Women's Studies An interdisciplinary journal ISSN: 0049-7878 (Print) 1547-7045 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20 FTM(TF): Allegories of Electricity from Edison to Wifi Andrew M. Shanken To cite this article: Andrew M. Shanken (2017): FTM(TF): Allegories of Electricity from Edison to Wifi, Women's Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2017.1331647 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2017.1331647 Published online: 12 Jun 2017. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gwst20 Download by: [108.216.158.201] Date: 12 June 2017, At: 21:07 WOMEN'SSTUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2017.1331647 FTM(TF): Allegories of Electricity from Edison to Wifi Andrew M. Shanken UniversityofCalifornia,Berkeley On Sather Gate, the symbolic entrance to the University of California at Berkeley completed in 1910 to designs by John Galen Howard, allegorical representations of the liberal arts betray more than the emerging disci- plines of the modern university (Figure 1).1 Howard played fast and loose with traditions of representation by reconfiguring the liberal arts. Law, Letters, Medicine, and Mining, all male, face intramurally; Agriculture, Architecture, and Art, all female, face the commercial axis of Telegraph Avenue. Completing the latter group is Electricity. While one might quibble with Howard’s choice of Letters as masculine or Architecture as feminine—in fact, Architecture was a late replacement for Education— they were more or less conventional (Howard). The men would fill the core professions and the pivotal California industry of mining, the aesthetes among them becoming belletrists. The women take on the arts and the earth. Electricity, however, was an odd choice of discipline and gender. She nominally provided the lone science among the disciplines on the gate, modernizing the idea of the natural sciences by way of this still mystical force. At the time, electricity had become a major part of the curriculum at Berkeley.2 Making electricity a woman looked backward to nineteenth-century associations of women with enlightenment and abun- dance even as it modernized the disciplinary schema (Lears, “Reconsidering Abundance” 452–54). The sculptures themselves complicate matters.3 The men, bodies taut, faces concentrated, stand flexed in naked splendor, a Beaux-Arts cliché of the Greek gymnasium (Figure 2). By contrast, womanly Agriculture, Art, and Architecture all draw one foot subtly forward, forcing their hips to shift and theirneckstotilteversoslightly(Figure3).Thetorqueturnstheireyesaway. CONTACTAndrewM.Shanken [email protected] DepartmentofArchitecture,Universityof California,Berkeley,232WursterHall,Berkeley,California94720. Colorversionsofoneormoreofthefiguresinthisarticlecanbefoundonlineatwww.tandfonline.com/gwst. 1Howard seems to have invented the sculptural scheme with input from Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who was a classicistandpresidentoftheuniversity.SeeHoward’scorrespondenceinRecordsoftheOfficeofthePresident, BancroftLibrary. 2Inthe1880s,themeagercourseofferingsonelectricitywerehousedinPhysics.Bytheturn-of-the-century,many coursesonthesubjecthadbecomestandardandin1901–02theDepartmentofMechanicalEngineeringhad becometheDepartmentofMechanicalandElectricalEngineering.SeetheUniversityofCaliforniacoursecatalogs fromtheseyears. 3TheyweresculptedbyMelvinEarlCummings,“ProfessorofModeling”intheDepartmentofArchitecture.“Melvin EarlCummings,Architecture:Berkeley,1876–1936.” ©2017Taylor&FrancisGroup,LLC 2 A.M.SHANKEN Figure 1. John Galen Howard, Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley, 1910. Author’s photograph. Figure 2. Melvin Earl Cummings, “Mining,” Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley, 1910. Photograph by author. WOMEN’SSTUDIES 3 Figure 3. Melvin Earl Cummings, “Art,” Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley, 1910. Photograph by author. As they ponder some inward ideal, they also fail to meet our gaze directly. It is a gesture of submission, one reinforced by the soft flesh of their bodies, the gentle bend of their arms, and the weightlessness of their attributes. Their curves—and their femininity—thus revealed, these artsy and earthy hostesses of the university welcome town to gown. And then there is Electricity (Figure 4). Erect, resolutely forward, arms held ready at her sides, she buzzes stiffly with bolts of energy that crackle from her fingers and head. She has the same hips and breasts as Art, Architecture, and Agriculture, but none of their easy charm. Who is this more complicated, formidable woman? Is she the ambiguous cultural delta between nineteenth- and twentieth-century paradigms of production, transcribed to the context of the university and preparation for work in these fields? Or is she the redoubtable daughter of Western pioneers come to carry the frontier myth into new territories of the mind and still unknown professional domains unfolding in California? Even as she embodies the power she represents, something in her balks. Like her sisters, who avert their eyes, she gazes ambiguously forward, avoiding eye contact. Even Electricity, then busy revolutionizing mining and metal- lurgy—two of her male cohort—was not self-possessed enough to confront the public directly. The anomaly on Sather Gate was anything but an oddity in Europe and America. Turn-of-the-century society commonly represented electricity as a 4 A.M.SHANKEN Figure 4. Melvin Earl Cummings, “Electricity,” Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley, 1910. Photograph by author. woman.4 Similar images can be found on stock notes, paper money, and adver- tisements, and in every medium from painting and sculpture to the decorative arts. Many of these were high-profile, public commissions. Puvis de Chavannes paintedElectricityinhismuralinBostonPublicLibraryatroughlythesametime thatSecessionistartist,C.TheodorKempf-Hartenkampf,createdasprite-likeone foranexhibitiononelectricity(Figure5). As Electricitytookher womanly form inthese decades, she encounteredthe electrificationofhomesandcities,thedevelopmentoftimeandspaceshattering technologies,theriseoftheconsumerculture,theSuffrageMovement,andthe outbreak of World War I. Between the wars, however, Electricity gradually underwentasex-changeoperation.Malegodsandbrawnymenwhodidmature industrial work displaced the winged women who had ushered electricity into society. Allegories of electricity as woman would continue—and even appear now—butincreasinglyshebecameaman.Morerecently,Electricityhasbecome a woman again.Thisessay attemptstoexplain why. Singing the body electric In fact, modernity had changed electricity’s gender in the first place. Pre- modern manifestations of electricity (as lightning) most often appear as 4Forexample,seeGraemeGooday197–217;DavidE.Nye,ImageWorlds;“TheElectricEve,”inJulieWosk68–88. WOMEN’SSTUDIES 5 Figure 5. C. Theodor Kempf-Hartenkampf, “Electricity,” Allegorien, Neue Folge, 1897, Vienna. Courtesy Michael Pabst, Wiener Grafik um 1900. powerful male figures. This is true of the Norse Thor, Greek Zeus, Slavic Perun, and Hindu Indra. Similar masculine figures can be found in Asian, African, Meso-American, and Afro-Caribbean traditions. As electricity was domesticated in the nineteenth century, however, its gender changed. Electricity was simultaneously indispensable for capitalism and undepend- able,harnessedforproductionandpartofthetumultuouseconomiccyclesof the period. It was implicated in many disorienting subversions of modern society. It made day of night, and thereby disengaged work from daylight hours,whiledoingthesameforleisure.Thisinvisibleforcediminishedearth- bound cycles of time and warped spatial relationships. By the 1880s, its complex resonance triggered a new symbolism. The old gods faded away and while powerful male figures did appear occasionally, Electricitybecameawoman.5Thenewallegoriesappeared,moreover,ashigh art distanced itself from allegory. Electricity’s complicated nature in society and the pressures on allegory itself churned out a pantheon of shifting electrical women, effulgent and fickle, enlightened and saturnine, liberated and enslaved, maternally life-giving and undead, servilely conductive and dangerously repulsive. The mysterious force that Benjamin Franklin had plucked from the air, a force of nature, entered modern culture as a woman, and it did so seemingly 5Thefigureoflaféeélectricitéoriginatedearlier,butbecameacommoniconinFrenchcultureattheturnofthe century.SeeGooday198–200.AlsoAlainBeltranandPatrice-A.Carré. 6 A.M.SHANKEN without premeditation; consequently, it came densely packed with assump- tions. As historian Jeffrey L. Miekle has written, “electricity is formless, invisible, yet capable of nearly infinite transformations.” All the more reason to give it form, make it visible, and when possible fix it in place. Yet, like electricity itself, its personification in female form was labile, ambiguous, and unfixed in meaning. Because of the nature of the phenomenon—beyond easy everyday observation, dangerous, and unpredictable—it found cultural par- allelsintheineffable,invisible,inscrutable,anddangerous,includingwomen. Turn-of-the-century culture mysticized electricity. It was often thought of as both a physical and spiritual phenomenon. In 1898 science writer Henry RaymondRogersclaimedwithabsolutecertainty:“Electricityissubstantial.It may be amassed, condensed, and rarefied; and mass, condensation, and rarefaction are properties [of] matter” (6). Two years later William Hemstreet wrote: “The ether, or electricity, being such a mighty force as to crush and dissipate physical matter, is substantial enough to form and maintain a spiritual or ethereal body in the future life, and this without any violence to physiological analogy” (16). Electricity could clearly be any- thing: an empirically physical force or the “manifestation of the God in nature,” a kind of élan vital avant la letter (Tyndall). For spiritualists in the period, it was a short step from the widespread representation of electricity as a spirit, an extension of the French fée électricité, to locating that spirit in the real bodies and beings of women. “The electrical character of animation or vitality in both animals and plants,” wrote transcendentalist minister Edward Cornelius Towne in 1887, revealed the “electrical agency” of all life and the “true origins of species” superior even, he thought, to Darwin’s ideas (3–5). For Towne, electricity was at the root of creation. “Creative parentage” (5) created the embryo, but “creative motherhood” expressed “the power over offspring of influences reaching the young through the mother” (30). This was more than a Whitmanesque singing of the body electric. For Towne, sexual distinction was merely a matter of electricity’s positive and negative forces, but he directed his theory at women, particularly mothers. Mothers delivered a “charge” to their chil- dren, not merely through birth, but also through a “charge of tendency” “given by ardor of mother concern.” “Great and peculiar genius has no other secret than creative motherhood,” he wrote (30–31). Women were seen as natural conduits, if not sources, of electricity. Spiritualism’s electrical mother infused the electrical fairies used by consu- merculturetosellproducts.Bothwereexpressionsofthe“electrictheology”of theera(ThomasdelaPeña98).GeorgeA.Scott,aBritish“medicalelectrician” (i.e., mountebank), manipulated these associations to market electric “flesh brushes,” plasters, corsets, and other cure-alls. An image from his 1888 A TreatiseonElectricityandElectroMagnetism—inrealityapromotionalpamph- let—shows a woman as conduit, a great spirit floating above the earth WOMEN’SSTUDIES 7 Figure 6. Cover, George A. Scott, Ninety Years of Pleasure: A Treatise on Electricity and Electro Magnetism, 1887, Warshaw Collection of Business Americana—Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. (Figure 6). As in so many allegorical images of electricity in this period, electricity issues like magic from her fingertips. A clue to the image comes in the corset just below her body, whichcarries the motto:“The germof all life is electricity.” Here is Edward Cornelius Towne’s “creative mother” in pictorial form delivering her “charge of tendency” to the entire world through Scott’s gadgets (Waits). Similar imagery can be found in The Electric Era, a trade catalog published by the German Electric Belt Agency of New York City.6 The association between electricity and women’s bodies had a darker side, as well. If women provided the germ of life and genius, women’s ailments could be understood as failures in their nature, failures that could be treated 6SeetheWarshawCollection,SmithsonianInstitution. 8 A.M.SHANKEN with the very thing they were missing. Doctors sought direct and eminently physical applications of electricity to treat mysterious and elusive problems. Although electrical treatment for medical issues originated much earlier and was applied to men as well as women, the era witnessed a proliferation of psychological and gynecological experiments with electricity.7 Physician George Betton Massey, who founded the American Electrotherapeutics Association in 1891, wrote of “the chemical action of a strong current brought to a focus on the bared surface of a single pole, which has been placed directly at the seat of the disease” (1). Similar treatments for neur- asthenia would persist into the teens (Jones). Doctors experimented with special zeal on women’s bodies, which were seen as repositories of mysterious ailments susceptible to the equally myster- ious power of electricity. By 1890, currents had been used to treat fibroid tumors in the uterus, metrorrhagia, chronic metritis and endometritis, ste- nosis of the cervical canal, subinvolution, and chronic pelvic indurations. It had been applied directly to the vagina, uterus, and bladder for the relief of pain (Massey). Doctors and quacks—categories that had not yet been sorted out—applied electricity, invisible and mystical, but also natural, to women’s highly concealed, mysterious, and earthly bodies (Rice). Electricity as slave This darker side of electricity echoed the anxieties that arrived alongside the new technology. Electricity and women began to inhabit parallel metapho- rical universes. Like women, electricity could be curative, the germ plasma of all life, but it could also be threatening. The still untamed force was part of what David E. Nye has called the “technological sublime” (American Technological Sublime). Electricity, like most technology, participated in aesthetic experience and could be both attractive and fearsome. It promised to extend the reach of modern comforts and communication. In this guise, it often appeared as a benign spirit or magical creature. But behind electricity’s comforts lay terrors: disfigured landscapes and choked air, subsistence labor and the factory system, and perhaps most frightening, social change itself. What to do with the technological sublime but subdue it? In order to overcomefearofthedangers of electricity,consumercultureoften represented itasaservant(Gooday61–90).Writersandartistswentfurther.Asadangerous force of nature tamed to do society’s work, electricity, when embodied, some- timesenteredthesocialranksasaslaveasawayofassertingmoralandphysical controloverit.8Suchrhetoricalsubjugationhasaccompaniedthedevelopment 7Formoreonthissubject,seeA.W.BeveridgeandE.B.Renvoize153,157–62;MargaretRowbottomandCharles Susskind;andCarolynThomasdelaPeña89–136. 8Formore,seeAnneClendinning. WOMEN’SSTUDIES 9 Figure 7. Frontispiece, Albert Robida, La vie électrique, 1892, Librairie Illustrée, Paris. Public domain. of many new technologies. Thomas Edison wrote “Electricity Man’s Slave” in 1885, using a common motif found in writing about technology during the IndustrialRevolution.9FiveyearsafterEdison’sarticle,AlbertRobida,aFrench writer and caricaturist, allegorized the idea in his frontispiece for Le vingtième siècle: La vie électrique (Figure 7). Here ample-thighed Electricity cranks the gears of a generator in a Hephaestean scene of power and production. Behind her back, diminutive demons, the laboring putti of this underworld, work a treadmill.Awide-eyedowlwithamonstrousbodyholdsupalightbulb,taking the placeof the ready cliché ofLibertyorEnlightenment. As a symbol ofnight vision,herelievesElectricitytodootherwork—andtoplayotherroles.Aslave canbeneitherLibertynorEnlightenment!Machinecranksshackleherleftarm and ankles. Her neck, collared, but not to anything discernible, makes her enslavement a moral as well as a practical matter. 9SeeWosk73foranalysisofEdison’spiece.