Co-option or Recognition? Second-wave Feminist Politics and the Frigidaire Australia Women’s Design Conference, 1980

In 1980, Frigidaire Australia launched an advertising campaign in popular women’s magazines calling for readers’ opinions on refrigerator design. Soon after, Frigidaire held the Group 200 Women’s Design Conference in Sydney, leading to the release of the G2 refrigerator in 1981, which was promoted as being “designed” by the women involved in this market research. This example offers insights into evolving public understandings of design in mainstream Australia in the early 1980s. It also demonstrates the troubled position of design in relation to the maturing second-wave feminist movement, and particularly amid feminist debates regarding domestic labor. Furthermore, Frigidaire’s marketing strategy can be read as an example of the emergent neoliberalization of design in the 1980s. The article finds that, despite Frigidaire’s marketing rhetoric, the women participants had little agency over the G2’s design. The politics of identity (in this case, a subtle form of feminist agency) was effectively co-opted by capital to encourage consumption. Nonetheless, the Women’s Design Conference was meaningful in a discrete sense, as a moment in time when a group of women (mostly middle-aged “homemakers”) recognized their own domestic knowledge as design expertise. This may be the only saving grace from what was otherwise a thoroughly unambitious attempt to incorporate women’s knowledge into product design.