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 (Rosenblum 2002). 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 the “two spheres,” 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 (Spencer-Wood 1994a: 177, 1996). 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.