The forthcoming Myths and Realities event at the British Library (to be held on 29 April) will explore whether we ‘work to live or live to work'? Many of us are working longer hours than ever before, and the age of retirement is increasing, while at the same time there is increasing job satisfaction reported many areas. The event will consider whether work is a means to an end or if it is the end itself. In this post, Toby Austin Locke explores the idea of work in our society.

We all have those mornings when we wake up and breathe a deep sigh at the prospect of dragging ourselves from bed, to return to our office or place of work to start all over again. Even those of us who are lucky enough to work in jobs we enjoy, in which I thankfully include myself, every so often face a sinking feeling at the sound of the six o’clock alarm. Our dreams of youth, of being an artist, musician or robot, seem distant absurdities, the follies of youthful imagination.

We all have these moments of despair at the reality of work, at realising we have become something other than the object of our dreams, but as far as I know there is only one case of someone having woken up to find themselves transformed to a giant bug…Ok, maybe not a real case, I do know that Kakfa’s Metamorphosis (2009) isn’t a true story. But regardless of whether it is factual or literary, the point remains the same

Franz Kafka, 1906 

The transformation of Gregor in the Metamorphosis is often considered to mirror Kafka’s life. As his diaries and correspondence (1982) show us, he was torn between a deep dissatisfaction with his job and an immense guilt resulting from his desire to write. His family, and particularly his father, did not consider authorship a worthy way to spend his life – he should work, work hard, and earn good money to support himself and his family. His writings demonstrate the clear anguish these conflicting interests caused within him.

This guilt that arose within Kafka was explored by avant-garde French theorist Georges Bataille in one of his later works, Literature and Evil (1985). In the only existing television interview with Bataille he discusses how Kafka is exemplary in showing how literature is on the side of ‘evil’, of how “writing is the opposite of working” (1958). This seems like an odd statement, and not particularly logical - Bataille is known for his off the wall propositions, next to statements such as “the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space” (1988), the claim that writing is ‘evil’ looks like common sense.

A little contextualisation helps to uncover what is meant by this statement. Bataille comes from a line of philosophy that, following from Nietzsche, considers ‘evil’ as an entirely relative component of socially constructed values and moral codes. ‘Good and evil’ do not hold the same absolute qualities in this way of thinking, as they do in, say, the Christian way of considering morality. ‘Good and evil’ are produced by society’s moral standards and expectations.

German sociologist Max Weber famously described the Protestant work ethic as part of “the spirit of capitalism” (2011). The notion of working hard, of bringing your best to a job whatever that job may be, of being useful, productive, and noble in your labour was considered by Weber as central to capitalist societies’ moral codes. And you can certainly see his point, Government employment policy, as a browse of the employment section of the British Library’s Social Welfare Portal will show, has long been oriented around ensuring people contribute their labour to society, ensuring people are useful and productive. This notion is ever more salient in contemporary government rhetoric, and one could barely ask for a better example than the opening line of George Osborne’s latest budget speech, where he declared “this is a budget for people who aspire to work hard and get on” (2013).

This helps us understand what Bataille means by his statement; what he is saying is that literature goes against this productive work ethic and as this work ethic is generally considered virtuous and ‘good’, the unproductive act of writing literature, the non-useful expenditure of time that it entails, is ‘evil’. Literature is an unproductive use of time and energy.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once considered hunter-gather societies as The Original Affluent Society (2004). He outlined how it was precisely because these societies did not have the drive to work, to produce, because it was considered virtuous, that they were more affluent. These social groups do not work because of a moral code that considers work ‘good’, that insists that the use of time must be focused on productivity and utility, they work for their needs and as a result spend much of their time engaged in seemingly unproductive activity, they are affluent in their leisure time and the time they spend with their social groups and families.

Situationist International

All this throws up various questions. Why do we work such long hours? Why do we spend so much of our lives in our places of work? Why do we feel the need to always be productive, to always be useful? Do we simply adhere to a socially constituted moral expectation when we work? Or is it something else? Is it that many of us quite simply enjoy working? There are certainly days when one can be forgiven for sympathising with the cries of the radical group Situationist International to “abolish work” (1981). Sometimes, we have to ask ourselves - is work really a means to an end, or, in our societies, is it the end in itself?

Myths and Realities

The event 'Work to live, or live to work?' will be held on the evening of Monday 29 April at the British Library. For further details and booking see our 'What's On' pages.

References and useful links

Bataille, Georges (1958) Interview with Pierre Dumayet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA

Batille, Georges (1985) Literature and Evil, London: Boyars, X.950/46419

Batille, Georges (1988) The Accursed Share: an essay on general economy, Vol. 1: consumption, New York: Zone Books, YC.1988.b.10164 

Kafka, Franz (1982) The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-23, Max Brod (eds), Harmondsworth: Penguin, X.958/15070 

Kafka, Franz (2009) Metamorphosis, London: Arcturus, YK.2011.a.28425 

Knabb, Ken (eds) (1981) Situationist International Anthrology, Berkeley California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 83/26856

Osborne, George (2013) Budget speech: full text, New Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/george-osbornes-budget-speech-full-text

Sahlins, Marshall (2004) ‘The Original Affluent Society’ in Stone Age Economics, Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, YC.2005.a.1789

Weber, Max (2011) The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Oxford University Press, YC.2011.a.16275 

Toby Austin Locke is currently working for the British Library Social Sciences team on the Social Welfare Portal and is due to start working towards his doctorate in October 2013 at Goldsmiths College, University of London. You can contact him on twitter @tobyalocke or read more of his blog-posts at www.plurality-press.info

 

In this post Sarah Evans outlines materials and resources available at the British Library that can be used to research social, political and cultural aspects of Britain in the 1980s

The events of the last two weeks have fuelled discussion about British society, politics and culture during the 1980s. Serendipitously, I was today browsing through the British Library Sounds website and came across this new oral history collection entitled ‘Observing the 1980s’  which features interviews with those involved in key events such as the Falklands War, the uprisings in Brixton and the Miners’ Strike, as well as on social issues such as unemployment and HIV. It brings together different voices from those who lived through the 1980s and is part of a project led by the University of Sussex, in collaboration with the British Library and the Mass Observation Archive.

As well as this collection, there are many others which offer insight into politics and life during the 1980s. Indeed, the recently launched website ‘Sisterhood and After’ includes extracts with women who were involved in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. For example, the below extract from Rebecca Johnson about the idea of ‘Embrace the Base’:

‘I don’t know who came up with the idea to call Embrace the Base but what came out of that idea of the action was, we were going to bring women to Greenham in their thousands.  We were going to do it on the anniversary of the NATO decision to put Cruise and Pershing into Europe and that was December 12^th 1979, so we were going to do this on December 12^th 1982 and that was a Sunday.  And having got loads of women to come to the camp we were going to invite as many as possible to stay and help us close the base so it was Embrace the Base on Sunday, Close the Base on Monday.  And this action began to kind of form in our minds as a way to bring women to see what’s going on, to see the sheer immensity of this nuclear base expansion ‘cos it had been a nuclear base for quite a while.’

Embracing the base, Greenham Common December 1982, near to Greenham, West Berkshire, Great Britain. At noon on December 12th 1982, 30,000 women held hands around the 6 mile perimeter fence of the former USAF base, in protest against the UK government's decision to site American cruise missiles here. The installation went ahead but so did the protest - for 19 years women maintained their presence at the Greenham Common peace camp. This image was taken from the Geograph project collection. See this photograph's page on the Geograph website for the photographer's contact details. The copyright on this image is owned by ceridwen and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. 

Alongside the oral history collections which document personal experience, the British Library sound collections include other kinds of recordings which will no doubt be of value to researchers in many different disciplines. For instance, the collections include recordings of speeches of the major political parties during the 1980s. Indeed, I have just found Margaret Thatcher’s speeches at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference in Brighton and the 1989 Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool.

Researchers of pop culture during the 1980s will be interested in the music recordings and pop videos which are held at the British Library. From The Specials singing Ghost Town to Kylie Minogue talking the audience through her favourite songs on BBC Radio One, the sound collections offer the opportunity to remember the events which fuelled musical responses or to be catapulted back to one’s younger self (I also just found ‘Smash Hits’ magazine in the main catalogue!).

Nearly three years ago my colleague Dr. Phil Hatfield and I organised, with a number of external partners, an event which brought together witnesses from the uprisings (sometimes called ‘riots’) of the early 1980s, alongside those who have subsequently undertaken research on what happened. The chair was Professor Gail Lewis and the speakers were Linda Bellos OBE, Wally Brown CBE, Kunle Olulode, Prof. Louis Kushnick OBE, Dr Anandi Ramamurthy and Sean Creighton. The podcast for this event is available on the British Library Website.

The recent political, cultural and public discussion about the impact and legacy of social change during the 1980s has certainly shown the need for researchers to be able to access a variety of materials relating to recent history. For those who remember the 1980s and for those who want to find out more, the British Library’s diverse collections are a good place to start.

Sarah Evans recounts an especially absorbing session at the British Sociological Association's annual conference which examined archival research in sociological inquiry.

Last week I managed to spend some time at the annual conference of the British Sociological Association. There was one session in particular that inspired me in relation to my work at the British Library. A session on 'Archival Research in Sociological Inquires and Beyond' brought together four academics who have undertaken feminist, archival research in different ways: Liz Stanley, Maria Tamboukou, Andrea Salter and Niamh Moore.

Liz Stanley has written about archival research in the social sciences as an emerging field, and as someone who works with social science researchers in the archive, I'm aware that there are still relatively few sociologists who work closely with archival materials. It was great to hear the issues given voice and discussed by real advocates of archival research.

One member of the audience asked a question about how the sociologist in the archive is different to a historian; must the starting point be a different one? How does the methodology differ? What are the different epistemologies and practices that take place within the different disciplines, and how do these come into being through engagement with the archive and the resulting interpretations? I began to wonder whether the pressures and limitations of the REF exercise might go someway to explain the relative dearth of sociologists within the archive - could there be concern about mis/recognition in relation to 'units of assessment'? Or are the main issues in training and awareness?

Liz Stanley and Andrea Salter gave presentations on the different methodological and theoretical issues which arose during the process of undertaking archival research, specifically in relation to their research on Olive Schreiner's letters which has produced the Olive Schreiner Letters Online. Andrea Salter spoke about how the production of a digital 'archive of an archive' requires the practice of a particular kind of sensitivity which draws repeated connections between past and present. Their work made me think about the relationship between the researchers who use Olive Schreiner Letters Online and the researchers (including Liz and Andrea) who have used the original letters in the archive. If I had thought of it at the time I would have asked about the conversations which have taken place between these different users; no doubt these conversations are productive.

I very much enjoyed hearing about Feminist Webs, a participatory feminist project which has created an archive and produced an online resource for those involved in youth and community work with young women. Niamh Moore described the process of creating and building the archive and the process of change which occurs in the imagination when one works in the archive. Some of what she and the other speakers said connected to my own experience of using archival material in which reality can be suspended at certain moments (with the deep imaginative absorption one might experience in reading a great novel), whilst at other moments the social world is enhanced through occasions of real clarity. These very different kinds of thought seem to fuel one another. Maria Tamboukou's paper spoke beautifully about these moments and of how working in the archive generates particular imaginative connections through time and space in her paper on 'archival rhythms'.

What struck me across all of the presentations was the way in which archival research requires a sensitivity to multiple audiences and stakeholders (dead or alive) - from the people who produced the material, to those whose lives have been documented and represented, to the future researchers who may use the 'archive of an archive' which is necessarily produced as we sort and organise archival materials in the process of our research. This session really inspired me to seek out more ways to work closely with sociologists in the archive.

Addendum

25 April 2013: I received a lovely email from Liz Stanley following this post which alerted me to an article which she, Andrea Salter and Helen Dampier have published in Cultural Sociology and which examines and answers many of the questions raised here. The link to the online copy is here and the print version will be out in early summer.

What do the British Library's collections offer to those interested in examining issues around food, fear and risk?

A recent news story about 'dangerous' triangular flapjacks (!) which have been banned in an Essex school prompted me to think about the different ways that foods can be perceived to be risky, and to the varying degrees of proportion in how we respond to risks around food.

Risky foods and food scares (in varying extremes) seem to be constantly in the news, ranging from large-scale cases of contamination - such as the horsemeat scandal - to daily stories about the possible threats and benefits of consuming too much, or too little, of a particular food type. Our cultural obsession with the potential dangers of too much/too little food, contamination through eating (though additives and suspect ingredients which might make us ill, destroy our health, ruin our beauty or make us age etc.) can be seen beyond the news stories we see everyday. Indeed, we probably all remember literary examples of dangerous foods from the stories we read as children (from Snow White's poisoned apple, to other examples of tempting foods as a currency of evil such as Edmund's Turkish delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). In the academic realm, managing risk to children through diet and nutrition is a huge topic across the disciplines and is a major subject for many of the cohort and longitudinal studies as well as being explored by research groups such as Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent.

 

  The 'Frances' Regulated Feeding Bottle, 1981. Evan.6704 

The British Library's collections are of particular value to those seeking to examine and understand changes in social and cultural practices. For example, the Library's collections enable a historical examination of changes in knowledge and culture around feeding, especially in relation to children and families. These show that managing risk and promoting health through carefully planned diets and feeding schedules are not new concerns. The Library's collections include many child reading manuals from the 1850s onwards, such as:

Baker, Benson (1880) ‘Milk for Babes:’ How to Feed an Infant. London: Bailliere, Tindall & Cox. 

Bull, William (1890) How Shall I Feed My Infant? Hints and Suggestions Valuable to Those in Charge of Children. London: Dodds. 

Doctor. (1898) Baby Feeding: A Doctor’s Advice to Mothers on the Rearing and Management of Infants. Bristol: John Wright & Co. 

Like many people, I am always drawn to the accounts about health, risk and food that appear in newspapers. I'm constantly thinking about our family's food (and navigating our different food allergies!) and am fascinated by how risks around food are communicated, perceived and managed by individuals and families. The sociology of risk and 'risk culture' has become a useful tool for framing these discussions and I have found on the British Library's Ethos service numerous PhD theses which examine food risk from this perspective. The first couple of examples that the search engine pulls up are:

Coulson, Neil Stewart.(2000) Concepts of healthy eating and perception of food related risks in children and adolescents. University of Exeter.

Shaw, Alison.(2000) What are 'they' doing to our food?: expert and lay understandings of food risks. University of Bristol.

With my family's allergies to think about, I've found that the access the British Library provides to scientific papers exploring the causes, effects and management of food allergies an invaluable way of reading around the subject and understanding 'risks' in a way that enables my ability to make informed decisions as a parent. I'm not sure that the journals will have much to say about the hazards of the triangular flapjack…but still I feel confident enough to leave these at the very bottom of my own list of food-related risks.

This post was written by Sarah Evans and any views expressed are her own.

Dr. Polly Russell, Lead Curator for Human Geography and Anthropology, writes about her experience of being immersed in a collaborative, feminist, oral history project. She reflects on the difficult process of selecting interviewees and describes the the vibrancy and depth of the resulting interviews.

www.bl.uk/sisterhood

On Friday 8^th March, International Women’s Day, the British Library held an event with 150 guests to celebrate the launch of a new oral history archive and website. This marked the end of a three year research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, called ‘Sisterhood & After: the Women’s Liberation Oral History Project.’ This project has collected oral histories with Women’s Liberation campaigners to create an archive that captures women’s fights for equal rights and liberation in the UK from 1968-1990 through a series of in-depth interviews with 60 feminist activists and intellectuals.

Speakers for the launch event included two of the project’s interviewees, Sally Alexander, feminist activist and historian, and Susie Orbach, co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue. Sally spoke beautifully of the value of the archive for future historians – she noted how oral history takes seriously emotion, subjectivity and memory as important analytical categories for the historian and researcher. Susie, a veteran campaigner, talked of how the archive would inform new generations of activists and she also reflected, as a psychotherapist, on the process of being interviewed for an oral history

Equal Pay for Equal Work Badge. Image courtesy of the Women's Library.

For the last three years much of my work as a curator at the British Library in the Social Science team has been dominated by this project. Working with Dr Margaretta Jolly and Research Associate Dr Rachel Cohen at the University of Sussex, we have attempted to create a permanent record of the voices and stories of women who were part of the WLM. This has been a wonderful but challenging task. On a practical level we have struggled with the problem of trying to represent a movement involving thousands of women with just 60 oral history interviews. Working closely with an Advisory Board we wrangled over a long-list of more than 400 names and whittled this down, through debate and discussion, to 60.

We wanted to make sure that we captured the accounts of women from across Britain and from a range of different backgrounds, as well as those women whose contribution to the intellectual project of feminism is well known. Interviewees included, for instance, Una Kroll, one-time surgeon and campaigner for women’s rights to be priests; Betty Cook, founder member of Barnsley Miners’ Wives Action Group; Karen McMinn, Co-Ordinator for Women’s Aid Northern Ireland and; Rowena Arshad, member of the first black women’s group in Scotland and Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Scotland 2001-2007. We have worked hard to try and counter simplistic representations of ‘feminists’ and the little that is known about the women who chose the term for themselves during this period. These oral histories, available in full via the British Library or in edited clips on the website, last, on average, seven hours each and are fully transcribed and summarised. Taken individually they are deep biographies accounting for the circumstances and consequences of an individual’s activism. Taken as a whole they bring to life a period of exceptional political vibrancy in which ideas about work, relationships, family and children, the political process, the state, sexuality, culture and identity were freshly explored through the lenses of feminism and social justice.

If interviewee selection has been one focus of our energies, another has been trying to tell the story of the WLM on a website aimed at ‘A’ level and university students. Arguments about feminism, gender and the WLM are contested, subtle and complex but by necessity our website had to be accessible, engaging and informative to a non-specialist audience. In the end we have let our interviewee's voices lead the site with more than 120 oral history extracts and short documentary films used to prompt analysis, discussion and debate.

If this lady was a car... Image courtesy of © Jill Posener

For me, ‘Sisterhood & After’ is about creating permanent record of the voices and stories of women who were part of the WLM and to provide an account of the movement in all its complexity, contradictions and colour. But I also hope it will create a space of encounters where everyone can be inspired to identify with the political project of feminism and with the experience and challenge of activism in general. The launch event on Friday was not the end of something but the start – we hope that over time the oral history collection will grow in size and scope.

Useful links

There is a long list of useful links on the Sisterhood and After Learning website at the British Library.

Jonnie Robinson and Holly Gilbert write about the British Library's VoiceBank - a collection of 15,000 recordings made by the public during the Evolving English exhibition. It includes voices from around the world with wonderful examples of everyday speech, accent and dialect. Read more below...

The Herculean task of cataloguing the British Library VoiceBank is now underway. The VoiceBank is a collection of sound recordings made by visitors to the Evolving English exhibition which took place at the British Library between November 2010 and April 2011. The exhibition looked at the history and diversity of the English language in all its forms so it was a good place to collect some new information about contemporary variation in spoken English. For this purpose, tucked just inside the entrance were three specially constructed booths containing a telephone and a set of instructions. On lifting the phone receiver, contributors heard prompts that asked them to provide anonymised information about themselves including gender, year of birth, whether they spoke any languages at home other than English and where they thought their accent was from. They were then give the option of talking about a word or phrase that they found interesting or amusing or of reading the popular children’s story ‘Mr Tickle’, or both. Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Sociolinguistics and Education at the British Library and curator of the Evolving English exhibition, describes the reasons for using the Mr Tickle text in a previous blog post and on Radio 4’s Today programme. Around 15,000 people contributed to this incredible collection and we are now in the process of uncovering the exciting diversity and rich research potential of the recordings. You may even have made a recording yourself.

After listening to a mere 1,920 of the VoiceBank recordings, the variety in terms of age and geography is already astounding. The oldest participants were born in 1928 and include a German refugee who explains how her family used the word ‘emigranto’ to describe the mixture of languages used at first by immigrants which combined German syntax with English words such as in the term ‘geboiltes egg’ as well as a man from Tyneside who uses the word ‘dunch’ to mean ‘collision’. The youngest contributor is a boy from Chicago born in 2003 who simply says ‘bagel’. The contributors have accents that come from across the world including of course a huge number of locations in the UK and Ireland, as well as many other European countries from Portugal and the Channel Islands to Serbia and Estonia. There are voices from African countries including South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria and contributions from Russia, Australia and New Zealand as well as many parts of Asia and the Middle East including India, Japan, Israel and Iran. South America is represented by voices from Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela and there are contributions from several US states, Canada and the Caribbean. So far no voice from Antarctica but you never know, according to Wikipedia the first child was born in the South Pole in 1913.

We’ll be writing more about some of the fascinating words and phrases discussed by the participants in the coming weeks. The first batch of 1,731 VoiceBank recordings has now been uploaded to the Sound and Moving Image catalogue and is available in the British Library Reading Rooms. Right now I’m researching the word ‘shuntler’, used by one contributor’s mum in Chesterfield, Derbyshire in the north of England but thought to be a made-up word by his dad. A Sheffield dialect dictionary published in 1891 may contain just the information I need…

Gill Ridgley writes about developing and managing a British Library website and resource which examine the 2012 Games from a social science perspective.

This time last year doesn’t seem so long ago, and yet a lot happened in those 12 months - a truism, but particularly ‘true’ for the two curators working on the Social Science Department’s Sport and Society website: Gill Ridgley and Simone Bacchini.

Work started on this site in 2008 when a London 2012-related Departmental project was first mooted. The Olympics and Paralympics looked set to provide an ideal opportunity to debate the social science aspects of sport and the Games itself, and more particularly to showcase the wonderful resources of the British Library in this area. The medium of choice was the Internet, which would make the content we planned to include more widely accessible.

Designing the website was a complex process. It had to appeal to a wide audience, from those with a basic interest in the subject to those doing advanced research. We hoped to have something for everyone: bibliographies of the BL sport collections; original research produced by staff and external contributors, links to relevant materials on the web; and details of new events and publications. A great deal was learned in the process, not least the mechanics of site architecture and the editing and creation of pages in the Dreamweaver software. This was also where our training as librarians came in handy: what topics would we divide the subject up into and where would we fit the different contributions we received within this framework? Subject classification began to reveal itself as a very inexact science!

However, perhaps the most rewarding part of creating and maintaining the website was the opportunity it gave us to make new acquaintances outside the Library. Keeping a watchful eye on people researching in the field from undergraduates to university professors; blogging and tweeting information about the progress of the website and the Games; commissioning articles and researching the BL collections; liaising with publishers: all these aspects of Sport and Society improved our knowledge of the wider sports research environment and the needs of those working in it, and also revealed the often untrodden pathways in the Library’s sports collections. This combination of factors proved very fruitful for all concerned, as we discovered what types of material interested researchers the most, and identified gaps in the collections. Wonderful images began to emerge from obscure books and journals, like this one:

Don't Ride Horses

One of the indirect outcomes of our concentration on the London Games and sporting resources more generally in 2012 was a number of events in the Library which really raised the profile of the collections. The first was our conference, Sourcing sport in May 2012 which looked at the Library’s sports collections across the range of the social sciences and humanities, and which shone a spotlight on such topics as Dutch canal pole vaulting & mass sports and physical education in the USSR. This event was soon followed by the Olympex exhibition – an IOC-sponsored philatelic exhibition centering on the Olympics & Paralympics which showed numerous philatelic items and artefacts owned by collectors from around the world. The Library was able to fly the official Olympic flag while the exhibition was on, and was presented afterwards with its own London 2012 torch.

So it’s win-win for all concerned when it comes to engaging with what’s going on in the wider non-library environment, not least because all our hard work won’t be going to waste. Sport and Society will soon be archived in the UK Web Archive, along with other sites about the London Olympics and Paralympics, and will therefore continue to be available to the researchers of the future.

 

Inspired by the Mary Berry Story on BBC Two, we decided to take a look at some of the British Library's collections which relate to cooking and care of the home in the 1950s.

With the improvements which were made to the national grid in the late 1940s it became more feasible for ordinary households to install large electric appliances in the home. The electric cooker became seen as a 'clean' alternative to the gas stove and manufacturers and trade names such as Creda, Belling, English Electric, Jackson, New World, G.E.C and Kenmore sold electric ovens in various shapes and sizes: from the large Belling Horizontal Cooker (with its 5 doors and 2 drawers!) to the more standard sized G.E.C. 'Supreme' cooker with features such as boiling plates, a warming oven and splashguard.

We spent a wonderful hour or so in the basement of the Library on Monday looking through materials relating to the 1950s cooker in our trade literature collections. The material we found included guides, instruction manuals and pamphlets. Many of the manufacturers produced their own cookery books and household manuals offering recipes and advice about cooking with electricity.

As well as providing insight about the expectations and ideals about housework in the 1950s, these guides and books elucidate gendered expectations of the time through the advice they offer and in their imagery. They suggest that the ideal housewife, hardworking and altruistic, diligently managed every aspect of the lives of others, from children to party guests. For instance, one manual advises that:

'A good hostess has a mental list of her guests, and tries to arrange her party so that they will enjoy it - not she.' (p. 177, The 'Creda' Housecraft Manual, 1958)

 

The front cover of 'The 'Creda' Housecraft Manual' © Simplex Electric Co., Ltd. (1958)

Alongside manuals, cookery books and trade literature, the Library holds back-catalogues of household magazines, including well-known names such as Good Housekeeping, House and Home and Ideal Home (where Mary Berry worked as an editor in the 1970s). Indeed, in response to the rise in electric cooking Good Housekeeping produced their own guide (in 1959), which features many recipes for meals such as Veal Fricassee and deserts like Pineapple Creams. Unusually for the time, this guide also features a photograph of a man using one of the ovens, emblazoned with the caption 'Man on his own'!

The front cover and page 23 of 'Good Housekeeping's Electric Cooking Today' (1959). Reproduced with kind permission by Good Housekeeping magazine, Hearst Magazines UK.

A visit to the basement always leaves us thinking about links to other collections and the possibilities of future research or digitisation…but for now, we are off to write down some of these classic recipes, find out whatever happened to candied angelica, and, (as ever) to disregard all past 'wisdom' about how household tasks should be gendered!

Bibliography

(1957) 'Belling' Electric Heating and Cooking. Belling and Company Limited: Enfield and Middlesex. British Library Shelfmark: Y.D.2004.a.6630

(1958) The 'Creda' Housecraft Manual. Simplex Electric Company. Odhams Press Limited: Stoke-on-Trent. British Library Shelfmark:  Y.A.1996.A.13155

(1950) Creda Electric Cookery. Simplex Electric Company. Odhams Press Limited: Stoke-on-Trent. British Library Shelfmark: LB.31.a.7121

(1959) G.E.C. Electric Cookers including timer control. The General Electric Co. Ltd: Kingsway, London. British Library Shelfmark: YD.2012.a.7529

(1936) G.E.C. cookery book. New ed. London: General Electric Co. Ltd. British Library Shelfmark: YD.2006.a.5442

(1959) Good Housekeeping's Electric Cooking Today. The National Magazine Co. Ltd. British Library Shelfmark: 7937.d.62

(1966) Pattern, Marguerite. How to cook perfectly with electricity. London: Electricity Council, EDA Division, British Library Shelfmark: YD.2012.a.6578

 

Useful links

Food Studies at the British Library, ESRC website resource

Food Studies: Help for researchers web-page

Oral Histories: http://sounds.bl.uk/

This post was written by Robert Davies and Sarah Evans and the views expressed are our own. Follow us on twitter at @BLRobertDavies and @dr_sarahevans.