Re: 1900 House

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Women in the l980s may have spent as many hours on "housework" as women
in 1900, but the type of work was very different. Laundry was a
backbreaking task, beating carpets, cooking for big families, washing
dishes by hand, heating water, carrying coal and wood for fires, sewing
and mending etc. America was still largely rural--farmer's wives worked
incredibly hard. By the l980s, the amount of physical energy expended on
housework was way down. And don't forget those 1900 women had big
families without modern gynecology, and wore stiff, heavy clothes with
corsets! they were not in very good physical shape. Having one servant
still left an awful lot to do. And as for men helping back then-- oh
please. Lots of women died essentially of overwork.
 I read "More Work for Mother" when it came out -- it's a fascinating
book. But I was never persuaded by her thesis, that rising standards of
cleanliness meant ever more housework, despite laborsaving devices.
Cowan undervalues the changing nature of the work -- there is NO amount
of machine-washing of laundry that requires the stamina and time
required by Victorian handwashing of laundry, no amount of vauccming
that is as exhausting as beating a carpet etc.  In modern era, I think
that as B friedan pointed out, housework expands to fill the time
available--she cites women changing the sheets on all the beds two and
three times a week!
Now that women are working, the amount of time spent on housework has
--finally -- gone way down. Because, needless to say, men have not
increased their share--husbands of working wives do only a little more
housework than those with stay at home wives, and married men of any
kind do much less housework than single men. Women, at long last, are
letting things slide.

katha

ps there were lots of working-class suffragists. And pps, as Dana Frank
writes in "The Wages of Whiteness for Women" (white) working class women
in US often had at least occasional cleaning help.