On July twenty-fourth, 1959, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were given approximately girls, kitchen appliances, and the American manner of existence. It wasn’t planned. But it turned into recorded on film and broadcast in each nation. It became the first excessive-degree assembly among American and Soviet leaders because of the 1955 Geneva Summit. In 1958, the 2 nations had agreed to a main cultural alternate venture: the U.S. Would arrange a World’s Fair-style exhibition in New York City, and the USA could do the same in Moscow. So Nixon traveled to the USA, tasked with giving Khrushchev a tour of the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park. Over 450 American companies had created pavilions to reveal off their goods. Science and era presentations have been presented a 30,000-rectangular-foot geodesic dome internally.
The leaders had numerous conversations over the path of the excursion; however, the most iconic of these occurred while they had been standing with a crowd in front of a version of the American kitchen. It had all the current conveniences you’d expect to find in the sort of latest, postwar home that would sell for $14,000 (approximately $120,000 today): fashionable shelves, a dishwasher, a variety, and a refrigerator. Khrushchev was cantankerous, waving his hand dismissively while putting forward (through a translator) that the improvements inside the American version kitchen had been devices of the little outcome. He then asked if there was a system that “places food into the mouth and pushes it down.” Their change didn’t touch at the problems that certainly concerned citizens of the day—specifically, the threat of nuclear struggle—however, it did contact a nerve where gender turned into involved, and it took place when Nixon drew Khrushchev’s interest to the dishwasher:
Still clean from the sting of the launch of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957, America had spoken back through launching the Explorer I on January 31, 1958, and setting up NASA on October 1 of that 12 months. The nascent, tit-for-tat Space Race had Americans feeling apprehensive. It wasn’t the only competition for clinical “firsts.” The area race and the improvement of nuclear guns had probably devastating implications for both international locations and certainly for the complete international. So to some extent, Nixon and Khrushchev’s debate wasn’t sincerely about dishwashers. Nor was it about color tv—a place in which, Nixon deftly stated, the US become in advance of the united states, as evidenced through the reality that their communication turned into broadcast in coloration lower back home. It was approximately development.
And whose progress has become it? Was it, in fact, a “familiar mindset” that Americans and Soviets alike wanted to make life less difficult for ladies? Corporations had been racing to provide the sorts of merchandise and devices that would lighten the home workload for girls. Technological development opened up at an ever-quickening tempo from the Industrial Revolution through the postwar increase. Still, the concept that house responsibilities have to be girls’ paintings remained vigorously in the vicinity in postwar America. In the Nineteen Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties, companies unveiled gleaming, green dream kitchens to get clients excited for what came to return. “The future” held robots, automation, fashion, and ease. However, it didn’t promise any changes in home gender roles—pretty the opposite.
The show that brought about Khrushchev’s feminist critique of American society become intended to symbolize the kitchen of a home that would cost $14,000, a lower-priced sum for a normal American employee in the Nineteen Fifties, according to Nixon. If Soviet site visitors to the fair were moderately inspired by using the middlebrow gadgets within the version kitchen, they have been wowed with the aid of the aptly named “Miracle Kitchen,” a joint project among Whirlpool and RCA first designed in 1956.
