More Work for Mother: Technology in the Home
(Based in part on Ruth Schwartz Cowan's book More Work for Mother)
Part I: Why does housework take so much #(%&%)#$@ time, when I spent so much on these labor-saving devices…?
When we think of "the impact of science and technology," it is easy to think of Big Important Things: antibiotics, which have saved millions of lives. Computers, both in the home and the office. Aircraft. Rockets and space satellites. Bombs and atom smashers. In today's class, however, we are going to think a bit about science and technology in the home.
Some of this technology is obvious, as in the case of radios, television sets, and home entertainment centers. However, when you think about it, it is possible to have a home without any of these things. Today we are going to look at things that we often take more or less for granted--things like refrigerators, stoves, and washing machines. Also, we are going take a look at how these have changed households over time. Some changes may be obvious, but others are much more subtle.
But lets start at the beginning. British settlers first managed to get permanent colony going in what to become the U.S. in the early 1600's.
For years and years, most families in America were small farmers. We find a description of their life on pp. 20-24: food was coarse bread, butter, eggs, cheese, oatmeal, and stews, plus seasonal vegetables and fruits. During the winter fresh fruits and vegetables would have been replaced with easily-stored fruits (like apples), plus pickles and preserves. The drinks would have been beer, ciders (both hard and sweet), milk, tea, and (bad) coffee.
Generally speaking, to food was probably plain, but generally solid and plentiful, with more meat (especially roasted and fried pork) and eggs than we would think healthy today. However, this was less of an issue then, because husbands and wives worked hard from sun-up to sun-down. Though they probably wouldn't have thought too much about it, men and women did different types of work. Husbands would be in charge of growing grain and threshing it, as well as slaughtering animals, while women generally cooked it once it was in the house. Women did a lot of the food preservation. Men made mead (fermented honey) and cider, while women usually made beers, ales, and wines. Women were in charge of producing cloth, turning it into clothes, and mending; men did leather working. Men would chop wood, while women would process lye and fats to make soaps and candles. Some jobs were "sexually neutral"--weaving, milking cows, carrying water, and peeling fruits and vegetables.
Note, however, that in this world there was no question of whose work was more important or "better": all the work was essential. If one person got sick, life rapidly got worse for both--there was simply too much work for one person to do well, and most people could not afford hired help. This is why rural people tended to remarry quickly after the death of a spouse, and also why they tended to want a lot of children. Neighbors and family might or might not be able to help out enough to keep a person from starving during a hard winter.
What happened once a family became established, and had family and a bit of money? In all likelihood, the chores became slightly less arduous. Children can carry water or peel potatoes or simple mending. Hired help can do heavy, semi-skilled work like laundry, or scrubbing floors, or watching children. However, the complex work--supervising planting, caring for the sick, complex sewing, orchestrating meals, etc. would still take up a lot of time. And note that in America, good labor was always hard to find; land was cheap, so anybody with any ambition would work long enough to acquire skills, then leave to start their own farm or business. Thus, most "help" consisted of young people learning skills and/or too young to strike out on their own just yet, or people with some sort of problem.
It is against this backdrop that we part of why America developed in the way that it did. Land was easy to come by, but good labor was short. Thus Americans spent a lot of time developing gadgets to help take the place of the (missing) unskilled labor--thinks like automatic apple peelers and corers in the kitchen, sewing machines (the most basic of which could increase output by 15 fold over hand stitching), mechanical harvesters (the first of which did the work of 8 men), etc.
Note, too, that this system--at least at the beginning--encouraged people to go to work in factory towns. Why? Because factory work was hard (sometimes 12 hours a day, 6 days a week), but duties were well-defined and predictable. A servant, on the other hand, was expected to be on-call at the will of the employer, living in the same house. The servants could be expected to get the hardest, least-interesting jobs most of the time. And employer quality was highly variable--some were certainly kind, but others could be harsh, constantly reminding the workers of their lower status. Thus, young people and/or "status impaired" (due to ethnicity, race, or lack of education) often freely chose industrial work over domestic service!
But here is the trick: industrial work provides a very important return: cash. So what? The answer: cash can be used anywhere, for anything. And over time, men and young people (both male and female) tended to take outside jobs, sometimes in addition to their farm duties. This brought more money into the home, allowing people to buy things that they made before… thus further reducing the need for unskilled domestic labor. For example, making soap was time consuming and back-breaking work. Simply buying a bar of Ivory Soap made much more sense, and it was better quality than could be produced at home, too. Gradually people realized that it was cheaper and easier to do this with other things, as well: first flour milling, then grain production, then bread-making itself was turned over to professionals. Jelly/jam/preserve production followed, too. Flax/cotton/wool production, then spinning/thread production, then cloth production, and then finally clothes production was industrialized.
And there is not simply a conversion to store-bought goods. Appliances also help take some of the drudgery out of tasks that cannot be farmed out. For example, washing machines removed a lot of the heavy labor from laundry (and helped preserve hands, too!). Iceboxes and (later) refrigerators reduced food spoilage and trips to the market. Vacuum cleaners lessened the need to take rugs out and beat them (and also made wall-to-wall carpet practical).
The trick, though, is this: no matter how much stuff is farmed out/subcontracted, somebody still has to manage everything. This is essential, but time consuming. And it does not produce cash, which contributes to the low status of housework as seen by much of society. Complicating this is a loss of independence, too--people doing housework are no longer seen as producers of goods (as they were "back in the day" when people made their own clothes or did home canning). Instead, they are seen as consumers of goods that they cannot make or service themselves, such as vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, and other appliances.
Part II: But Did It HAVE To Be This Way…?
It is easy to think that our lifestyles today came about the way that they did because they simply had to do so. In this view, electricity had to be discovered. Then it had to be brought into the house. And it had to be used for traditional filament-based light bulbs.
This is called "technological determinism"-- for better or for worse, the "stuff" determines the way we live, and people who don't live like us are either deprived or confused. This is not necessarily true, for a variety of reasons.
For example, the author of the book describes the evolution of the refrigerator. Now, it is true that most people across cultures desire some form of refrigeration--note that ice cream and sherbets are popular around the world. Whether it is a true necessity or not depends on a variety of factors, including lifestyle and food choices. However, there are a several ways to make a refrigerator! Indeed, large-scale meat lockers were in use in the 1800's. During the 1920's people figured out how to shrink the equipment down to something that could fit in a house, it turned out that it was about as easy to make a home refrigerator that ran on gas or wood as it is to make one that ran on electricity. In fact, it is even possible to make one that runs on both gas and electricity, has no moving parts, and is nearly silent (see pp. 128-145). So why not use this one? The answer was economic and social. It turned out that General Electric decided to push the all-electric refrigerator because it fit well with their overall strategy and increased home electricity consumption, and they were willing to dump millions of dollars into research and especially advertising. They also had a national network for sales and repair already in place from their electrical work. The company producing gas refrigerators did not have nearly as much money, and the gas companies--who were losing share to the electric companies--did not push the gas refrigerator, in spite of the fact that it would have increased gas usage. The result was that the gas refrigerator ended up being slightly more expensive.
By the 1930's, the refrigerator race had been won by the electrics. Interestingly, GE managers were themselves surprised how many refrigerators they sold. By 1929 they had sold about 50,000, when they had expected to sell only 10,000. Today gas/heat powered refrigerators are still available for niche markets, such as RV's and camping cabins. However, they are more expensive than regular refrigerators, because of low production volumes. An 8-cubic foot combination refrigerator/freezer runs about $1300, plus shipping costs. (See http://www.sierrasolar.com/prod_store/R_servel.html) In contrast, a cheap Kenmore 18 cubic foot unit from Sears runs only about $450. To its advantage, the propane unit uses only about 7 pounds of propane a year--about $7 a year(!) while my refrigerator may cost $58.
There are other examples of "alternative" (and more expensive) appliances available. For example, it is possible to buy composting toilets that do not require water, which again have higher initial costs, but may have lower overall costs. Unfortunately, as in the case of the propane refrigerators, these do not have a very good national support system; if something goes wrong in the middle of the night, one cannot just call a regular repair person for an emergency call.
It is rather unlikely that everybody will go buy propane refrigerators or composting toilets soon. However, we might see shift in the not-too-distant future towards home generation of electric power. Once thought to be the domain of hippies, survivalists, and nut-cases, recent events--combined with technological advances such as small, quiet generators and fuel cells--make this option much more attractive than it was even five years. ago.
Note, too, that it is not only our appliances that could change. There are other (failed) alternatives. Some examples:
Common use of domestic servants (which we have already describe)
Communal living, either rural or city.
Laundry services
Cooked-food delivery services
There is no intrinsic reason that at least some of these alternative arrangements could not have worked. However, they probably ran aground for social, rather than technical, reasons. In the U.S., people tend to value their privacy and autonomy greatly. They want to eat when and where they want, and would rather eat inferior food (say, T.V. dinners) than be forced to schedule meal deliveries ahead of time. They also tend to prefer privacy and independence over community and obligation, even at the cost of possible loneliness. (Note, for example, the ambiguity that people have about "retirement communities" and assisted living.)
The same can be said about domestic servants. While the U.S. has enough opportunity that few people go into domestic service, there is also the problem of trust and privacy ("Have they been stealing the silverware…? Will be see our maid talking about us on the evening news…?"). We also allow our labor laws to be complicated allow domestic service to exist as a half-underground economy.
Part III: The Closing of the "Appliance Gap"
In conclusion, it is interesting to note that over the past 50 years the U.S. has seen a very interesting trend: a closing of an appliance gap. What does this mean? Note that in the not-so-distant past, we could fairly easily tell the difference between the well-off and the "hard-pressed" (or "status impaired…?") by looking both at their home and their lifestyles. Early in this century, things such as running hot and cold water, sinks, and bathtubs. In many areas between 1900 and 1920, only about 20% of the people had bathrooms and indoor plumbing. Those without had to carry water to a house and heat it up on a stove, making it hard to keep clean (p. 162). Central heat and air did not exist, making the house cold in the winter, and the kitchen an oven in the summer.
By the end of WWII, we start seeing the better-off with appliances such as telephones, hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity, plus refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. In the city, the hard-pressed usually had the telephones, electricity, and at least cold-water plumbing, though not in the country.
Curiously, nowadays both well-off and hard-pressed have access to many of the same basic conveniences. Unless one is truly destitute (or in special circumstances) one has access to hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, telephones, and washing machines. (What about garbage disposals, dishwashers, and internet…?) Furthermore, the days (9 to 5 jobs for most, male or female) are common, with housework piled on after work. Is it safe to say that while very real differences exist in lifestyle (where one lives, safety, etc.), for the first time in U.S. history the actual living patterns are now quite similar between rich and poor?