ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the gas companies' active movement into the realm of advertising through the medium of public exhibitions and their use of lady demonstrators to sell their goods and services. No longer monopolists, like any other trader, they had to sell their services and products. By linking conversion to gas lighting and cooking with public health, improved housing and national well-being – the organising themes of Smoke Abatement and International Health exhibitions – the gas industry attempted to elevate the acquisition of gas appliances from a convenient luxury to a critical necessity. The placement of the appointed women, who stand on-stage with the appliances behind and to either side of the seated men, suggests that the lady demons were part of the exhibition itself: temporary and portable. As Victorian manufacturers used lady demons to show off their stoves, visual representations of women, by the early 1900s, were increasingly incorporated into the trade literature and printed advertisements.
