The core promise of technology, in all its forms, is that it will lighten the burden for humanity. Humble household appliances often get trotted out during such lofty discussions, perhaps because they are technologies everyone is familiar with and takes for granted. We’ve forgotten there was a time when such things didn’t exist, and if we think about them at all, it’s usually to be annoyed that we have to think about them. We’re chided to be grateful for these miracles — “You kids don’t know how good you have it! My grandmother used to have to [insert terrible chore that is probably now outlawed under current labor laws]!” In other words, we elevate tools like the humble washing machine to a proxy for all of our highest values as a progressive society.
In Enlightenment Now, when discussing the drastic improvements in quality of life over the past several decades, Steven Pinker says that "the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general." He quotes Thomas Edison as saying:
"The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge. She will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic laborer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman's world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman's energy will be conserved for use in broader, more constructive fields."
The assumption — often delivered with a patting-themselves-on-the-back tone from male authors — is that once women gained access to washing machines, dishwashers, and other labor-saving devices, they were liberated from drudgery. The consensus, echoed by Pinker, is that such innovations have given us our time back, shifting the role of the home from a place of production to a place of consumption. What used to be produced at home (often by women) is now purchased outside the home in the form of goods and services. Yay! Everybody wins!
Well, hang on a minute.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, a historian focused on the history of technology, shows us why this view is incomplete and overly simplistic. In her 1983 masterpiece of historical analysis, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, she steadily dismantles everything you think you know about so-called labor-saving devices and what modernity actually looks like in the home — a place, incidentally, that Cowan reminds us is "as much a locus for industrialized work as factories and coal mines are.” Or, to put it in even starker economic terms, “Households are the locales in which our society produces healthy people, and housewives are the workers who are responsible for almost all of the stages in that production process.”
Even something as straightforward as understanding households as sites of production and core participants in the economy — not as sheltered havens apart from it — is a relevant reminder for today. And the emphasis on household labor as labor, despite being unpaid and unaccounted for in a country’s GDP, is a concept that is increasingly voiced by progressive and feminist scholars writing about the gender pay gap and the idea of a Universal Basic Income.
More Work for Mother is a compelling work of scholarship that dares to put aside the facile praise of labor-saving devices and follows where the historical data lead. The book’s key message, which still comes as a revelation nearly 40 years after it was published, is that household technologies primarily accelerated men’s, not women’s, entrance into the labor market outside the home. In fact, many of those technologies had unintended consequences that made it more likely a woman would need to continue working at home.
The core question Cowan wants to answer is: When we talk about labor-saving devices, whose labor is saved, exactly? For Pinker and Edison and nearly everyone else, the answer is obvious: it’s women's labor. But what Cowan's analysis shows is that, during the industrial era, the household work traditionally performed by men became, for a variety of reasons, more completely replaced by technology than the household work traditionally performed by women. The story of how this happened, and why the reverse didn't happen, is what More Work for Mother is about.
To lay the groundwork for her analysis, Cowan assumes that we have no idea what household work used to look like 200 years ago, or what specific tasks were handled by men, which by women, and which by children. I think this assumption of her readers' ignorance is well-founded, and it's enlightening to learn about all the work that went into keeping a family alive as recently as a few generations ago.
What is most unfamiliar to a modern audience is the extent to which, prior to industrialization, household work was an obligation shared equally by both men and women (and children). For example, according to the pre-industrial division of labor, men were responsible for making mead and cider, mending leather garments, pounding corn, whittling the family’s wooden bowls and spoons, and chopping the wood used for cooking. Out of necessity, running a household was very much a joint venture, and a wife without a husband was at just as much of a disadvantage as a husband without a wife (back then, fish did need bicycles and bicycles needed fish). As Cowan reports, “the daily exigencies of agrarian life meant that men and women had to work in tandem in order to undertake any single life-sustaining chore.” The concept of household work being “women’s work” was a product of the uneven industrialization of the tasks men and women had traditionally performed in the home.
With each new innovation, men’s share of household work was largely replaced by market alternatives, while women’s remained largely the same, or even increased.
There are three key points to keep in mind while reading Cowan’s argument:
One of the surprising insights of More Work for Mother is how things we don’t typically think of as innovations actually had a radical effect on people’s day-to-day lives. Take, for example, white flour. Traditionally, most bread made in a household was quick bread (such as cornbread) which could be made, as the name implies, quickly and without relying on yeast cultures or rising time. Men played a significant role in the cornbread-making process: they shucked the corn and ground it into meal by hand or hauled it to the local grist mill for grinding. Over time, as refined white flour became widely available from large commercial flour mills, it replaced cornmeal as the household’s primary grain.
This shift from home-grown to store-bought grains relieved men and boys of one of their most time-consuming chores, while paradoxically increasing labor for women. This was because women were now expected to make more complex yeast breads that required more time, more skill, and more physical labor in the form of kneading dough. In short, men’s portion of bread labor disappeared, and women's was augmented. (Incidentally, this is how white bread and confections like angel food cakes became symbols of status in the industrial period; it indicated that a family had transitioned to refined flour and had a housewife with enough time and skill to make such delicacies.)
The same process occurred with the invention of stoves to replace hearths. Most pre-industrialization meals were what we would call "one-pot meals" — usually a meat stew of some kind that was cooked in a single pot over a hearth — and people typically ate the same thing day after day. This task also involved men's labor: they hauled the necessary wood to the kitchen every day. When stoves and ovens became affordable for most households, men's contribution to the cooking process was no longer necessary. On top of that, a skilled cook suddenly had the ability (and therefore, the obligation) to cook multiple different dishes and types of food simultaneously, spelling the end of the simple and less labor-intensive one-pot stew and the advent of multi-course meals and new types of cuisine.
New World 84 gas cooker advertisement, c.1950, from the Dunedin City Council Archives, Gas Department Series 39/136. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. |
Cowan explains how this transition played out in households:
“The important activity that was radically altered by the presence of a stove was fuel gathering; if a stove halved the amount of fuel that a household required, it thus halved the amount of work that men had to do in cutting, hauling, and splitting wood. The labor involved in cooking, which was the female share of the work, seems barely to have been affected at all; the process of frying bacon on a stove is little different from the process of frying bacon over a hearth.”
Further compounding matters, early cast iron stoves, unlike fireplaces, had to be cleaned every day to ward off rust. Applying stove polish was thus added to the growing list of women’s chores, while chopping and hauling wood for fuel was removed from men’s to-do list. As a result, “the kitchen became a place in which men had no useful role to play.”
Cleaning rugs is an excellent example of how chores used to be done: this was a task that, prior to the advent of vacuums, was typically performed once or twice a year, and involved multiple members of the household. The man of the household was responsible for carrying the rugs outside and hanging them up, and the children were responsible for beating the rugs to remove dust and dirt, after which the men would carry the rugs back inside the house. When vacuums were invented, this work process was distilled into one tool (the vacuum) and one person (the woman of the household). Whereas the task of keeping the rugs and carpets clean had traditionally been the responsibility of men and children, the advent of the vacuum made it the responsibility of women.
What is perhaps most important to realize about this process is that the invention of vacuum cleaners created a demand for cleaner rugs, which meant that a task that had previously been performed annually was now being performed weekly or monthly. Keeping all of these facts in mind, Cowan concludes that "the question of whether cleaning a rug has been made easier or faster by the advent of vacuum cleaners becomes considerably more difficult to answer. Easier for whom? Faster for whom? Under what conditions?”
Arco Wand Vacuum Cleaner Advertisement from August 1917, Scribner's Magazine. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. |
Perhaps the most striking example of this process is the advent of washing machines. Doing laundry prior to the invention of washing machines was notoriously back-breaking work. However, throughout the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, most middle-class families weren’t breaking their own backs — they outsourced this labor by sending their laundry to commercial agencies. When washing machines became commonplace, the work that had previously been outsourced to others was suddenly done by the woman of the household. In addition, the advent of manufactured cloth increased the amount of clothing a middle-class person was expected to own; in previous generations, most people had only one or two outfits, which were washed infrequently, if ever (most pre-industrial items of clothing were made of wool, felts, or leather and simply brushed when they got dirty).
Again, the technology not only shifted work from multiple others onto the shoulders of one person, but simultaneously created a desire or expectation that had never existed before — in this case, the expectation of more clothing items for each member of the household, clothing materials that lent themselves to frequent washing, and higher standards of cleanliness that virtually mandated frequent washing.
As Cowan puts it:
“Washing sheets with an automatic washing machine is considerably easier than washing them with one that has a wringer, itself considerably easier than washing them with a scrub board and tub. Yet the easiest solution of all (at least from the point of view of the housewife) is to have someone else do it altogether…The advent of the electrically powered washing machines (as well as of synthetic washable fabrics) coincided with the advent of ‘do-it-yourself’ laundry, so that the woman endowed with a Bendix would have found it easier to do her laundry but, simultaneously, would have done more laundry, and more of it herself, than either her mother or her grandmother had.” (emphasis mine)
Montana Steam Laundry, Butte, Montana (1901), Image taken from pg 42 of Souvenir history of the Butte Fire Department by Peter Sanger, Chief Engineer. From the Butte Digital Image Project at Montana Memory Project. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. |
“Why Risk His Health with Germ-Laden Clothing, When a Bendix Home Laundry Costs Only $99.50?”
An objection at this point might be, "Granted, vacuuming is easier than the old process of beating rugs, and doing laundry in a washing machine is easier than using a washboard, but why not just continue the same cadence and only vacuum once a year, or continue washing your clothes just as infrequently as you always did? After all, no one likes cleaning or laundry, so even if it's easier to do than it was before, why suddenly start doing it once a week?" To find your answer, look no further than the ad men of the 1940s and '50s. Prior to this time, of course, there were ads for various household supplies and tools, but by and large those ads were focused on the item's ingredients, the cleanliness of the factory where it was made, or clever ways to use it around the house.
As the unequal transformation of household labor gained speed, though, advertisers increasingly focused on themes such as guilt, embarrassment, anxiety, and insecurity to sell their goods. Suddenly, women were receiving the message that if they didn't buy a particular brand of vacuum, their home would not be clean enough, or their family would not be healthy enough, and it would be their fault. In essence, advertising directed at women underwent a shift that is still going strong today: The message is “You're bad, and you should feel bad. But with our product you can be better.” You don't want guests to come over and see a dirty rug and judge your housekeeping skills, do you? The only way to avoid being mired in shame any longer is to buy this brand of vacuum cleaner and use it once a week. You don’t want your child to get sick because you sent him to school in a dirty shirt, do you? Then keep your child healthy by buying a Bendix washing machine.
Women had never previously cleaned their floors once a week or cleaned their family’s clothing after only one wear, but now they felt compelled to. Hence, more work for mother — and not in spite of technological progress, but because of it.
The greatest insight of Cowan's book, in a nutshell, is that every innovation is embedded in a system of other pre-existing tools and practices and has an effect on them that is not necessarily predictable or accounted for in traditional narratives about how long a task takes and who performs it. This is an interesting and important lesson to keep in mind as we undergo the social transition to smart homes and the “internet of things.” Undoubtedly some labor, somewhere, is being saved — but whose? And who is bearing the cost? When one task is removed or streamlined, what is it replaced with?
Some of the most maddening examples in the book have to do with industrialization removing a chore from women’s lives, only to add a new one in its place. This is what happened, for instance, when gas lamps replaced candles as a family’s primary source of light. No sooner were women freed from the task of candlemaking than they had to remove soot from the glass globes of oil and gas lamps. Likewise, whereas cleaning outhouses and cesspools had been largely undertaken by men, private waste-water systems shifted that work to women, who suddenly had toilets to clean.
Each technological transition is part of a unique work process and didn’t necessarily play out the same way, but Cowan’s book makes a compelling case that there is a trend: historically, whenever something has been hailed as a labor-saving device for the home, the labor it saves is male. For men and children — but not for women — the house was gradually transformed from a place of shared domestic work into a refuge of leisure and rest. As Cowan points out, “Angel food cakes, strawberry preserves, clean clothes, ironed ruffles, and leavened bread may have made life easier and pleasanter for their families, but they also kept women working at home.”
And although her key points revolve around sex differences in the division of labor, she is also careful to document the ways in which work was allocated differently within each sex — for example, she discusses exceptions and circumstances that differed by a woman’s social class, number of children, number of servants, and location. With slight variations, though, the overall theme remains the same: more work for mother.
What’s interesting is that it didn’t necessarily have to turn out this way. Every society on Earth has some form of sexual division of labor; that's not the noteworthy part. But there's no immediately obvious reason why men's household chores, rather than women's, should have been the ones that were more thoroughly industrialized.
As a thought experiment, Cowan points out that, in a parallel universe where women's work advanced faster on the tech tree than men's work, we could just as easily have developed communal kitchens to provide all our food, while men forged all the metal goods for the household in their backyard smithies. In this parallel universe, men would be told that industrialized food production was saving so much labor — the future was NOW! — and the men would hammer away on their anvils, wondering why they were still so exhausted despite living in the era of labor-saving devices.
The reasons why we don’t have smithies in our backyards today, but still cook in much the same way as we did 100 or 200 years ago, are complex. Cowan calls it “one of the great unresolved puzzles of Western history.” In part, it was a runaway process set in motion when the early industrialists (who were overwhelmingly men) were understandably focused on inventing new tools to ease the work that was most familiar to them: men’s work. The creation of harvesters, combines, chemical fertilizers, and other technologies related to men’s work created efficiencies and economies of scale that perpetuated further innovations in that area — “it was the demand for those goods that continued to fuel the economy being formed by those who were organizing the manufacture of the goods.”
There were other macroeconomic reasons as well; for example, the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe drove up demand for American agricultural products, which in turn accelerated the adoption of new technologies that allowed for further scale. Other events, like the opening of the Erie Canal, made transportation more efficient and lowered the cost of shipping mass-produced products. Each of these factors — along with many others — compounded to change the types of work women and men did and how they allocated their time.
Cowan acknowledges that her analysis introduces "complications that may be annoying,” but these complications simplify and bring into focus the essential features of how we get work done in our homes, why men aren’t hammering away at smithies in their backyards, and why women still continue to do significantly more household labor than men, despite a slew of devices that were supposed to make housework a thing of the past and lead to “the liberation of women in general.”
However, Cowan doesn’t let women off the hook — she does not see them as mere victims of the advertising industry or of sexism or of industrialization at large, but as active agents in their own non-liberation. She brings it all home (so to speak) in a personal postscript to the book where she examines her own relationship to household labor and ingrained standards of housekeeping. She describes how at one point she was confined to bed for six months and forced to let her husband do the laundry. To her consternation, her husband didn’t follow the “rules” and refused to separate the laundry by color and fabric type as she had always done. As a result…nothing terrible happened. She had been doing that extra step for years for no reason at all. With grace and self-awareness, Cowan took this as an opportunity to re-examine the internalized rules she had been following blindly:
“Many of the rules that tyrannize housewives are unconscious and therefore potent. However manufacturers and advertisers may exploit these unconscious rules, they did not create them. By exploring their history we can bring these rules into consciousness and thereby dilute their potency. We can then decide whether they are truly useful or merely the product of atavism or of an advertiser’s ‘hard sell,’ whether they are agents of oppression or of liberation. If we can learn to select among the rules only those that make sense for us in the present, we can begin to control household technology instead of letting it control us. And only then is it likely that the true potential of that technology — less work for mother — will be fulfilled."
In addition to shedding light on an often-neglected field of study, More Work for Mother is an exemplar of how understanding history allows us to see beyond the standard narrative and, like archaeologists of human behavior, dig out the complex, messy truth. Exultant reports of women’s liberation certainly make for good ad copy, but the reality is considerably more complex. Thanks to historians like Cowan, we have the knowledge to appreciate and understand that complexity, and can use it to reveal the trade-offs, expectations, and constantly-negotiated divisions of labor in our own homes.
