Domestic technologies and the modern home

This article explores the history of electrical technologies for the home. It focuses on their symbolic dimensions in product design, marketing, and advertising, looking at how labour-saving and media technologies for the home have been promoted in relation to social ideals of modernity, progress, gender, and social life since the late nineteenth century. It also explores cultural anxieties and uses of domestic machines through to the present. Finally, the article focuses on the US context, where home technologies were first widely adapted in the early twentieth century, and it traces this through to the global digital home technologies of today. © 2012