Re: 1900 House

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Kelley wrote:

> again, i was talking about HISTORY, not comparing 1900 to today.
> the concern that women spent 12 hours washing clothes was the target
> of my first rant.  my point was that while they spent 12 hours doing
> a load or whatever, they did it once a month!  cowan's point is that
> technological revolutions benefited men first and made more work for
> mother.  again, this is historically.  she also points out that we
> spend considerable more time waiting and driving places to get
> things done.  waiting in the physician's/dentists office, waiting in
> line.   we no longer have door to door sales people, delivery
> services, affordable neighborhood stories, etc.
>
> in brief, technology is both good and bad.  makes work more
> efficient AND makes more work.

While technology doesn't directly help women counter sexism and solve
the unequal division of labor, it doesn't "make more work" either.
As you note in another post:

> as the industrial revolution severed "home" from "work" and
> technological developments were geared with an eye toward the
> convenience of those running factories (desire for greater
> efficiency), not for those doing the housework.  combine that with
> heavy marketing shaping people's values re cleanliness, fashion,
> style, health and the like and you are easily talking spending much
> more time obtaining those standards.

It is the combination of sexism, a rise in standards of cleanliness,
and continued privatization of household work that has not allowed us
to make use of available technological advances in a way that really
benefits women.

You say "cowan's point is that technological revolutions benefited
men first and made more work for mother," but does she really make
this argument?  It seems her main point is that the class of women
who used to be in a position to hire household help "lost" servants
and "gained" household appliances and that for them "gains" may have
been smaller than "losses."  Cowan writes:

*****   The significant change in the structure of the household
labor force was the disappearance of paid and unpaid servants
(unmarried daughters, maiden aunts, and grandparents fall in the
latter category) as household workers and the imposition of the
entire job on the housewife herself....The housewife is just about
the only unspecialized worker left in America -- a veritable
jane-of-all-trades at a time when the jacks-of-all-trades have
disappeared.  As her work became generalized the housewife was also
proletarianized: formerly she was ideally the manager of several
other subordinate workers; now she was idealized as the manager and
the worker combined.  Her managerial functions have not entirely
disappeared, but they have certainly diminished and have been
replaced by simple manual labor; the middle-class, fairly
well-educated housewife ceased to be a personnel manager and became,
instead, a chauffeur, charwoman, and short-order cook.  (Ruth
Schwartz Cowan, "The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household
Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century," available at
<http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/r_uth.html>   *****

It seems that there is a problem in Cowan using the same term
"middle-class housewife" to refer to the white farm wife in colonial
America, the lady of a petit-bourgeois house at the turn of the
century, and the wife of a workingman with a "family wage" in the
1950s.  Sounds like comparing apples and oranges.  Anyhow, if her
argument about the disappearance of "unpaid servants (unmarried
daughters, maiden aunts, and grandparents...) as household workers"
holds true, it undermines her observation below: "Historical
demographers working on data from English and French families have
been surprised to find that most families were quite small and that
several generations did not ordinarily reside together; the extended
family, which is supposed to have been the rule in preindustrial
societies, did not occur in colonial New England either" ("The
'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and Social
Change in the 20th Century").

Perhaps the way in which Cowan formulates her questions generates
problems, given the looseness with which she uses the term "middle
class":

*****   [F]or the purposes of this initial study, deliberately
limited myself to one kind of technological change affecting one
aspect of family life in only one of the many social classes of
families that might have been considered.  What happened, I asked, to
middleclass American women when the implements with which they did
their everyday household work changed?  Did the technological change
in household appliances have any effect upon the structure of
American households, or upon the ideologies that governed the
behavior of American women, or upon the functions that families
needed to perform?  Middleclass American women were defined as
actual or potential readers of the betterquality women's magazines,
such as the Ladies' Home Journal, American Home, Parents' Magazine,
Good Housekeeping, and McCall's." Nonfictional material (articles and
advertisements) in those magazines was used as a partial indicator of
some of the technological and social changes that were occurring.
("The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and
Social Change in the 20th Century")   *****

Yoshie