Mina Miller Edison, Education, Social Reform, and the Permeable Boundaries of Domestic Space, 1886–1940

Abstract

As part of a major restoration project, every scrap of information that could be found about the landscape of the Thomas Edison winter estate in Fort Myers, Florida, was collected, collated, and analyzed. Material evidence, in all its forms, was utilized (newspaper articles, letters, postcards, photographs, magazines, oral histories, diaries, biographies, books, and journal articles by professional botanists, avocational botanists, and local gardeners). Initially, the focus was on a famous inventor whose work spoke directly to the common man: electric lights, records, motion pictures, and national defense. His wife stayed in the background. Mina Miller was a very young woman when she married Edison, raised to live in a woman's world, and not to venture far into the spaces perceived as masculine. As more information appeared, it became clear that she grew from a homemaker into a reformer who helped transform American culture by making it laudable for women to act as active agents for public change in their communities. Mina Miller Edison was actively redefining the positions of women in public arenas—places that can be seen as political microworlds. When the placement and borders of Mina's public activities are mapped, they stand well beyond her home and are complemented by her conversion of domestic space into public space. Archaeologists assume a fundamental link between life events and change in the material record; sometimes the linkage is clear and undeniable. It is less clear how shifts in self-identity affect artifact distributions or the archaeological features that reveal the practice of space. Here evidence of Mina Miller Edison's activities during her passage from young bride to older widow is analyzed in tandem with her command and use of space. Particular attention is paid to the influence of Chautauqua women and the reform movements they supported, a topic not fully touched upon in earlier studies of Mina Miller Edison. It also focuses on the transition from masculine work space to feminine landscapes at her estate. Following Mina across her garden shows that nature was one medium that swept her into a wide sphere of public activity, social activism, and national influence. What this essay shows is that she gained a stronger sense of self as she matured and, as she did so, had a stronger and more visible influence in different facets of her life. But, to see these, I had to dig deeper into a history overlain with myths: myths about Thomas Edison the inventor, myths about her role in his life, and myths that obscure women's acquisition of civic power. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)