Book Review

Canada and the United States

Long after the cast-iron cookstove had become standard equipment in most American homes, a manufacturer's brochure in 1885 declared it to be "one of our crowning [national] triumphs," an invention "fully as conspicuous" as steamboat or cotton gin, revolver or telegraph, sewing machine or typewriter (p. 156). Priscilla J. Brewer maintains that historians have neglected the cookstove, despite its central place in the everyday life of the nineteenth century, precisely because it was a domestic technology used mostly by women. She sets out to rectify that neglect in a study that is equally attuned to environmental and economic factors, technologies of manufacture and transportation, shifting gender roles and patterns of household management, marketing considerations such as status and taste, and the symbolism of popular culture. Drawing from trade catalogues, advertising circulars, advice manuals, periodicals, popular fiction, published memoirs, and unpublished diaries and correspondence, Brewer presents a meticulously detailed, thickly textured social and cultural history of American reliance on wood and coal-burning stoves. Close to a hundred carefully selected images provoke an awareness that this is a study of material culture, of how people made use of and related to physical things, but also of how those relationships were often mediated through visual representations.

. . .