Following Thomas Hughes’s Networks of Power, the focus of many historical studies of Western electrification has been on the development of large technical systems and the interaction between system builders and regions.Footnote 1 In US-based corporate liberalism accounts, electrification history has been characterized by creation of publicly regulated/owned entities to solve complex problems of industrial capitalism through reliance on professional managers and engineers.Footnote 2 In Canada, the preeminent political economy study is H. V. Nelles’s The Politics of Development, presenting the Ontario provincial government’s establishment of Ontario Hydro to exploit state-owned property rights to develop power for the province, and in turn reducing “the state—despite an expansion of its activities—to a client of the business community.”Footnote 3 Political economy approaches have been influential in studies of system development among “provincial hydros” and in Saskatchewan and the Maritimes. In Saskatchewan, the provincial government took ownership of private utilities in 1949 to build a province-wide power system.Footnote 4 Likewise, Canadian Maritime region cases start with early failures to develop centrally generated electrical power and then, in the case of New Brunswick, mid-twentieth-century reorganization of the provincial utility to provide it with the autonomy to develop provincial hydroelectric resources and deliver power for industry and export.Footnote 5 In this latter historiography, domestic power users feature only as the recipient of a public relations strategy designed to silence critics of “progress and modernity.”Footnote 6 Business history methodologies have been applied in studies of entrepreneurial development of hydroelectricity in Quebec and Ontario hydro cases.Footnote 7 Likewise, British Columbia Electric Railway was studied as a case on the advantages of a foreign-controlled firm in a young and rapidly developing economy.Footnote 8
Gender has been a missing element in these histories. Building on Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s insights that the transformation of homes with electric power created more work for mothers as they used their appliances to achieve new standards of cleanliness and devote more time to child care, recent scholarship has integrated “women’s energy work more firmly into the larger cultural, political, and economic complexities and narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”Footnote 9 Instead of reducing women’s domestic lives to a separate sphere that was non-productive and in need of emancipation to realize equality with men, women are portrayed as food, light, and heat providers and physical and emotional care workers, with influence in energy decisions, especially after World War II.Footnote 10 Their work has been shown to support households and communities through “such activities as cooking, gardening, scavenging, piece work, laundry, borrowing, sharing, and of course the caring and social reproductive work for which women continued to be primarily responsible.”Footnote 11 Moreover, this work has explored the agency of women in industrialized countries and their increased culpability in the climate crisis.Footnote 12
The new energy historiography integrates gender within a narrative of how a novel form of capitalism arose in Western sociotechnical transitions from feudal to industrial power regimes.Footnote 13 Generalized features of this industrial capitalism included interventionist governments that played a major role along with private organizations in large-scale, capital-intensive resource and energy sector development projects.Footnote 14 State-regulated monopolies promoted centralized power generation and a gospel of consumption.Footnote 15 Euro-North American household economies were urbanized. Men became wage-earners and identified as “the primary economic support of the household,” with “productive work” removed from the household.Footnote 16 As this work was removed, the fiction was created that the household was a home, not an economic unit, separated from work as a refuge from the culture of industry and commerce.Footnote 17
In this article, I build on this new energy historiography to integrate business history and gender approaches to study how utilities and their collaborators shaped domestic energy use and work. I focus on the work of “agents of diffusion,” who stand between producers and users, and seek to educate and persuade potential energy users.Footnote 18 Previous work on this topic has examined the construction of gendered, racial, and class identities during the early twentieth-century sale of domestic electric appliances in the US.Footnote 19 In Graeme Gooday’s study of early British electrification and the instrumental role of advertising, advertising mattered because it had to persuade women to change their core values and priorities.Footnote 20 Dorotea Gucciardo has revealed the social implications of electrification in Canada in studying utility “advertising effort on enlisting Canadians as consumers.”Footnote 21
Within this research topic, I examine utility diffusion of a new domestic work culture. The goal is to address what Jane Whittle has called “the most serious gap in our knowledge” about “the nature of housework and care work and how this work changed over time.”Footnote 22 Others have identified similar gaps, including the differences from country to country and culture to culture in Western capitalism.Footnote 23 Writing about gender in Canadian energy history, R. W. Sandwell asked for more histories of turning points in energy production and consumption, including people’s bodies and homes.Footnote 24 In addressing this gap, I am responding to Jane Whittle’s simple question: What is work? She identified three meanings of work: as the opposite of leisure, known in preindustrial societies; as labor that earns income, commonly used now; and as unpaid domestic work, including housework and family care, commonly ignored or considered non-work at present, including by economic historians.Footnote 25 Her interest stems from the point that there is “no logical reason for excluding unpaid housework and care work from our conception of work or the economy.”23 In addition to studying housework and care work, I seek to expand Whittle’s analysis to a fourth kind of work, called leisure jobs.
Leisure jobs provide a useful concept in understanding why women gained more leisure time in the twentieth century (up to 37 hours per week) but remain as busy as ever, even with decreases in women’s housework, family care, and shopping time (savings of 12 to 19 hours per week in cited studies).Footnote 26 Its use is in explaining why many Western women report being time starved, even though clothes dryers “saved time and made doing the laundry less physically arduous,” and not all of the saved time was used in “better” homemaking and family care.Footnote 27 In this context, a leisure job is any work done in leisure. It is characterized by a “pattern of skill and ideological spillover of work.”Footnote 28 In the context of twentieth-century electrification, it includes the new jobs that utilities and appliance manufacturers marketed for their domestic users, such as hosting, gift buying, and attending amateur arts and sports events. In this way, leisure jobs are an extension of business operations and service work in homes, public spaces, and leisure facilities. They both “legitimate the work ethic by allowing workers to exercise it … [and] leisure by filling some part of nonwork time with productive activity.”Footnote 29 This leisure work also includes the accompanying emotional labor in managing and displaying the expected emotions.Footnote 30
The research questions are: How did the authors of Canadian utility marketing plans and materials conceptualize their domestic users, and what values and jobs were marketed by them from 1920 to 1970, beyond giving homemakers more time to run the house and more money to shop? Was it left to customers to imagine how they would use the time and financial dividends, or did utilities show them how to live better electrically? If utilities played this role, what did it mean to live better electrically, and what does it reveal about changing perceptions of family and social life in the mid-twentieth century?Footnote 31 To investigate, I reviewed primary materials from Statistics Canada and its predecessor agency; Library and Archives Canada; provincial archives in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia; civic archives in Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa; and the Hydro-Québec archive in Montreal.
To contribute to these questions, I use concepts from marketing to identify the values and jobs in utility materials.Footnote 32 By marketing, I mean the conduct of primary and secondary research to understand customers, conceptualize value propositions, and determine revenue models and pricing, as well as to advertise, sell, and distribute ideas, goods, and services.Footnote 33 As a discipline, marketing neither mirrors society nor creates customer values and demands, but offers materials for the interpretation of the ideals of modern life.Footnote 34 It does this by showing how firms and the authors of marketing materials perceived the needs of social groups and presented products and meanings as solutions for their customers.Footnote 35 It visualizes the selling of national, cultural, gendered, and other meanings of identity in the context of humdrum electric devices like toasters and sewing machines.Footnote 36
A value proposition is a business’s proposal to its customers of the benefits arising from use of a product or service.Footnote 37 Among electric power utilities, it includes not just reduction of customer perceived pains (e.g., muscle pain from washing and wringing out the laundry without powered machines) but also the jobs, gains, or outcomes wanted from use of the product.Footnote 38 As used by Christensen and colleagues, the jobs-to-be-done are broadly defined to mean any job that arises in customers’ lives, whether in labor or leisure.Footnote 39 These can include saving time and money, e.g. replacing kerosene lamps with electric lighting and wood with electric heaters, as well as spending time and money, e.g. decorating with electric lights for Christmas.Footnote 40 The jobs-to-be-done concept was well expressed in a 1919 trade article on the value of an electrical pot with its lower cost than cooking with coal, increased speed in heating up the pan, and convenience of cooking at the serving table “after coming in from a drive or in the evening when company drops in.”Footnote 41
I also use the social tableaux framework to analyze the ads as ideals of modern life. A social tableaux is an ad “in which personas are depicted in such a way as to suggest their relationship to each other or to a larger social structure.”Footnote 42 It has been applied in the examination of ads from the early twentieth century to the present.Footnote 43 In David Nye’s study of electrification in the US, the social tableaux of the 1930s were designed by “largely male, upper-class advertising executives … to appeal to the middle-class consumer.”Footnote 44 In this article, I apply the concept to the more homespun ads from Canadian utilities.
In the subsequent section, I review what values were marketed in advertising electric power. Next, I present data on the sale of electricity to domestic customers in Canada, showing 1950 to 1990 as the growth period for total sales, customers, and electricity use per household. The following three sections evidence the utility role in the family and social transition from 1920 to 1970. In the conclusion, I articulate the contribution of the article. While utilities and their partners in electrification initially sought to grow customer segments by selling power as rationality and household savings, utilities subsequently opened their marketing to social movements and groups that expanded their marketing to show customers, primarily women, how power may be used to do the new organizational and emotional leisure jobs expected of them.Footnote 45 The primary job was to transition from family-as-labor unit to realize ideals of a leisured, intimate, happy, and child-centered family and social life that made use of women’s increasing time and money.
What Values Were Marketed in Advertising and Electric Power Histories?
In the literature on the North American history of marketing, electric power features as another service in hard- and soft-sell campaigns, whether as part of a totalizing system of consciousness control or merely providing power for mechanical servants.Footnote 46 In the former narrative, the reduction in hours of factory labor meant not more free time but rather more time with the growing demand-side of capitalism: responding to the desires and demands created by advertisers for modernizing industries.Footnote 47 Consumption in this literature became a way of life through the influence of marketing.Footnote 48 The contrary view—of power as mechanical servants—saw marketing as more often in the dark about customers’ problems and needs and unable to practice “precision microsurgery on the public consciousness.”Footnote 49 James Williams’s study of early twentieth-century marketing of electric domestic technologies provides a particularly revealing look at how for men it meant conquering household efficiency and for women, household choices.Footnote 50 By the early 1930s, advertisers realized they could not raise public tastes and so increasingly focused instead on understanding customers, primarily women, and developing ads that addressed their perceived desires.Footnote 51 After the war, advertising increasingly moved from products to the images associated with it, with an emphasis on traditional family values.Footnote 52 This trend was accelerated during the 1960’s creative revolution, with its change from delivering product information to creating popular culture.Footnote 53
As with the marketing history literature, in energy histories there is a focus on commercial consciousness-shaping as well as labor-saving messages.Footnote 54 The marketing of domestic power in the US saw a transformation of the customer’s meaning of electricity, from late nineteenth century as an impractical technology of mysterious science to early twentieth century as an indispensable tool for progress and modern living.Footnote 55 In the UK, the transformation during this period was from electricity as “an insidious stranger with uncertain credentials who brought hazard and discomfort into the very heart of the home” to a “benign and well understood servant.”Footnote 56 During World War I, General Electric and power utilities changed their focus from upper-class households as consumers of appliances-as-status-symbols to instilling an “electrical consciousness” in middle-class housewives to achieve freedom from drudgery.Footnote 57 The focus was on electricity as a means for cleanliness, comfort, and convenience.Footnote 58 This approach increased in the 1920s as utility salesmen went door-to-door to sell the freedom-from-drudgery message and the new middle-class ideal of the woman who does her own washing.Footnote 59 Consistent with nineteenth-century utopian ideas of technological progress, escalating energy use was presented as a primary source of change to produce plenty and eliminate human labor.Footnote 60
Similar to Britain, broad household power adoption in Canada was later than in the US and more abrupt after World War II (especially among rural consumers).Footnote 61 In Canada, there was also more regional differences, with lighting, not heat or power, leading the transition.Footnote 62 In provinces with water power resources, large hydroelectric infrastructures were built in advance of demand.Footnote 63 These generation sources first met the needs of industry, its consumption dwarfing that of residential consumers.Footnote 64 Marketing sought to build domestic load, following American advertising thought and practice, albeit with differences.Footnote 65 In Canada, most household access to power did not begin until the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 66 When advertising campaigns were developed for Canadian women in the first decades of the twentieth century, accounts show industry and public agencies inventing consumers as part of a strategy to sell off-peak power to reduce overall generation and transmission costs.Footnote 67 Contemporaneously, new domestic science educators in Canadian elementary and high schools introduced students to electric stoves, standardized methods, and authoritative cookbooks.Footnote 68 These programs both shaped and were shaped by utility home economic programs that sought to promote values of scientific rationalism and efficiency in the electric home and grow demand as excess capacity increased.Footnote 69 It was a long-term project to build trust in power companies and erode the sense that electricity was a danger to home and pocketbook.Footnote 70 This has been emphasized in the case of rural Ontario, where consumers long failed to see advantages in expensive and incomprehensible electrical appliances over, for instance, their familiar, affordable, and controllable wood stoves.Footnote 71 The message in utility ads to rural consumers was on the emancipation and freedom offered by low-cost electricity.Footnote 72 In Lionel King’s history of Nova Scotia’s electrification, this freedom meant time for revival of a more spiritual way of life and advancement of Christian civilization.Footnote 73 More generally, the impact of campaigns to promote consumption to rural consumers at cost (albeit subsidized by commercial and industrial users), eventually helped to stimulate demand.Footnote 74
Domestic Electricity Sales, Rates, and Household Spending
The stimulation of demand is seen in the exponential growth of domestic electricity sales in Canada in the twentieth century as measured in both total kilowatt hours (kWhs) and number of customers. Table 1 presents the sale of electricity in kWhs to domestic customers by Canadian province for the years 1930 to 2000. Nationally, the number of kWhs increased nearly tenfold, from just under 1.5 billion in 1930 to 14.3 billion in 1956, and then more than tenfold again to 148 billion by the year 2000. The table shows 1950 to 1990 as a period of exponential growth in total sales of kWhs. Thereafter, even though the square meter of household space per person, amount of space cooled, and number of appliances per home increased, these gains were more than offset by energy efficiency. From 1990 to 2013, energy efficiency resulted in a 24 percent decrease in household power consumption.Footnote 75
Table 1 Sale of Electricity in kWhs to Domestic Customers by Canadian Province (millions), 1930–2000
Source: Data made available by the Canada Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Industry, Part 1-Statistics, Central Electric Stations in Canada. The data for the period 1920-1998 are labeled CS57-202-1920 to CS57-202-1988. The data for the period from 1999–2000 are labeled 57-003-x2000000 to 57-003-x2007000. BC = British Columbia. AB = Alberta. SK = Saskatchewan. MB = Manitoba. QC = Quebec. ON = Ontario. NB = New Brunswick. NS = Nova Scotia. PE = Prince Edward Island. NF = Newfoundland and Labrador.
The growth in electricity is all the more remarkable given that it occurred in the context of expanding residential natural gas sales, especially in the western provinces and Ontario.Footnote 76 On the supply side, the TransCanada natural gas pipeline from Alberta to Ontario was commissioned in 1958. Consumer demand for relatively inexpensive natural gas (versus wood and coal) drove growth, with natural gas heating typically being the largest home energy use (kWhs basis) in these provinces.Footnote 77 And yet, even with this national natural gas infrastructure, low prices, and strong demand, natural gas sales were still outpaced by electricity. From 1949 to 1970, residential natural gas grew ten times, from about 615 million to 6.9 billion cubic meters, similar to the growth in electricity from 1930. But then, from 1970 to 2020, total sales of residential natural gas grew less than threefold, reaching a peak (so far) of about 19 billion cubic meters in 2018.Footnote 78
Behind the growth in residential electricity sales were rising numbers of customers and increases in consumption per household. Table 2 presents the number of electricity customers by Canadian province for 1930 to 2000. Nationally, the increase was about tenfold, from about 1.3 million in 1930 to 12.1 million in the year 2000. The effect of energy efficiency can also be seen in the lack of drop-off in growth in 1990 and 2000 (Table 2 versus Table 1).
Table 2 Number of Domestic Customers by Canadian Province (thousands), 1930–2000
Source: See sources for Table 1.
The other factor behind the exponential growth in residential electricity sales was household service. Table 3 presents the average annual customer (or household) service of electricity in kWhs by Canadian province from 1930 to 2000. Nationally, it increased nearly ten times from 1930 to 1980, peaked in 1990, and declined thereafter. Although there were significant differences among the provinces, the overall trend is similar, with the exceptions of New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Labrador, which showed small increases after 1990.
Table 3 Average Annual Customer Service of Electricity in kWhs by Canadian Province, 1930-2000
Source: See sources for Table 1.
The growth in the numbers of customers and sales of household service came with decreasing power rates, shown by province in Table 4. Rates among the public and private utilities studied consisted of a monthly fixed demand charge and variable charges calculated on kilowatt hours used and a “consumption” rate.Footnote 79 Table 4 presents the average revenue per kilowatt-hour revenue for domestic and farm service by Canadian province from 1930 to 2000. The four provinces with the highest average household power usage from 1930 to 1970 (see Table 3)—Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec—also had the lowest power rates during this period; the exception is 1970, when British Columbia moved to fifth spot in the country for lowest average power rates. During this period, Manitoba maintained the highest domestic power usage and lowest power rates, followed by Ontario, with the second-highest domestic power usage and lowest power rates.
Table 4 Average Revenue in ¢/kWh for Domestic and Farm Service by Canadian Province, 1930–2000
Source: See sources for Table 1.
Although domestic service prices and corporate sales strategies varied, there was commonality in overall sales among domestic customers with similar average costs of service. For instance, in the 1920s, the publicly owned Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, with a rate design based on service to each customer class at cost, had similar domestic consumption levels as the privately owned BC Electric Railway (which provided its shareholders with a return on investment).Footnote 80 They also had similar experiences in appliance sales in the 1920s, with flat irons as the best seller, followed by toasters.Footnote 81 Likewise, in the late 1930s, large appliance sales surged, including for ranges, refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners.Footnote 82
Lower domestic power rates also correlated, in general, with a lower percentage of household spending on electric service. Table 5 presents the average revenue per domestic and farm service customer relative to total household per capita income by Canadian province for 1930 to 2000. British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec all have the lowest percentages from 1930 to 1950. Manitoba is an outlier in this grouping because it led the country in kWh usage from 1930 to 1950 (due in part to having the lowest power rates in Canada), but it had middling household per capita income relative to other provinces. In the Atlantic region, as domestic power rates decreased, annual household kWh consumption and the percentage of household spending on electricity began to approach that of Quebec by 1970.
Table 5 Percentage of Average Revenue per Domestic and Farm Service Customer Relative to Household per Capita Income by Canadian Province, 1930–2000
Source: Electricity revenue data made available by the Canada Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Industry, Part 1-Statistics, Central Electric Stations in Canada, 1920-1998 are labeled with the numbers CS57-202-1920 to CS57-202-1988. The data for the period from 1999 - 2000 are 57-003-x2000000 to 57-003-x2007000. The household per capita income data was prepared from Statistics Canada Table 36-10-0229-01. See also “Long-run provincial and territorial data,” Statistics Canada, 2 Nov. 2018, accessed 4 Jan. 2024, https://doi.org/10.25318/3610022901-eng.)
Marketing Power as Rationality, Leisure, and Intimacy in the 1920s
Decreasing power rates were not the only factor behind increases in the number of customers and sales. According to advertising agency advice in The Electrical News, the industry’s biggest problem in 1920 was the public’s lack of understanding of the need for more capital to build utility generation and transmission, and thus expand the scale of the system and reduce the cost of domestic service. The solution to this problem was the “enlightenment of the public so that it will understand not only generally, but specifically, every important phase of the electric light and power industry.”Footnote 83 In other words, the solution was to educate the public to think like a utility in terms of capital spending and returns. The job for domestic ratepayers was to see the low-cost value of electricity and the potential for further cost reductions as system capacity was increased. The business trade journals had a similar message for electricity marketers, although without the engineers’ call to educate consumers on system techno-economics. The advice was to sell the idea of electricity in terms of customer wants, such as more speed and efficiency of electric cooking relative to wood or coal ovens, as a solution to the lack of servant problem or for more leisure time.Footnote 84
The public and private utilities with capacity to expand domestic sales and deliver relatively low power rates, such as BC Electric, Montreal Light, Heat & Power, and Toronto Hydro-Electric, acted on this advice in the 1920s and sold electricity to households as rationality. Local distributors, such as London Hydro, spent about 4 to 5 percent of gross sales on advertising, most of it devoted to newspapers.Footnote 85 The message was to raise the efficiency of domestic work by replacing human muscle with electric-powered machines. Manufacturer and utility advertising sought to teach residential customers the meaning of a kWh in terms of its financial cost per unit and cost-per-task or cost-per-hour so they could calculate the benefits of replacing human labor. The message, for instance, was that electric cooking was fast and you would be foolish not to do it. Ontario Hydro promised that its power and washing machines would “do all the hard work” for busy mothers.Footnote 86 Toronto Hydro ads said washing clothes or sweeping rugs by hand could be done by electronic motors for less than 2 cents per hour.Footnote 87 BC Electric Railway told its customers a large dinner cost only 4½ cents to cook.Footnote 88 A Montreal Light, Heat & Power ad from 1925 showed the decreasing cost per kWh from 1908 (12.75 cents) to 1925 (3.50 cents) versus the increasing cost of labor since 1913 (up 87 percent) and food.Footnote 89
Given that the premise of these kWh-oriented ads rested on customer perception of residential meter accuracy, utilities were particularly concerned when doubts were raised.Footnote 90 These doubts about reliability were longstanding, evidenced by advertisements from meter manufacturers in trade magazines during World War I.Footnote 91 Montreal Light, Heat & Power had since at least 1933 been running ads to respond to criticism that its meters overestimated power usage, comparing their precision to that of expensive watches.Footnote 92 In 1939, the Federal Department of Trade and Commerce commissioned two advertising agencies, R. C. Smith Company and the James Fisher Company of Toronto, to design and publish two ads in newspapers across the country in support of meter accuracy.Footnote 93 Utilities from Calgary to Moncton wrote to the minister to express appreciation to the federal government for instilling public confidence in utility billing and addressing the public’s suspicion and lack confidence in meters.Footnote 94 Representatives from Kingston Electric Department, Toronto Hydro, Canadian Utilities Limited, and the City of St. Catharines asked the Department of Trade and Commerce to purchase or make copies to distribute to its customers.Footnote 95
Beyond ads, utilities also sought to shape loads—their shorthand for user social practices—through in-house publications, demonstrations, and schools. London Hydro, for instance, published a magazine called Live Wire. It was presented to the public through clubs and organizations like the Rotary and YMCA. It also delivered cooking and power equipment demonstrations at local fairs and constructed a showcase dining room and kitchen.Footnote 96 Likewise, BC Electric Railway was a heavy advertiser among firms selling electric appliances. As evidence of the appeal of its demonstrations, its 1925 home products fair attracted about 25,000 attendees. It also developed materials for domestic science education programs in local high schools.Footnote 97 These courses provided an initial introduction to household technology, standardized methods, and authoritative cookbooks later used in adulthood.Footnote 98 While student opinions were mixed as to whether the classes were helpful or a waste of time, interview records from the Behind the Kitchen Door project show an enduring influence through instruction in ironing, cleaning, and cooking with new appliances as well as in more unit-based measurements.Footnote 99 There was also influence from these classes when students went on to teach others home economics in the province for the Department of Agriculture and Vancouver area schools.Footnote 100
In addition to predominant messages of efficiency, leisure was presented as the payoff for rational housekeeping, with many ads showing users reading, relaxing, or conversing. For instance, according to a 1920 Toronto Hydro Shop ad, having the electric percolator and toaster on the table meant it was no longer necessary to run back and forth to the kitchen for fresh toast and hot coffee.Footnote 101 For women, the ads suggested electric appliances meant more time with friends and husbands. To illustrate the concept, a series of ads from Canadian utilities showed how cooking at the table saved work and allowed more time with husbands, as presented in Figures 1 and 2. Reflecting the expanding awareness of electricity as an enabler of intimacy, the 1916 ad in Figure 1 shows the husband and wife with eyes on the electric appliance, in contrast to the 1927 ad in Figure 2 in which there is now conversation and eye contact.Footnote 102
Figure 1. “Cook Right on the Table,” 1916. Reading from left to right, the surprise was to find a woman at the breakfast table. (Source: BC Electric Railway, “Cook right at the table,” The Province, 3 June 1916, 83, Box 8800582862, Item 7, BC Archives.) Image courtesy of the BC Archives.
Figure 2. “Toast for Two,” 1927. It is only the women’s chair that is drawn, underscoring that she is now being seated. In this version, the male figure leans far across the table with intense eye contact and reaching hand. The table is uncharacteristically without coffee and plate for toast. (Source: Toronto Hydro-Electric, “Toast for two made so easily and electrically,” The Bulletin 5 no. 10 (April 1927), Series 1749, File 35, Fonds 408, Toronto Archives.
From Selling Power and Appliances to Family Happiness and Fun in the 1930s and 1940s
Intimacy, rationalization, and leisure continued as themes in utility advertising in the 1930s and 1940s, with kitchens as a focal place. Ads continued to emphasize labor-saving and the potential to bring husbands and wives together at the dining table.Footnote 103 More generally, utilities presented the kitchen as a narrative of progress.Footnote 104 Figure 3 illustrates the narrative with two model kitchens from a circa 1950 Ontario Hydro display at the Canadian National Exhibition. The “country-kitchen” (left) relied on windows and kerosene lamps for light and wood or coal for heat. The table with three chairs centered the kitchen as both dining and workspace. The “operating room kitchen” (right) featured gleaming workspaces lit by windows, ceiling, above-sink, and hanging light. Although tables and chairs were still in the foreground, the dining space was shrunken and decentered from the work area, the new focus of the kitchen.
Figure 3. Ontario Hydro model kitchens. (Source: Box AB0170.1, Folder “Displays,” Ingenium Archives, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Ingenium Archives).
The main narrative of enlightenment-as-progress is reflected in other utility public relations materials of the period, such as a panel cartoon from Shawinigan Water and Power showing the advancement of lighting from fireplaces and candles to coal gas in the early 1800s to lard oil lamps in the 1850s to kerosene lamps in the 1870s and finally to electric-lighted kitchens in the 1940s. The message was that modern kitchen design “speeds work, reduces fatigue, [and] eliminates mistakes.”Footnote 105 Along with efficiency came convenience and comfort in electrified kitchens. Ads emphasized saying goodbye to fatigue from chopping wood, carrying kindling, stoking fires, and carrying out ashes.Footnote 106 In addition to freedom from drudgery and having cleaner and brighter kitchens, it also meant less food waste and more leftovers for marketers.Footnote 107 Water on floors from block ice was to be no more. As with the shop floor, electricity meant more productivity and safety for home workers.
These messages were also disseminated in the wider culture. In an article on the new power age, the national Maclean’s Magazine explained electric utility economics for its readers and the implications for domestic users.Footnote 108 The message was that the massive increase in power generation would mean salvation of the home through the end of drudgery. Writers in Maclean’s and the national newspaper The Globe also speculated on the coming public problem of having “more leisure time on its hands than it will know what to do with.”Footnote 109
Advertising campaigns to grow domestic use expanded beyond Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. The privately held Shawinigan Water and Power Company (co-founded and led by John Aldred, a former vice president of the Canadian subsidiary of Gillette Safety Razor Co. and president of Consolidated Gas and the Electric Light and Power Co. of Baltimore) was particularly active in the use of advertising to grow domestic load in its industrial territory. Its campaigns sought to persuade home users of the efficiency of power by translating the kWh into labor, time, and even pleasure (e.g., equivalent to the work of one maid cleaning an eight-room house, or 13 hours of muscle work).Footnote 110 At 5 cents per kWh, it was only about a quarter of the cost of relevant domestic labor in Quebec, at about 20 cents per hour.Footnote 111 For smokers, the utility claimed that two hours of electric lighting for a month (using one 100-watt bulb) was equal in value to a package of cigarettes.Footnote 112
Utilities outside of the big cities also sought to show how to make family relationships more intimate, loving, and happier. A 1934 marketing plan from Saskatchewan-based Dominion Electric Power Limited noted that while utilities had been advertising for years, it had been limited to pushing appliance sales or countering the perception of power utilities as greedy monopolists and collaborators in the “Insull crash” of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression.Footnote 113 Moreover, only recently “any real effort has been made to sell electric service of itself,” and very little of it had “been done with the object of selling the public on the use of electric energy in the home.”Footnote 114 Noting that seven large American companies were now trying to popularize Reddy Kilowatt as the household servant, Dominion took a different approach to emphasize electricity as not only a servant but also as a source of domestic happiness. The idea was to look beyond efficiency and convenience and to what families would do with this saved time.
The advertising should first keep in mind the fact that the consumer has certain wants. He may not want electric services at the start, but he does want comfort, health, leisure, etc. If he is shown that electric service will supply those wants, he will want electric service.Footnote 115
The resulting marketing campaign material used two working-class figures, “Lighter” and “Brighter,” to illustrate the dual function of electricity in the average home. The tableaux of the folksy couple lacked the “brilliance of imagery and intensity of focus” of high production-value American ads of the 1930s.Footnote 116 Instead of confident, youthful, and slender elites, we have smiling, middle-aged, and short figures. The male figure, “Lighter,” in a reversal of the gender roles, was the servant who washed and ironed the clothes, vacuumed the carpets and furniture, and cooked the dinners. The female figure, “Brighter,” brightened events and entertained family and friends. Instead of life-as-labor, family life was to be happy and fun and allow for cultivation of intimate relationships. Together, they lightened the housewife’s labor and brightened the hours of leisure and play.
This idea of electricity as an enabler of intimacy was expanded in post-World War II advertising. Pre-World War I advertising that featured the family often had its gaze directed to the electrical appliances.Footnote 117 Figure 4 shows the way families were portrayed after World War II, sharing the same room, happily reading, playing, and in conversation.
Figure 4. Family circle, 1948. This meaning of electric power-as-family-connector has now arrived. The mother and daughter exchange warm looks while the father and sons are absorbed in the funny pages and toy car. A convention of these ads is for mothers and daughters to express love through smiles and fathers and sons to do so through touch. Only the older son is left out, although his brown shoes (matching everyone else’s, except those of his sister) visually touches his mother’s leg. The mother and father are placed at equal height in the ad (relative to the top border), symbolizing their equality in the tableaux. However, it’s the mother’s body that extends into the centre frame; she is the centre of the family circle. (Source: Shawinigan Water & Power, 50 Years of Achievement, 1898–1948 [Montreal, 1948], “Customers”, OCLC 100687649, LAC.)
However, there were limits to messages of intimacy and equality at the table. Utility marketing materials also characterized the home as a workplace where wives were to “not let your mind wander inattentively when he [your husband] is explaining something.”Footnote 118 As well, wives were never to be late, and were to inspect their makeup once but the breakfast table three times, according to utility marketing.Footnote 119 Wives as laborers and husbands as consumers in the home were predominant themes in utility ads of the period.
Scaling of Home and Leisure Jobs from the 1950s to 1970s
Post-war utility marketing called for bigger homes; greater rationality in use of electricity; increases in leisure time; and more family intimacy, happiness, and fun. All of this was to be scaled up. Canadian homes as presented by utilities were to be larger in size as well as more open, functional, standardized, and less busy than pre-war homes. Rather than heating in hearths and lighting with candles and kerosene lamps, forcing families to gather together on dark evenings, central and electric baseboard heating and electric lighting allowed for more distance and privacy.Footnote 120
In a 1964 issue of its Current Events newsletter, the New Brunswick Electric Power Commission profiled what they called a typical home.Footnote 121 The five-bedroom “typical home” had 2,400 square feet. Even in Canada, this was large. Only in 2016–2017 did the median square feet of new homes (single-detached) in Canada’s largest province (by population, Ontario) catch up in square footage to post-war homes.Footnote 122 And this was 30 percent larger than median homes (by square feet) built in the 1980s and 1990s, and almost double the median size of homes constructed in 1960 (at about 1,200 square feet). Ironically, these increases coincided with decreases in the average number of people per home in Canada, declining from more than six in 1851 to five by 1906, four in 1951, three in 1976, and 2.5 in 2006.Footnote 123 As a consequence, space and power increased as household numbers declined. The “typical home,” for instance, used just under 32,000 kWh in the 12-month period of 1963–1964, far higher than both the 1964 provincial annual average of just under 3,000 kWh and the Canadian yearly average of more than 5,000 kWh. It was also far more than the peaks of average annual usage in New Brunswick (17,125 kWh) in 1994 and in Canada (13,536 kWh) in 1990.
With bigger homes with more rooms, utilities expanded their rationalization messages.Footnote 124 Hydro-Québec’s Medallion Home Program called for each room to be heated to an optimal temperature for its function, with 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the bedroom, 71 degrees in the kitchen, 72 degrees in the living room, 74 degrees in the bathroom, and 75 degrees in the baby’s room.Footnote 125 With lighting, there were recipes to be followed for each room and function based on industrial testing programs. Utilities, for instance, provided its customers with prescriptions for reading with a floor lamp. Height to the lower edge of the shade was specified to be not more than 49 inches and not less than 47 inches above the floor. Floor lamps were to be placed 15 inches to the right or left of the center of the reading material and 26 inches to the rear.Footnote 126 There were also correct dimensions for shades, to be at least 10½ inches across the top and 16 inches across the bottom. Saskatchewan Power was not alone. In New Brunswick, the local power commission sponsored a two-day course on lighting.Footnote 127 Hydro-Québec provided similar direction to its readers. Using material from General Electric, it specified the height of the bottom of floor lamp shades to exactly 47 inches.Footnote 128 These lighting recipes were made not just for floor lamps but also for table, wall, and desk lamps; ceiling fixtures; lighted valances and cornices; as well as for task lighting, such as for sewing, playing piano, watching television, cooking, dining, washing dishes, reading in bed, applying makeup, shaving, doing laundry, and ironing. Reflecting mid-century assumptions of “master” bedroom design and problem-solving through consumption, another recipe from General Electric advised homemakers that the best way to unify the experience of sleeping in twin beds was to mount a 6½-foot lighted wall bracket 30 inches above the mattresses. Moreover, the advice was not limited to indoor lights. Utilities provided guidance on outdoor lighting. Quebec Power offered a brochure for outdoor lighting for “after-dark beauty and family living.”Footnote 129 In its customer newsletter, BC Electric showed households how to beauty-light their gardens.Footnote 130
Lighting was also to be reimagined for the larger kitchens of the period. The Ontario Hydro mid-century modern kitchen, shown in Figure 5, was lit with eight potted lights, three floor lights, and a table lamp. Expanded to the size of the old “country-kitchen,” its minimalist décor and island re-integrated the kitchen as both a social space and workspace.
Figure 5. Ontario Hydro mid-century modern kitchen, circa 1960. (Source: Kitchen circa 1960, Box AB0170.1, Folder “Displays,” Ingenium Archives.)
With the home expanded and rooms appropriately heated, lighted, and redecorated, utilities suggested more time for family activities. In the 1950s, televisions began to regularly appear in advertising, fitting nicely in the comfortable, leisure-based domesticity of electrified post-war homes.Footnote 131 The range of family activities in advertising included listening to the radio or records, playing cards and games, running model trains, gardening, or just sitting together.Footnote 132 A Quebec Power brochure for outdoor lighting featured a birds-eye view of the yard with a tennis court and pool, included images of families playing tennis, croquet, and archery.Footnote 133
Not only did Canadian electric utilities show their residential customers how to use time saved for more expressive and happy family lives but also how to host and socialize in their new homes. Rather than limiting social events to halls and restaurants and, weather permitting, parks and backyards, parties could happen year-round at home. Consequently, parties featured prominently in utility marketing in the 1950s and 1960s. To address the challenge for women with time increasingly devoted to jobs and busy family lives, utilities provided suggestions on how to entertain. According to a 1961 power utility newsletter:
Informality is the theme for entertaining in most homes today; and a buffet supper has a happy air of informality that adds to that feeling of being able to eat to your hearts’ content, even as you relax while conversing with friends.Footnote 134
The image that accompanied the article, shown in Figure 6, showed customers what to expect at these parties. In addition to selling electric hot plates, monthly newsletters and cookbooks published by utilities informed women how to cook and prepare the table for guests. Canadian utilities also suggested what their domestic customers could do after dinner. There were sports in the well-lighted yard, card games at the table, hockey games on the television as well as conversation, dessert, and freshly percolated coffee in the living room. Saskatchewan Power’s public relations department suggested dancing. They also published a guidebook for its customers and delivered a square-dancing program on a local radio station.Footnote 135 Power in these ads provided a means for deeper and stronger friendships in spending more time together in leisure.
Figure 6. “Entertaining – buffet style,” 1961. This a middle-class home, as illustrated by the limited seating and side tables. Guests sit on stool (man) or floor (woman); drinking glass, cigarette package and ashtray are also on the floor. The martini pitcher and bottles of alcohol (more likely spirits than wine, given English Canadian norms of 1960s) occupy the centre of the tableaux, showing customers what to bring as gifts and expect before dinner. As is conventional in the dinner party tableaux, the hostess holds the attention of the room. She towers over and beneath the guests, nearly touching the top and bottom frame. She is distinguished from the other three women in her light-coloured clothes, matching those of the men. If there is any doubt that she is a unique, largely-than-life super hero, she is revealed here as not only the (most likely) dinner party organizer, hostess, shopper and cook, but also performer and mother, with “M” on her sweater like the “S” of superman. (Source: Saskatchewan Power, “Entertaining – buffet style,” Power Talks 12 [1961], Box 1877, Sask Archives.)
Although rarely mentioned in marketing material before the war, sports featured prominently afterward, whether in lighted backyards, playgrounds, courts, or outdoor neighborhood rinks, as well as the new powered indoor facilities. Baseball, bowling, curling, and hockey leagues filled the pages of power utility newsletters.Footnote 136 With more leisure time, Canadians increasingly registered themselves and their children for lessons and leagues.Footnote 137 Weekday evenings became normalized as times for families to spend together under the lights at bowling alleys, baseball diamonds, hockey and curling rinks, football fields, and church basements for scout meetings. And at home, parents did the organizational work for these groups.
Seasonal festivities such as Halloween were also in the plans of the electric industry. Electrical suppliers sought to benefit from the transformation of Halloween from a nineteenth-century night of “pranks, tricks, illusions, and anarchy” to mid-twentieth-century door-to-door treat-giving to youngsters.Footnote 138 In the 1910s, General Electric Canada was an early mover in the emerging culture of trick-or-treating, adding to their sales of strings of Santa Claus and snowmen light bulbs via the shape of pumpkin heads and witches.Footnote 139 A New Brunswick Electric Power Commission home economist wrote in the late 1950s about the recent past, before electric street lighting, when Halloween was then an evening at home with taffy and families telling stories that were full of fear, ghosts, and tricks. With lighted streets and houses, it subsequently become “more fun than fear.”Footnote 140 In addition to lighting, utilities helped with the cultivation of Halloween in developing plans for themed parties, complete with recommendations for invitations, decorations, cakes, candy apples, face painting, games, and gifts.Footnote 141 The lighting up of Halloween was, however, nothing compared to what utilities did in marketing for Christmas.
Christmas was the great annual celebration in utility public relations and marketing materials. No effort was to be spared in its celebration. Utilities recommended indoor and outdoor lighting, recipes for seasonal parties and Christmas day menus, electric-powered presents for family and friends, and decorations.Footnote 142 Utility chairmen and general managers addressed their residential customers with wishes for peace on Earth, good will, joy, and happiness. Although the religious meaning was emphasized, so too were the commercial, social, and family experiences of Christmas. The general manager of one utility expressed common themes in his 1954 annual address:
Few of us … can think of the approaching Yuletide Season without conjuring up visions of loaded dining tables, gaily wrapped gifts and the glamour and sparkle that make a Christmas what is in our happy country. All the better meaning of happy family life, possibly taken too much for granted at our other times, becomes focused in our minds during the Christmas Season.Footnote 143
In a 1955 ad from SaskPower, the meaning of Christmas was synonymous with the meaning of electric power: both had happiness as their raison d’être.Footnote 144 Happiness, in other words, was the primary job for customers of electric power.
Conclusion
US histories of mid-twentieth-century electrification emphasize the social and cultural shaping of power technologies. David Nye, in Consuming Power, shows energy system changes as being less about the development of technology and more about the development of culture. According to Nye, electrification neither increased nor colonized leisure time. Rather, it intensified an already ongoing transition from Victorian homes with public/private divisions, dark colors, ornamentation, family gatherings by hearths, and task-based production to homes that were lighter; cleaner; safer; more open; easier to maintain; and designed for consumption, efficiency, isolation, and a minimalist aesthetic.Footnote 145 Behind this transition were emergent values of home life as leisured, child-centered, managed, efficient, and enjoyable. For Nye, these homes and the new popular culture of the twentieth century arose not from elites or corporations in colonialization models but from consumers.Footnote 146 Likewise, Mark Rose, in Cities of Light and Heat, shows the influence of culture, politics, and cities in shaping technological change.
The contribution to business history in this article is to show both the transition from “family-as-labor” to “family-as-leisure” and the role of electric utilities in shaping domestic culture and the rise of leisure jobs or “leisure-as-labor.” The role of utilities was similar but different than that of manufacturers of durable goods during the period.Footnote 147 Like electric appliance manufacturers, utilities developed home service organizations to deliver product demonstrations, speeches, and cookbooks while disseminating messages of convenience and money-saving as well as gender roles.Footnote 148 However, durable-goods manufacturers turned to a narrower range of organizations to learn about feminine taste—specifically advertising executives, consultants, market researchers, and home economists. Utilities pursued their role by opening up their marketing to social movements and groups that created and disseminated these new meanings of family and social life. The business model innovation exploited in BC Electric; Montreal Light, Heat & Power; Toronto Hydro, Saskatchewan Power; Shawinigan Water & Power; and many other utilities brought allied social groups into the shared production and dissemination of their message.Footnote 149 In the case of Saskatchewan Power’s monthly Power Talks newsletters to households, the contributors included academics, appliance manufacturers, farmers, food producers, in-house graphic designers, home economists, homemakers, medical doctors, nurses, nutritionists, radio station managers, sports associations representatives, and utility staff.
The marketing of electric living to rationalize the home and make customers conversant about kWhs was the least successful of the campaigns. Although sales figures suggest that residential customers did buy into the basic value proposition of low-cost and high-consumption power, utilities failed in their goal to educate the public to think in terms of utility economics, household kWhs, or lighting-by-inches. Instead, money became the basis to quantify power usage, like dollars for gasoline, versus thinking in liters, joules, or British thermal units.
There was more convergence with ascendent twentieth-century norms in the campaigns to show customers how power may be used to make family relationships more intimate, loving, and happier as part of “a new companionate family ideal that emerged in the early twentieth century.”Footnote 150 Utility marketing materials showed the emotional and organizational labor of the new family and social life. In ads from the 1920s, women could finally sit and talk with their husbands at the breakfast table, which is what marketers assumed women wanted to do. Toasters in these ads were marketed as emotional-connection machines, warming bread and marriage alike. Canadian marketers in the 1930s diverged from some US-based Reddy Kilowatt campaigns that sold electricity as household servants. Instead, utilities like Dominion Electric Power saw their Depression-era customers wanting brightened lives of leisure, play, and domestic happiness. In response, their ads and those from others like Shawinigan Water & Power showed happy, contented families talking, reading, and playing in electrically lighted living rooms. Appliances in these ads were sold as meaning more time for family activities. Likewise, lighted outdoor yards became grounds for family play in the summer and rinks in the winter. And if family members needed some privacy, advertising sold that too, with “typical homes” providing 600 square feet per person in the 1960s, about double the figure in Canada and Europe at the time.Footnote 151 Similarly, these utilities helped shape domestic expectations of social lives. Images of brightly lit kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms, and decks showed customers how to confidently create the right look for socializing with friends and neighbors. Lighting helped transform Halloween from scary tales told at home to well-lit neighborhoods and cheerful front-door greetings of trick-or-treaters. Contemporary visions of Christmas recreated the warm glow of the fireplace, with powered presents; lights everywhere; baking stuffed into freezers; and peace on Earth, joy, and happiness for all. Beyond the home, new public and social worlds opened up in new electric-powered indoor gymnasiums, rinks, and bowling alleys constructed in the post-war, and to where Canadians increasingly drove their children and watched them play sports.
This research is intended to lead to other questions about gender in sociotechnical energy transitions and the transformation of family and social life. Given the scope of the article, much has been left out, such as an examination of regional or international differences in utility marketing. Future research should also contribute to understanding firm-level approaches to energy transitions, for example, utility business strategies and corporate organization among very different private utilities such as Shawinigan Water & Power and Montreal Light, Heat & Power and public ones such as Saskatchewan Power.Footnote 152 New studies of business history and gender in energy transitions should also expand to include state- and political- economy approaches. The methods in this article may be applied to power utility marketing from 1970 to the present, to investigate changing meanings of the home and family and social life. This also applies to understandings of contemporary scholarship as it seeks to realize decarbonized power grids, expansion of electricity into mobility and heating markets, and changing social practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These include the literatures on digital housekeepingFootnote 153 and multi-level perspective/sociotechnical transitions.Footnote 154
Professor Foord has published histories on powered prosthetics, carbon black, and electric power industries as well as on science, technology, and innovation policies.
