For caffeine addicts, a morning without a pot of coffee is a no-go. But it hasn't always been as easy to make coffee as it is today — and as Rebecca K. Shrum writes, the dawn of coffee machines came along with a lot of manly marketing(营销).
Mr. Coffee, the first electric drip coffee machine for home use, appeared in1972, forever changing the way Americans made coffee. Before its rise, women used percolators (渗滤式咖啡壶) to make their coffee on the stovetop or on the counter — a method that produced bitter, scorched (烧焦的) coffee. Despite the availability of complex, non-electric drip systems, percolators ruled American kitchens.
They also gave American women a reputation for making terrible coffee. Part of that was based on the coffee supply itself, writes Shrum. Due to wartime shortages and poor quality, "coffee tasted bad no matter what method consumers used."
At the time, women were households' primary coffeemakers, and cultural pressures such as the popularity of percolators as wedding gifts kept the task in a firmly female sphere(领域). Coffee ads described coffee-caused family issues and threatened women who made bad coffee with relationship problems. This cultural pressure cooker presented the perfect opportunity for Mr. Coffee.
Mr. Coffee looked and worked differently than percolators. It also made better coffee. In order to get consumers to give up their familiar percolators for this expensive new product, not only was Mr. Coffee given a masculine (男子气概的) name, writes Shrum, but its marketing suggested that it would produce a man's preferred coffee. The company hired Joe DiMaggio to give his masculine endorsement (宣传) to the product — adding an additional layer of masculine advice to a product that claimed to teach women how to make better coffee.
Mr. Coffee encouraged men to get into the kitchen themselves. Since it was so easy to use, men no longer had an excuse to avoid coffee-making. Mr. Coffee played into existing ideas about gender and domesticity. It all goes to show that everything around us has historical and cultural significance — even that morning cup of coffee.
