Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users

Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev's famous "kitchen debate" in 1958involved more than the virtues of American appliances. Both Nixon and Khrushchev recognized thepolitical symbolism of the modern kitchen; the kind of technological innovation represented in thiseveryday context spoke to the political system that produced it. The kitchen connects the"big" politics of politicians and statesmen to the "small" politics of users andinterest groups. Cold War Kitchen looks at the kitchen as material object and symbol, consideringthe politics and the practices of one of the most famous technological icons of the twentiethcentury. Defining the kitchen as a complex technological artifact as important as computers, cars,and nuclear missiles, the book examines the ways in which a range of social actors in Europe shapedthe kitchen as both ideological construct and material practice. These actors--from manufacturersand modernist architects to housing reformers and feminists--constructed and domesticated thetechnological innovations of the postwar kitchen. The home became a "mediation junction"in which women users and others felt free to advise producers from the consumer's point of view. Inessays illustrated by striking period photographs, the contributors to Cold War Kitchen considersuch topics as Soviet consumers' ambivalent responses to the American dream kitchen argued over byNixon and Khrushchev; the Frankfurter Kuche, a European modernist kitchen of the interwar period(and its export to Turkey when its designer fled the Nazis); and the British state-subsidizedkitchen design so innovative that it was mistaken for a luxury American product. The concludingessays challenge the received wisdom of past interpretations of the kitchen debate.

Ruth Oldenziel is Professor of American and European Technology at the Technical University of Einhoven and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam.