What Makes Washday Less Blue? Gender, Nation, and Technology Choice in Postwar Canada JOY PARR The way Canadian women did their wash confounded the appli ance managers ofAmerican branch plants in the late 1950s. In 1959 wringer washers—a technology little altered in twenty years, and by contemporary engineering standards a technology entirely super seded—outsold automatics three to one in Canada. This was exactly the reverse of the pattern in the United States, where automatics that year accounted for 75 percent of sales.1 “Theoretically there is no market for ordinary washing machines as everyone should be buying the automatic type,” a senior offical at Canadian General Electric asserted counterfactually. He added in a bemused attempt at explanation, “I suppose, however, that the big market for ordinary washing machines lies in less developed countries.” E. P. Zimmer man, who ran the appliance division at Canadian Westinghouse, yearly through the 1950s forecast a breakthrough for automatic ma chines in Canada, as did his counterparts at Kelvinator and Frig idaire, and yearly found that sales of wringer machines remained strong. “This is strange,” he affirmed (implicitly rejecting the underdeveloped countries explanation), “because usually Canada is much closer to U.S. trends than this.”2 Readers familiarwith the literature on domestic technology might Dr. Parr is Farley Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. This article was first presented at the Technological Change Conference at Oxford University in September 1993. The author is grateful to Shirley Tillotson, Marilyn MacDonald, James Williams, Bea Millar, R. Cole Harris, and Anthony Scott for comments on an earlier draft, and to Ingrid Epp and Margaret-Anne Knowles for research assistance. ’Canadian Westinghouse Hamilton, Employment Forecast Interview Report (EFIR) May 5, 1959, RG 20 767, National Archives ofCanada (NAC) ; “Thor Gathers Speed after US Agreement,’’ Marketing, April 24, 1959, 8. Marketingwas the Canadian equivalent of Printer’s Ink. 2Canadian General Electric, October 7, 1958, EFIR December 6, 1962, RG 20 765 23-100-C27, NAC; Zimmerman’s comments are in Canadian Westinghouse, EFIR May 6, 1959, RG 20 767, NAC; for Kelvinator see RG 20 773 NAC.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3801-0006J01.00 153 154 Joy Parr share this puzzlement, because the fine work published in the early 1980s by Strasser and Cowan on the United States case has served as the template for understanding household technology in the North Atlantic world. United States production of automatics surpassed wringers definitively in 1951. Although Strasser and Cowan are atten tive to distinctions between the priorities ofmakers and users, in the case of washing machine technology they report not conflict but a quick convergence of interest.3 They find that automatics were ac cepted into American households as soon as they were made avail able by U.S. manufacturers.4 Cowan’s justly famous parable about how the refrigerator got its hum, which has the giant electrical apparatus and automobile manu facturers successfully championing the condensor cooling technol ogy over which they commanded proprietary rights, only makes the prolonged failure of automatic washers in the Canadian market seem more inexplicable.5 For it was these same American makers, and for the same reasons, who intended to have Canadian women of the 1950s do their washing in automatic machines. In fact, it was not until 1966, fifteen years later than in the United States, that Ca nadian automatic sales passed those of wringer washers.6 A European observer might not be so befuddled by the Canadian pattern. In the early 1950s when automatics were coming to domi nate the U.S. market, fewer than one in five British households owned any washing machine. Still, in 1969 only 5 percent owned automatics. Most domestic laundry was done either in a copper boiler, a variation on the wringer washer which heated the water and used the boiling action rather than a central agitator to circulate the clothes, or in the modern technology of choice, a twin-tub which ’Judy Wajcman suggests in her study of refrigerators, however, that Cowan re duced housewives to the role of consumers, responsive only to price, and told the story as a rivalry between manufacturing...