cabinet while I read, realizing that I didn't know anything about the company, and not much more about my mother's machine. I could barely even picture her Singer now, so many years after I'd last heard its hum. All I knew was that it was black and heavy and had been my mother's daily companion. I wasn't even sure if it worked anymore. While it rested in its cabinet all those years, it had become an antique, and perhaps now its age was the only value that it held.
I learned from Rosen that the last official sighting coincided with the controversial removal of ancient trees from the Singer Tract by loggers who had leased the land. The ivory-billed was a very specialized bird that lived on the grubs of decaying trees in old virgin forests like the Singer Tract. Rosen said the ivory-billed preferred trees that were five hundred to seven hundred years old, though some ornithologists thought they would feed on trees only one hundred years old. In 1944 the last ivory-billed refused to move, even when the loggers came. She just sat there, cocking her head when the tractors rolled in, and then she vanished. For fifty-five years no one claimed to see another.
Rosen's book did exactly what I hadn't wanted — it kept me awake. I could not dismiss the odd coincidence he'd drawn my attention to. The book had begun to expose my ignorance, and when I turned off the light those nights I read its chapters, I began to fuse birds and sewing machines and mothers into a single thing — some strange hatted creature with metal quills and presser feet.
* * *
During the days, I would try to remember whatever I could about my mother's Singer. The Singer my mother loved became a puzzle to her, and now it was a puzzle to me. Sometime in the early 1980s, when Alzheimer's announced itself in her life, she lowered her machine and never took it out again. She soon forgot what was inside. She forgot it had an inside. She forgot "inside" altogether. By the 1990s her confusion was so profound that I moved her into an Alzheimer's unit — something I vowed never to do — where she lived five more years in a single room surrounded by three pieces of blond furniture from her old bedroom set, all of which she stripped of their wood veneer with her thumbnails.
I had wanted to keep my farewell to my mother orderly, and final. I wrote a book about her after she died and had thought its pages made sense of her life and held my goodbye. But in the years since writing it, I had begun to suspect that I had left something out, and thinking about her Singer because of the Rosen book made me quite sure of it. I had told only about the Alzheimer's years, omitting all the long, healthy days of her life. It was easier that way, though people thought I had done something brave. After she stopped sewing and dementia sealed off her brain, she was all mine. She was caught. I could love her and study her the way that Alexander Wilson and James Audubon leisurely studied and painted birds they had captured or killed. I could invent her. She was finally still, as safe as the Singer inside that cabinet. But when she sewed, she belonged to no one and she was as elusive as an ivory-billed. Opening up her machine seemed too great a risk, for couldn't something unexpected fly out and devour me?
But that ivory-billed woodpecker had started to tap away in recent days. Singer's trademark was an "S" with a woman behind it, her body visible between the loops of the letter. The woman sat on a chair, working at a machine. Tap, tap, tapping, hoping someone would notice her.
I began to wonder who she was, and I knew I would have to remove my mother's machine from the cabinet in order to find her because my mother and the woman suddenly were the same, both hidden from me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Curlers to Chainsaws by Joyce Dyer, Jennifer Cognard-Black, Elizabeth MacLeod Walls. Copyright © 2016 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.