Sarah Archer

Well, it was like they were presented to women as if they were cars.

And it's interesting because it feels like the consolidation of the middle class apparently involved women pulling off even more stuff.

Yes.

Basically that it's like the woman, the protagonist is shown taking up hobbies.

And so the implicit message of that is that you have appliances doing stuff for you that you used to have to do.

Like you can time your kitchen, set your dishwasher to wash your dishes, kind of

Leave things to some extent on autopilot and that that will free you up to do things like play tennis or play golf, you know, kind of lounge, read, like sort of do something else and sort of become a lady of leisure in a way that would have been unthinkable for somebody from your background a generation before.

Hmm.

Oh, it's called Design for Dreaming.

I found it.

It's 1956.

It's a promotional short film for General Motors Motorama, and it's all futuristic kitchen.

But a masked man whisks her away like like happens sometimes to all of us.

May I come just as I am?

And shows her the kitchen of the future.

And the idea is that things, the kitchen of the future is so advanced that it's kind of like you're entering like a lab at IBM and everything kind of happens automatically for you and cakes appear and it's magical.

And so that's the part of it that I find most interesting, the idea that it's unthinkable that you would do other stuff like anyway.

Like there's the idea that you would, you know, read books or play tennis or be involved in the PTA or something.

Well, and also we're seeing her like using a cabinet, like a computer, but also a computer that doesn't exist yet because she's inserting a punch card.

And then like a color image of a cake is coming up and it's like, you guys were bluffing.