Feminine devices - various artists, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, New York

Art in America, Dec, 1993 by Richard Vine

Similar examples of almost-laughable chauvinism abound in the graphic materials that accompany (and largely constitute) the remainder of the exhibition. Many ads - typically showing housewives visibly enamored of their appliances or secretaries working in male-dominated offices with a concubine's deference and barely contained sultriness - have a creepy charm that reminds us just how insidiously gender norms are implanted in our social unconscious. In 1990, we are told, 99 percent of all secretaries were female. The overall disparity between female and male wages was 72 cents to the dollar. The expectation of womanly subservience - a.k.a. "women's work" - is still structured into our personnel systems and into the very instruments with which business and home life are conducted.

Perhaps it is frustration with these antediluvian conditions that accounts for the divided sensibility of the catalogue and show, rendering them half pictorial jokebook, half socioeconomic expose. The second gallery, for example, is dedicated to a jocundly tendentious treatment of laundry - specifically of pressing irons and washer-dryers. Vitrines contain such landmark items as the first flatiron with a detachable wooden handle (introduced by Mary Florence Potts in 1871), classic chrome-and-black models from the '40s, and World War Il variations with Pyrex bodies in bright translucent colors. Along the walls stand several washing and drying units, ranging from a muscular 1938 Bendix automatic to the geometric, pastel-hued, multicycle convenience centers of 1950s fantasy. Interspersed among the mechanical exhibits and historical photos of women bending to the task of laundering, towel rods hold swatches of printed fabric that dispense tips from Heloise and other bits of domestic wisdom.

The story these elements tell is one of a shift in the nature of female captivation: from early washboards, hand wringers and heavy, stove-heated "sad irons" that demanded brutal physical labor to immaculate streamlined appliances that have had the unforeseen effect of tying their operators to the home with invisible bonds of guilt. Once doing the clothes became theoretically "effortless," there was no excuse for sending laundry out (thus an entire industry withered and countless numbers of unskilled workers were displaced) or for accepting anything less than a clean-shirt-every-day standard of sartorial hygiene. (Studies document that labor-saving appliances do not actually reduce the number of hours spent on housework, since expectations of cleanliness rise to consume the new "free" time.)

Many ads also reveal a double standard of domestic leisure. For men, returning at the end of a working day, the home is a refuge from activity, a lair of comfort and repose. They sit in their reclining loungers, smoking pipes or sipping drinks. Their wives, meanwhile, are pictured with the loaded washer-dryer always nearby while they contentedly prepare meals, deal with compliant children or smile blissfully over an ironing board as they natter away on the telephone. On one side of the gallery, in a variation on the hearthside chat, a video monitor located in a fireplace plays a tape on which various persons involved with the exhibition give their reactions to such lingering stereotypes. Particularly moving is a segment centered on Fay Ping Chiang, one of seven poets invited to expand on themes in the show, who gives a deeply respectful biographical account of her "Chinese laundryman" father.