| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Anne Clendinning. Demons of Domesticity: Women and the English Gas Industry, 1889–1939. (Modern Economic and Social History Series.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2004. Pp. xvii, 352. $109.95.
This book is not about evil household spirits. In Britain between 1889 and 1939, demon was shorthand for demonstrator: an educated, middle-class, middle-aged woman paid to teach other women how to cook with gas. Anne Clendinning's book explores the important roles of these demons, as well as the general roles of women in the growth of the gas industry. While chapters one through three chart the rise of the lady demons, the three final chapters explore post-demon, female replacement workers during World War I and the grand promotional schemes of the interwar period. It is a fascinating, hitherto untold story that touches on a broad range of themes that overlapped in the half century under study: domestic science, professionalization, progressive technologies, consumption, separate spheres, household labor, industrialization, and women's rights.	1
Clendinning's approach, with a special focus on gender, is original and convincing. Refuting the notion that the gas industry was solely motivated by the apparent popularity of electricity in the 1880s, she argues that the lady demons occupied a liminal realm between the producers and consumers of domestic technology. "The use of women experts to mediate between male producers and female consumers helped to domesticate, perhaps even feminise, gas technology, engendering sales and challenging gendered assumptions about the corporate sphere," Clendinning explains (p. 3).	. . .

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