The kitchen as political symbol and material reality in the cold
war years. Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev's famous "kitchen
debate" in 1958 involved more than the virtues of American
appliances. Both Nixon and Khrushchev recognized the political
symbolism of the modern kitchen; the kind of technological
innovation represented in this everyday context spoke to the
political system that produced it. The kitchen connects the "big"
politics of politicians and statesmen to the "small" politics of
users and interest groups. Cold War Kitchen looks at the kitchen as
material object and symbol, considering the politics and the
practices of one of the most famous technological icons of the
twentieth century. Defining the kitchen as a complex technological
artifact as important as computers, cars, and nuclear missiles, the
book examines the ways in which a range of social actors in Europe
shaped the kitchen as both ideological construct and material
practice. These actors-from manufacturers and modernist architects
to housing reformers and feminists-constructed and domesticated the
technological innovations of the postwar kitchen. The home became a
"mediation junction" in which women users and others felt free to
advise producers from the consumer's point of view. In essays
illustrated by striking period photographs, the contributors to
Cold War Kitchen consider such topics as Soviet consumers'
ambivalent responses to the American dream kitchen argued over by
Nixon and Khrushchev; the Frankfurter Kuche, a European modernist
kitchen of the interwar period (and its export to Turkey when its
designer fled the Nazis); and the British state-subsidized kitchen
design so innovative that it was mistaken for a luxury American
product. The concluding essays challenge the received wisdom of
past interpretations of the kitchen debate.
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