Plastics - Power and Gender
A Swedish View

Anna Steen

The author works in the Department of Field Research and Acquisition of the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm. The article is based on one published in Teknik och Kultur in 1996 and discusses the changing attitudes of Swedish consumers, especially women, towards plastics over recent decades.

Plastics have proved a blessing for many, not least housewives, since they became common after the Second World War. However, most of the literature on them has been written from a technological viewpointpredominantly male, and is readily accessible. What one does not get to know is how the everyday use of plastics has changed our culture and lifestyle. Users' views - especially those of women - are almost totally absent from plastics research. Rather, they have been expressed more silently at the point of sale - through their purchases!

My own interest in plastics is based on my work as a curator since the 1980s, and since 1993 1 have specialized in research in the plastics field. Swedish cultural museums have been researching the contemporary scene continuously from the 1970s and, in consequence, a great variety of modem objects have reached our storerooms, many of them made of plastics.

My first research project was on dialysis care at the main hospital in Lurid. home of Gambro, one of the leading producers of dialysis filters and machines. As a result of this project the Medical History Museum in Lurid acquired several hundred disposable items relating to dialysis treatment which reflect the wealth of objects used in modem health care as well as a key principle of hygiene: disposability. The dialysis filter. the main component. is a disposable plastics product.

My second project involved an entire kitchen, acquired from a family, in the industrial and rural district of Toreboda, in central Sweden. When it came to cataloguing this enormous acquisition - some 2000 items ranging from large pine furniture to small airtight seals for bags - a striking difference between the museum's more than adequate familiarity with traditional materials, such as wood, metal and textiles, and its sparse knowledge of modern synthetics became apparent. Remember that this was despite 20 years of active collecting!

For both these projects 1 needed knowledge of the different plastics materials being used, but thoughts on how these new synthetics were influencing human lifestyle also began to germinate. 11 became clear to me that the study of the effect of plastics on ordinary people must be concerned with power and gender as well as knowledge. As plastics have throughout this century become progressively available in mass consumer markets, men and women have on the whole come into contact with them through distinctly separate channels. In the consumer area it has above all been women whose lifestyle has been changed by the introduction of such revolutionary products as nylon stockings, Tupperware containers and Formica work surfaces, while it has been men who have discovered and developed them.

The housewife's new clothes
The development of a changed role for Swedish women coincided with the introduction of plastics materials into the industrialized society of the late nineteenth century and, later, their breakthrough into modern consumer society after the Second World War.

With the modernization of Sweden at that time, women in the role of housewife became an object of political interest and comprehensive reforms initiated by the power of the state. Boel Berner (1) describes howthe experts at Hemmens Forskningsinsitut [Swedish Home Research Institute] depict this new being as somewhat like a female Frankenstein. These experts - doctors. architects and home advisers, professional women but with their own experience as housewives - saw their model as between 25 and 45 years old: rational. economic and hy ienic. with an eve for taste and style. Above all. she was to be open to everything new. and it was plastics that were the symbol of the modern era from the 1940s to the 1960s. So women as consumers became the harbingers of modernity.

Engineers and scientists also participated in the modernization of Sweden. They were often employed by industrial research laboratories and were almost without exception men and, as Berner (1) points out it was they who applied their expertise to the design of domestic appliances such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines. They also developed new chemical products for the home such as washing powders and paint. The value of new plastics materials was fundamental to all this work.

Hemmens Forskningsinstitut was founded in 1944 by various women's organizations with the aim of improving household work. A prime example of the significance of a new material for women is the nylon stocking. Launched in the USA by Du Pont in 1938 it was an immediate success and a huge seller. much missed when it disappeared during the war. In its Christmas issue for 1944, the newspaper Allt i fickformat published a report by Du Pont '...on the hunt for the nylon stocking', which stated: "but after the war there will be stockings as thin as spiders' webs, lacy stockings. ordinary walking stockings, thick stockings for sports wear - and all, of course. non-run - as well as seamless stockings and specially woven varieties, designed for ladies with problems like ugly knees or thick shins - and all in nylon". Clothes and household textiles made of nylon would no longer need to be beaten in the wash, pulled into shape, mangled and ironed. If they became dirty one had only to dry them off with 'a wet rag and they would be as good as new again. Obviously the writer thought that the new miracle fibre was the answer to all sorts of problems! Jeffrey Meikle (2) says that when nylon once again became available for civil purposes in 1945, a new 'nylon riot' broke out in the USA and women actually stormed department stores in order to get hold of the coveted stockings.

The role of plastics
Plastics have contributed to the democratization of Western industrial society through the distribution of expert knowledge and increased material welfare. Berner (1) points out that when this scientifically based knowledge was dispensed to consumers in the 1950s and 1960s. mass-produced articles played a major role. As a museum researcher 1 am primarily interested in the role of actual articles in this process.

Information reaches the mass market not only in the form of printed instructions for equipment. but also through trivial consumer items. Robert Friedel. an American historian of technology. thinks that plastics materials contributed to achieving the dream of 'the good life' for the great majority of the public. They were a democratizing factor and assisted social mobility by making good taste available to all - or at any rate to the middle classes.

However, with increased material welfare the housewife had to become a discerning purchaser. She was now supposed to accept everything that was new and thus buy herself a happier and easier daily routine. By following descriptions of plastics from 1945 onwards in Husmodern. a weekly aimed at middle-class housewives. Idun. for educated female readers, and Rad & Ron [Advice & Observations]. published by Konsumentverket (Consumer Agency], one can see how the 'consumer competence' of housewives has changed. from the material and method expertise of the 1960s through the purchase analysis of the 1970s to the fashion-conscious aestheticism of the 1980s. But what is going on in the 1990s?

In copies of Husmodern and Idun from the 1940s and 1950s. one sees how the attitude to plastics changed. At the beginning of this period people were totally fascinated by the new materials. but there was doubt as to how they could be used. (nylon stockings are the one exception!) After several years this cautious attitude moves to a more euphoric phase. Plastics, now a familiar term. are about to revolutionize women's lives. Heavy loads of washing. masses of ironing and endless polishing of floors would become only a memory. Meikle (2) mentions that. in the USA, the concept of 'damp-cloth cleaning' came to hold the promise of an easy-care material world, as long as one chose a plastics material. Then towards the middle of the 1950s this euphoria is replaced by a more sober style of writing about plastics. Nylon stockings were not 100% non-run and plastics buckets were not indestructible! Around this time new plastics companies became established in Sweden. One of their first corporate activities was to campaign in the consumer press and to develop uniform labelling systems with care instructions, as had already been done in the USA. The aim was to instruct the consumer about the differing properties of plastics materials.

The change of name of the Swedish Home Research Institute to Consumer Agency at the end of the 1950s reflects the direction in which women's interests and activities had evolved. In Rad & Ron. which has tested products since 1958. one can follow the gradually, lessening interest in plastics and other materials. At the beginning of the 1960s there are a number of articles on different types of plastics products, such as buckets. container lids and kitchen sinks. and their properties are carefully reviewed. In 1963 a survey of man-made fibres was published. However. by, the 1970s the actual purchase of items had become more important than how they were made. how they worked or how they should be looked after. It became possible to buy good quality products. In Rad & Ron there is now less interest in plastics as materials. and their negative influence on the environment and badly designed plastics products are among the few themes that are pursued. Features are increasingly about how consumers should analyze their buys by comparing prices., reporting opportunities for returning unsatisfactory purchases, and discussing consumer law.
In the 1980s. plastics materials were regarded as absolutely predominant as far as consumer goods were concerned. although invisible and taken for granted. For instance, the magazine does not say that the kitchen flooring tested is a plastics product. The only exception is the tennis racket where the materials used are carefully detailed! Between 1981 and 1984, no articles whatsoever on plastics appear in Rad and Ron Analysis and information on goods is no longer thought necessary. Consumer 'competence' now begins to embrace information on fashion, design and the ability to decide on the time for replacement and renewal.

In the 1990s, interest in specific material properties disappears completely in Rad and Ron tests. But many of the products covered are, of course. plastics. In a new section entitled '.on the green branch', the magazine turns to the environment, health and the economy,, including questions regarding the influence of plastics on the environment, recycling and 'returnable' procedures. In an article published in 1990, IKEA's decision to put the description 'artificial material' rather than 'PVC' on its goods is questioned. The explanation given is that people still do not know the difference between the various synthetic materials and how to distinguish between them in the goods description is therefore deemed unnecessary.

Recycling plastics
Making Sweden into a modem industrialized society required certain sacrifices. Serial production demands specialization and the engineers made material technology their area of expertise at the same time as knowledge about products disappeared from the housewife's spectrum of qualifications.
The latter became superfluous when the idea was to buy 'new' the whole time. so that now it no longer seems of interest to know anything about the world of materials. The symbolic significance of Products appears to become more important after we have lost our knowledge about materials, production techniques and function. It is then that we buy with our eyes and our hearts rather than using our heads and our hands.
Now, however, there is a new consumer 'competence' in the making: recycling. EC packaging regulations (which came into force in 1994) specify, mandatory requirements in this area affecting both industry and the consumer which are constantly being intensified.
Plastkretsen AB will supervise this work in Sweden. and the packaging industry has already begun to adapt to it by, for instance. developing systems using only one material rather than several.
However. to live up to demands for ecological consciousness and consideration for the environment, the consumer must also be able to recognize and sort plastics materials. On the threshold of a recycling society. women must be enabled to win back the knowledge of the material world developed by industry at the beginning of the age of mass production. As Berner (1) points out, knowledge of a subject is historically specific to a certain time and can contain a large element of morality. The question now is what consumer recycling competence of the future will look like and who will have power over it.

References
(1) Berner B, Sakernas illlstand [The State of Things], Stockholm, 1996.
(2) Meikle JL, American Plastic: a Cultural History, Rutgers University Press,NJ, USA. 1995.