As a PhD student interested in technology and its role in
society, professors are always suggesting interesting reading material. Of course, I never read most of it, but this
blog gave me a good excuse to finally read Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s seminal book More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.
The book covers a lot of ground, so I’m going to get four
posts out of it. This “Part 1” will
discuss Cowan’s basic thesis: industrialization eliminated “housework” for men
and children but preserved “women’s work” and in some ways made it worse.
For most of human history, basic survival required a lot of
work from every person in the household.
Men made leather goods, whittled tools, ground grain into meal (or
hauled it to the mill), chopped and stacked wood, tended animals, and worked
the fields. Women cooked, tended children,
made soap and candles, sewed, and wove.
Even children worked, tending smaller children, mending, stirring pots,
and cleaning vegetables. If the family needed
help during the harvest/slaughtering season, or if someone was ill, they would
hire help or foster a young family member.
In this dynamic, everyone had work to do and each person developed
specialized skills to complete this work.
Then the industrial revolution changed the balance. Children went to school and men’s work became
industrialized: flour was milled commercially, tools and leather goods were
made in factories, coal and gas replaced wood.
However, traditionally women’s work remained in the home and new
technologies often created more work for married women.
- The production of industrial clothing reduced women’s sewing and weaving tasks, but now the family has more clothing that is expected to be washed more frequently.
- Coal and gas stoves meant that women didn’t tend the fire anymore, but they are expected to provide more diverse and more time consuming meals.
- Vacuum cleaners simplified carpet cleaning, but now women are expected to clean the carpets weekly rather than yearly.
In addition, with the boom in factory jobs, domestic workers
could find better pay for less work outside the home, so married women are
expected to do all of this by themselves.
This got me thinking.
Aren’t there “labor-saving”
devices today that only make more work for women? Here are some examples I thought up and I’d
love to hear others:
- We now have McMansions where each kid has his/her own room with a bathroom and Dad has his man-cave, but now Mom needs to clean more rooms.
- How many kitchen devices promise to grill a stuffed pepper, infuse a steak, or puree something exotic? Guess who usually makes all these specialized meals and then cleans the contraptions.
- How many laundry steaming and sanitizing machines are on the market, raising the sanitation standard yet again?
This is such a great point that you (and Ruth Schwartz Cowan) are making. I certainly agree that many of today's advances just produce more household chores - which unfortunately, are still largely left to women to do.
ReplyDeleteAs a minimalist, I tend to avoid too many gadgets because of the extra work they entail. I believe that part of the issue has to do with the consumerism we are indoctrinated in from an early age. People feel compelled to surround themselves with objects although the real necessity of these items is debateable.
This is really interesting and gets to something that I eventually want to write about, the differences in domesticity and "traditional" work between the third world and first world. The idea of basic survival t still exists in the world, and it's interesting to see how it makes such a difference in basic equality. With the introduction of "westernization", cultures in places like Ghana have been slowly changing but still maintaining the unity with everyone contributing their share.
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