Who Was Mina Miller Edison, Spouse of Thomas Edison? | Historical past

Katherine Hobbs

Historian, Thomas Edison Nationwide Historic Park

Mina Miller Edison managed a big property, ran numerous charities, raised six kids, had an encyclopedic data of birds, and devoted herself to the idea and apply of ladies’s labor. Her husband’s achievements had been equally wide-ranging: He was the inventor Thomas Edison, pioneer of incandescent light, holder of 1,093 patents, architect of America’s technological transformation and a infamous workaholic. But few know the story of the opposite workaholic Edison—the lady heralded by newspapers as “the one ‘boss’ that [Thomas] obeys.” Mina, who presided over Glenmont, the Edisons’ dwelling in West Orange, New Jersey, for six many years, is half the story of how the Edison household helped outline American modernity.

Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1865, Mina was the seventh of 11 siblings. Her father, Lewis Miller, was an inventor and outstanding determine in Nineteenth-century Methodist schooling reform. Along with attending lectures on the experimental Chautauqua Institution, which her father co-founded, Mina graduated from highschool, went to ending faculty in Boston and traveled together with her siblings. She was on monitor to change into an unusual upper-middle-class spouse. Then she met Thomas.

The 12 months was 1885. Thomas’ first spouse, Mary, had died the earlier 12 months, and he had three kids at dwelling. Thomas was smitten with Mina, noting in his diary that he might need to take out an accident coverage as a result of he was “enthusiastic about Mina and got here close to [to] being run over by a road automobile.” Nonetheless, he remained clean sufficient to flirt in Morse code, even proposing by tapping out the query.

By the point the Edisons settled into their new home in 1886 (bought at half value and totally furnished as a result of it had been confiscated from an embezzler), Thomas had already established his fame because the “wizard of Menlo Park.” As Mina, startled by her sudden movie star standing, wrote to her mother from her Florida honeymoon, “Individuals stare at us so.”

Being “Mrs. Thomas A. Edison” was numerous work. Mina needed to handle the general public entertainments peculiar to technological royalty, together with placing up with Henry Ford and panicking when the king of Siam requested for iced tea. She additionally needed to fulfill all of the home duties anticipated of a spouse. The 20-year-old was all of the sudden in control of a large home and three stepchildren: Marion, Thomas Jr. and William. (Her kids with Thomas—Madeleine, Charles and Theodore—would observe over the subsequent 12 years.) It didn’t assist that Mina had a tough time profitable over 13-year-old Marion, who thought the “Ohio woman” “too younger to be a mom to [her] however too outdated to be a friend.”

Mina leaned on her personal mom and sisters for assist. “I do know there [are] many issues demanded of you,” wrote her sister Jennie Miller in 1886, “however you might be robust and have character sufficient to face manner above them. … I do know of nobody who might do higher.” Even when Mina struggled underneath stress, her household by no means noticed her as a “whiner,” says great-grandson David Sloane, who remembers assembly her on the very finish of her life. “She had a job that was bigger than human-sized.”

Over the course of her marriage, the younger girl as soon as perceived because the “easy, quiet spouse of an incredible and profitable man” (to steal a never-quite-accurate description of Mina from the Ladies’ Home Journal) reworked right into a assured public determine who known as herself a “home executive” and promoted home labor as a matter of nationwide significance.

As america industrialized within the Nineteenth century, paid (male) labor moved more and more outdoors of the house. Center-class properties had been idealized as protected (feminine) havens, sheltered from the bustle of capitalist manufacturing. These closely gendered “separate spheres” had been mutually reinforcing: Wives performing unpaid work throughout the dwelling had been markers of their husbands’ monetary success. The supposedly protected dwelling, nevertheless, was by no means static. New family applied sciences, whether or not apple parers or washing machines, raised questions on what sorts of labor ladies needs to be doing.

In 1912, Thomas himself informed Good Housekeeping he hoped expertise would liberate ladies from “family drudgery,” which he steered—amongst different gendered and racialized feedback on so-called progress—had stored ladies from creating their brains for hundreds of years. (His imaginative and prescient of an electrically powered dwelling, working to the sounds of phonograph music, was primarily a self-advertisement.)

Mina skilled these financial and technological modifications firsthand. She married on the top of the Gilded Age, when electrical mild was nonetheless a novelty. Whereas at Glenmont, she watched ten presidents come and go. She took half in temperance activism. She weathered World Struggle I, witnessed ladies profitable the vote and lived by way of the Great Depression. Upon her loss of life in 1947, she left behind a world blighted by World Struggle II and the atomic bomb. She is thus a exceptional historic barometer for understanding how large-scale modifications in ladies’s work performed out on a person degree.

Nineteenth-century housekeeping was not for the faint of coronary heart. Operating Glenmont took apply. Mina learn manuals on housekeeping and mentioned home service together with her mother and father. She discovered tips like utilizing kerosene and varnish to remove bugs or treating machine grease stains with lard. Mina was by no means doing this work on her personal: Her staff, whose precise composition fluctuated over time, recurrently included a waitress, a prepare dinner, a maid, gardeners and a chauffeur, and she or he usually outsourced the notoriously tough job of laundry.

Not content material to let her husband be the one scientist at Glenmont, Mina approached family administration scientifically. This was nothing radical. Earlier than Mina was born, ladies like Catharine Beecher had outlined “home financial system” as a self-discipline, emphasizing sensible schooling for ladies and selling housekeeping as a “science” and “occupation” that required vital coaching. Housekeeping grew to become science in a really literal sense when Ellen Swallow Richards, the primary girl to graduate from MIT, began making use of her data of chemistry to on a regular basis home issues, co-founding the American Home Economics Association in 1909. For Richards, the house was something however a non-public home retreat; she hoped dwelling economics would each advance ladies professionally and enhance public coverage.

Mina admired Richards all her life, even quoting her throughout a 1940 interview. By then, Richards had been useless virtually 30 years, however Mina steered that her name for “educated ladies” to advertise and develop the “science of home financial system” was nonetheless present. “Educated” was the operative time period: “A data of the weather of chemistry and physics should be utilized to the day by day dwelling,” Richards as soon as stated. Mina modeled her personal profession on this mix of professionalism, examine and intense private funding.

Mina was at all times enthusiastic about the house’s social significance, and she or he wielded her appreciable assets to satisfy each new disaster. When the U.S. entered World Struggle I in 1917, dwelling economics grew to become essential to nationwide safety. Wartime inflation made it troublesome for folks to feed their households, and authorities officers nervous about feeding males on the battlefield.

Herbert Hoover, then head of the U.S. Meals Administration, turned to housewives for assist. Pushing the slogan “food will win the war,” Hoover inspired ladies to protect meals, remove waste and substitute different substances for scarce objects akin to wheat. Mina collected a bursting scrapbook of supplies on easy methods to contribute to the struggle effort by way of food preservation at home. She taped Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 war message to Congress on the entrance of the guide and stuffed its pockets with canning directions, pamphlets about provide shortages, and a number of meatless and wheatless menu choices.

Wartime meals conservation made an impression on Mina. In 1928, she joined Hoover’s presidential marketing campaign, citing his “belief within the womanhood of America” throughout wartime. The struggle had strengthened her conviction that home pursuits had been nationwide pursuits. Her dwelling was a public useful resource.

By the early Nineteen Thirties, Mina had change into a home thinker. A lot had modified in ladies’s work since World Struggle I. It spooked Mina that increasingly more ladies had been opting to work outdoors the house. (In response to the Brookings Institution, virtually 50 p.c of single ladies and almost 12 p.c of married ladies participated within the labor pressure in 1930.) She nervous these people had been “victims of a mechanical age” and that “the mixture of girl’s suffrage and the struggle” had given them a distaste for housekeeping. “Until the ladies of America make a determined effort to return to the enterprise of home-making,” Mina stated in a July 7, 1930, speech, “essentially the most very important basis of our nationwide life is threatened.” She believed everybody would lose alternatives for cultural improvement if ladies didn’t use their leisure time (prolonged by labor-saving applied sciences) to coach themselves and their kids.

Mina was conspicuously drawing on what she had discovered from Nineteenth-century discourses of home financial system. Her claims that the house needs to be a protected, woman-run heart for schooling and social stability might have come straight out of the 1840s. However she added a company twist. She rejected the time period “housewife.” “As head of the home,” Mina asserted, “girl occupies a most necessary and enviable place. … ‘Home-executive’ is the title I like to use to home-makers. The time period ‘housewife’ doesn’t apply to the succesful girl who conducts her dwelling simply as effectively as the person who carries on his work.”

The perfect family was a posh company entity, staffed by “home assistants” (servants) whose duties and pay could be primarily based on talent and coaching. The house government occupied a supervisory position like that of a manufacturing facility foreman. Her place required a stunning array of skills: “She should have government means. She should be a great buying agent. … She should be one thing of a chemist … an economist. … She needs to be versed in music, in artwork, in literature.” The house government was an mental, a scientist, a businesswoman, an artist and a trainer multi function.

Mina’s aim was to maintain the house—and ladies—central in trendy society. Constructing on the house economists who got here earlier than her, she sought to outline ladies’s work as work relatively than a obscure, idealized calling.

This isn’t to idealize Mina herself, nor to assert her as a contemporary feminist. Mina couldn’t go away behind her Nineteenth-century upbringing, nor the concept the house was ladies’s area. And her imaginative and prescient of the executive-run dwelling was solely attainable for ladies with vital monetary assets. At the same time as she up to date her vocabulary, she held onto sure dated fashions of labor, consistent with the truth that she had live-in home servants nicely into the twentieth century. Because the a lot youthful Eleanor Roosevelt pointed out in a speech given the identical day as Mina’s, many individuals had been now dwelling in trendy residences, and “the lady who sits at house is apt to be idle and never very contented.”

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Regardless of how usually she informed the press that girls belonged within the dwelling, Mina was too sensible to put service to a cultural splendid over the calls for of day-to-day actuality. Certainly, buried inside Mina’s extra conservative statements had been two sensible—however radical—ideas. First, Mina argued that if a household solely had sufficient cash to ship one youngster to school, it needs to be the daughter (the long run dwelling government) and never the son. Second, she acknowledged ladies’s “desire for financial independence” and believed the husband and spouse ought to cut up the household revenue 50-50. Home work needs to be compensated, with the house government formally acknowledged as her husband’s “accomplice and companion.”

“Companion and companion” was precisely what Mina was to Thomas. Glenmont and the laboratory, lower than a mile aside, had been by no means separate spheres. Earlier than that they had been married a month, Thomas had Mina taking lab notes. Throughout World Struggle I, the Navy nervous Thomas wouldn’t be a part of its Consulting Board as a result of Mina thought it was a nasty thought. Mina stored tabs on Thomas’ endeavors, from ore milling to phonographs, and helped her sons navigate the household enterprise.

Thomas wasn’t towards getting concerned in home issues, both. In 1903, when Mina threw a Halloween party to learn her church, company had been greeted by festive parts that bore her husband’s signature: glittering incandescent lights, illuminated placards and a “ghost chamber” geared up with an electrified handrail that shocked unsuspecting guests. The Edisons, in youngest son Theodore’s phrases, had been a household of “inveterate sensible jokers.” These jokers had been additionally thinkers, and they’d spend evenings collectively within the Glenmont lounge, trying up references for Thomas’ scientific analysis.

Two massive desks dominate this room within the estate-turned-national park—one for Thomas and one for Mina. Right here, she might write correspondence; go over accounts; and make plans for the Nationwide Recreation Affiliation, the Girl’s Change of the Oranges, the National Audubon Society and different organizations to which she lent her abilities. Drawers are filled with clean stationery. A sliding compartment holds playing cards for her skilled contacts, from taxidermists to journey businesses. One other drawer is stuffed with eyeglasses. Private mementoes and notes from Thomas are tucked amongst appointment books and writing implements. House, household and profession are intertwined.

Mina was not forward of her time. She didn’t go away behind a legacy of radical politics or open protest towards gendered restrictions. However that’s exactly why she is necessary to understanding the historical past of ladies’s work. Eminently of her time, and poised between eras, Mina was at all times trying , adapting her inherited data to new conditions. This historical past, unfolding in particular person lives, is simply as political because the historical past of any large-scale motion. It reveals how viewpoints step by step shift, and the way the reasonable beliefs and day by day practices of the late Nineteenth century virtually imperceptibly blended into the practices of postwar America. “What goes on within the properties of a nation,” concluded a Washington Post reporter writing about Mina in 1930, “is actually extra necessary than what its legislature does, or what its scientists uncover.”