The Pleasures of Domesticity

Abstract

This article analyzes Egyptian print advertisements of gas stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines as a way to consider how the technopolitics of Egyptian modernity intersected with gender politics—both at the level of state policy and in everyday life—in the two decades following the 1952 revolution. It argues that the proliferation of advertisements for Egyptian-made stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines found in the popular press during this period envisioned domestic technology as a critical building block in a gendered social contract between the state and the Egyptian people. Aimed exclusively at women, such ads stressed values like pleasure, abundance, affordability, and leisure—a vision of society where every housewife could achieve her dreams and every family could have a modern kitchen. These idealized images were not a new feature of household advertisements. However, the language of pleasure, beauty, and happiness used to advertise household goods prior to the revolution became embedded in new gendered definitions of citizenship after it. Advertisements also depicted women as primary beneficiaries of Egyptian state socialism and, in doing so, papered over some of the tensions in the state’s plan to mobilize women as workers, housewives, and consumers.