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Show Electricity-the great liberator of women When Thomas Edison opened the first central electric generating plant on New York City's Pearl Street in 1882, women across America were virtual slaves to their housekeeping chores. One can only try to imagine the home-bound life of drudgery that women indured a centruy ago, and the revolutionary impact the "New" electricity elec-tricity had upon their lives. The wide range of alternatives available to women today in considering consider-ing their lifestyles represents choices which would have been unthinkable 100 years ago. A woman may further her education, pursue a career, develop her creative talents, andor care for her home and family. More and more women are successfully combining professional careers with their roles as wives and mothers. The opportunity to do so, the liberation from labor, is a gift of the electric age. As the old saying goes, "A man may work from sun to sun, but women's work is never done." While washing clothes by hand, ironing, baking and cleaning took entire days of hard labor, they represented only a fraction of "women's work" at the time. Women also had to perform dozens of other daily tasks: children had to be cared for, meals prepared, beds made, clothes sewn, dusting and sweeping done, rooms tidied. Women had to use wood or coal stoves insufferably hot in spring and summer and emitting noxious fumes all year-round to heat water for washing and cooking. Water had to be hauled from outdoor pumps or wells. Even the change of seasons meant more work, as women undertook under-took spring and fall cleaning. In the absence of a food processing industry, women canned their own fruit and vegetables. But Edison's electricity changed all that. In 1912, he predicted that women of the future "will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic laborer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, hand-maidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman's world that a large portion of the aggregate of women's energy will be conserved to use in broader, more constructive fields." He was right. The new electric labor-saving appliances vacuum cleaners, clothes washers, irons, sewing sew-ing machines, refrigerators, and ultimately dishwashers, ranges and even microwave ovens freed women from the homeplace, just as the new industrialization was creating an unprecedented un-precedented number of jobs in factories, fac-tories, department stores, telephone exchanges, and offices. Higher levels of education and employment gave women the opportunity to evaluate themselves. compare their grievances, and achieve new political and social awareness. They demanded demand-ed civil equality and the right to vote and spearheaded reforms in factory working conditions, demanding cleaner, healthier work environments and better wages. The role of women was undoubtedly undoubted-ly expanding, but change of any kind is rarely achieved overnight. For many years, electric appliances were available only to families who could afford af-ford such luxury. In 1911, the best vacuum-cleaner sold for $15; a small electric stove was $110; and a family-sized family-sized washing machine was $85; a lot of money in those non-inflationary days. But, as Edison predicted, the price of electricity and appliances fell as the efficiency of production methods improved. In fact, the price of electricity kept falling until the 1973 Arab oil embargo and rising interest rates combined with uncontrolled inflation in-flation and tangled regulations to send all energy prices skyrocketing. As the use of appliances became more widespread, women took their . place in the workforce. Today, women are moving into executive positions and the boardroom, where they are taking part in the creation of new technologies rather than simply being the consumers of technology, as they were a century ago. Women are helping help-ing to make the difficult energy policy decisions which determine whether new technologies and traditional industries in-dustries will move forward or will falter from lack of the steady, affordable affor-dable electricity that has been women's liberator. The second century of electricity, while holding many promises, will also have its challenges. Many investor-owned investor-owned electric utility companies are already stretched to their financial limits by regulations that do not always take long-range goals into account, ac-count, and which threaten to short-circuit short-circuit an otherwise promising future. Utilities, in fact, are finding themselves hard pressed to keep pace with the evergrowing demands of new technologies. ' " In its first hundred years, electricity electrici-ty offered women the freedom to make choices about their lives and lifestyles, providing them with the opportunity to assume roles which were previously inconceivable. The question is, will electricity's second century fulfill all its promises or will women's "great liberator" find its future role needlessly needless-ly constrained? Like the women of America, electricity represents a priceless resource with the potential to make ever-greater contributions to the world if we give it the opportunity to do so. |