The ironies revolve around the idea that household
industrialization has led to less work for father, more work for
mother; the basic fallacy lies in equating the open hearth and the
microwave. True, Prof. Cowan (History, SUNY/Stony Brook) achieves a
clearer, sharper focus on the technological improvements than Susan
Strasser's exposition of this thesis, Never Done (1982). She also
has recourse to a hypothetical Connecticut couple to guide us
through the changing times and technologies. Nonetheless, the book
reduces to one big feminist point applied - rather flatly - to a
mass of detail. If the pre-Industrial household was based on the
labor of both spouses, then the early stages of industrialization
paved the way for increasing inequality. "Merchant flour, cast-iron
stoves, municipal water, and manufactured boots did not free
[women] from their labors. Insofar as these commodities allowed men
and boys to leave their homes and. . . created new jobs that only
women could perform, women were tied even more strongly. . . to
their cast-iron hearths." Further industrialization did move many
tasks out of the house - clothes-making, health,
food-preserving-but expanded the time relegated to transportation.
"The automobile had become, to the American housewife of the middle
classes, what the cast-iron stove. . . would have been to her
counterpart of 1850 - the vehicle through which she did much of her
most significant work." The "golden years" of housework were
1900-1920, when the average middle-class woman could count on some
domestic help, and before she was expected to hold down a job too.
While new appliances helped poor women achieve "basic amenities
that their mother could not have attained," the disappearance of
servants has meant that "women who had been in comfortable
circumstances before the war. . . were under increasing pressure. .
. to shoulder the burden of housework alone." Add in outside
employment and the result is more work for mother. But there's an
apples and oranges problem here: is labor to be judged by hours
alone? Does driving to ballet classes match beating the rugs? (Does
a microwave take the time or the trouble of an open hearth?) Strong
on research, short on common sense. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this classic work of women's history (winner of the 1984 Dexter
Prize from the Society for the History of Technology), Ruth
Schwartz Cowan shows how and why modern women devote as much time
to housework as did their colonial sisters. In lively and
provocative prose, Cowan explains how the modern
conveniences,washing machines, white flour, vacuums, commercial
cotton,seemed at first to offer working-class women middle-class
standards of comfort. Over time, however, it became clear that
these gadgets and gizmos mainly replaced work previously conducted
by men, children, and servants. Instead of living lives of leisure,
middle-class women found themselves struggling to keep up with ever
higher standards of cleanliness.
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