Conference Agenda

Marketing materials for gramophones, radios, player-pianos, autoharps, theremins, and other novel instruments from the early twentieth century consistently employed a rhetoric that these devices would perform labor for the consumer. I position a particular instrument, the RCA Theremin (marketed between 1929 and 1931), alongside other domestic technologies designed to minimize household labor, such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines. I then consider RCA’s production of theremins and radios, suggesting a relationship between how these technologies were marketed and how they were manufactured that played out along lines of race and class. While rhetoric surrounding commercial domestic technologies revealed the unwaged labor being performed by white middle class American housewives, it also obscured the waged labor of poor, not-yet white American women working in electronics factories where those technologies were manufactured. While the RCA Theremin was one of many devices that appeared to take on unwaged domestic labor, at the same time it was a device produced by an increasingly waged female workforce. In 1936, of the 9,800 workers employed by RCA in Camden, New Jersey, 75% were women. I show how the transformation of domestic musical labor from reproductive to productive labor and RCA’s increasing reliance on women workers to create audio technologies such as radios that replace domestic music making technologies such as pianos are co-constituted, and then ask how this gendered labor might have manifested in listener receptions of Clara Reisenberg Rockmore’s iconic theremin performances in the decade following RCA’s commercial failure to market the instrument.

Sometimes dubbed the “push-button era,” the 1950s in the United States was a time of bustling innovation in home technologies. Benefitting from the streamlined manufacturing processes developed during World War II, electric vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, intercom systems, televisions, and record players became affordable for many middle-class families in the United States. Advertisements for these devices often highlighted the “automatic,” “magic,” and “all-powerful” push-button as the access point to an endless array of advanced features. For midcentury hi-fi advertisers, the push-button posed a conundrum. While it was a logical interface option for listening devices, the concept of “ease” butted up against the “do-it-yourself” ethos that was a core value in 1950s hi-fi culture. The labor that went into shopping for, tweaking, and using the sound system was vital to the audiophile listening experience. Even more troublesome, the push-button was subtly coded as feminine: women’s magazines advertised easy-to-use home technologies, while hi-fi gadgets that invited tinkering were marketed to men.

In this presentation, I use advertisements from midcentury audiophile magazines to shed light on the ways advertisers, equipment reviewers, and hi-fi writers navigated these gender dynamics. Bringing together masculinities, media, and sound studies, I argue that audio manufacturers maintained a set of haptic characteristics—including mechanical resistance and switch clicks—to generate a sense of productive labor for hi-fi users.

After experimenting with parts from various domestic appliances, electric guitar innovator George Beauchamp settled on a sewing machine motor to power the machine on which he made his first electromagnetic pickups in the mid-1930s. Other tinkerers followed suit: Paul Bigsby’s and Leo Fender’s respective machines and their processes resembled sewing machines and their operations: the user pressed their foot on a pedal to regulate the winding mechanism’s speed. Instead of thread, they wound a thin copper wire around an oblong bobbin. Thus the sewing machine, a symbol of women’s domestic labor, became the perfect machine to fabricate the devices at the core of the twentieth century’s most masculine musical symbol, the electric guitar.

During Fender’s Golden Age (1946-1965), several Latina women workers were responsible for winding electromagnetic pickups. Collectors of instruments from this time simultaneously espouse and covet objects signed by these women, describing their work as “primitive” and non-specialist. This presentation examines the skills which Fender’s female employees brought to their work. Oral histories bring the perspectives of these workers into dialog about their labor, revealing how the Latina women workers who wound pickups for Fender were skilled at sewing, a craft which requires considerable practice, planning, precision, and engineering. The Fender company benefited from their ability to problem solve and fix finicky machines, find better ways to complete their tasks, and recruit and train women from their familial and social spheres. Their expertise both illuminates and complicates fetishistic discourses about their labor.