more work for mother

I NDUSTRIALIZA TION tTansformed every American household sometime between 1860 and 1960. For some families, this transition occurred very slowly: each generation lived in homes that were just a bit "more modern" than the generation immediately before it, and the working lives of the members of each adjacent generation were not so profoundly different as to leave unbridgeable communication gaps between them. For other families, the transition was more rapid; in these families, as the result of immigration or urbanization or sudden affluence, one generation of people may have been living and working in conditions that would have been familiar in the Middle Ages, and the very next generation may have been completely modernizedinhabitants, as it were, of a totally different world. Yet despite these differences in pacing, if we consider the broad spectrum of American households, from rich to poor, from the most urban to the most rural, a simple generalization can describe what hap3 MoRE WoRK FOR MoTHER pened in the century that was ushered in by the Civil War: before 1860 almost all families did their household work in a manner that their forebears could have imitated-to wit in a pre-industrial mode; after 1960 there were just a few families (and those either because they were very poor or very isolated or ideologically committed to agrarianism) who were not living in industrialized homes and pursuing industrialized forms of labor within them. Now usually, when we think of the word industrialization, we think in terms not of homes but of factories and assembly lines and railroads and smokestacks. In our textbooks of history and economics and sociology, the terms industrialization and home are usually connected by the word impact, and we are usually asked to consider what happened when one term (industrialization) caused some significant economic process (productive work or the manufacture of goods for sale in the marketplace) to be removed from the domain of the other term (home). Implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) we are given the impression that industrialization occurred outside the four walls of home. The popular imagination goes one step farther; industrialization is conceived as being not just outside the home but virtually in opposition to it. Homes are idealized as the places to which we would like to retreat when the world of industrialization becomes too grim to bear; home is where the 11heart" is; industry is where "dogs are eating dogs" and "only money counts." Under the sway of such ideas, we have had some difficulty in acknowledging that industrialization has occurred just as rapidly within our homes as outside them. We resolutely polish the Early American cabinets that hide the advanced electronic machines in our kitchens and resolutely believe that we will escape the horrors of modernity as soon as we step under the lintels of our front doors. We are thus victims of a form of cultural obfuscation, for in reality kitchens are as much a locus for industrialized work as factories and coal mines are, and washing machines and microwave ovens are as much a product of industrialization as are automobiles and pocket calculators. A woman who is placing a frozen prepared dinner into a microwave oven is involved in a work process that is as different 4 An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools from her grandmother's methods of cooking as building a carriage from scratch differs from turning bolts on an automobile assembly line; an electric range is as different from a hearth as a pneumatic drill is from a pick and shovel. As industrialization took some forms of productive work out of our homes, it left other forms of work behind. That work, which we now call "housework" (see page 17), has been transformed in the preceding hundred years, and so have the implements with which it is done; this is the process that I have chosen to call the "industrialization of the home." Households did not become industrialized in the same way that other workplaces did; there are striking differences between housework and other forms of industrialized labor. Most of the people who do housework do not get paid for it, despite the fact that it is, for many of them, a full-time job. They do not have job descriptions or time clocks or contractual arrangements; indeed, they cannot fairly be said even to have employers. Most of their work is performed in isolation, whereas most of their contemporaries work in the company of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of other adults. Over the years, market labor has become increasingly specialized, and the division of labor has become increasingly more minute; but housework has not been affected by this process. The housewife is the last jane-of-all trades in a world from which the jacks-of-all trades have more or less disappeared; she is expected to perform work that ranges from the most menial physical labor to the most abstract of mental manipulations and to do it all without any specialized training. These various characteristics of household work have led some analysts to suggest that housework (or the household economy) is the last dying gasp of feudalism, a remnant of precapitalist conditions somehow (miraculously) vaulting the centuries unimpaired, the last surviving indicator of what the Western world was like before the market economy reared its ugly head.* Perhaps this is true, but there are other sides to the coin; indus- *This is one of the many interesting insights about housework which can be derived from reading the Marxist debate about the relations between household and market labor. 1 5 MoRE WoRK FOR MoTHER trialized housework resembles industrialized market labor in significant ways. Modern housework depends upon nonhuman energy sources, just as advanced industrialized manufacturing systems do. Those of us who regularly perform household chores may regard this as an erroneous, or at least an ironic, statement, but it is nonetheless true. The computer programmer turns an electric switch in order to power the tool that makes his or her labor possible-and so does the houseworker; we are all equally dependent upon the supply lines that keep these energy sources flowing to us. We may be thoroughly exhausted by our labors at the end of a day of housework, but without electricity or the combustion of certain organic compounds (like natural gas or liquid petroleum or gasoline), our work could not be performed at all. None of us relies any longer solely on animal or human energy to do our work. Thus, even if the household is an isolated work environment, it is also part of a larger economic and social system; and if it did not constantly interact with this system, it could not function at all-making it no different from the manufacturing plant outside the city or the supermarket down the street. The pre-industrial household could, if necessary, function without a supportive community-as is demonstrated, most clearly, in the settlement pattern of our frontiers. Individual families were capable, when need arose, of supplying themselves with their own subsistence and protective needs, year in and year out. Very few families are capable of doing that any longer. Very few of us, for example, would know how to make our own bread, even if our lives (quite literally) depended upon it; if we could find and follow a recipe for making the bread, it is highly unlikely that we could (1) grow the wheat, (2) prepare it properly for use in bread, (3) obtain and keep the yeast alive, or (4) build and maintain a suitable fixture for baking it. We live in isolated households and do our marketing for the tiniest of consumption units; but, to get our bread to the table, we still need bakers, agribusiness, utility companies, and stove manufacturers. This is the second significant sense in which household work and market work have come to resemble one another. Finally, both household labor and market labor are today per6 An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools formed with tools that can be neither manufactured nor understood by the workers who use them. Industrialized households contain vastly more implements than pre-industrial ones did, and those implements are much more likely to have been made by persons and in locales that are totally foreign to their eventual users. Pre-industrial households purchased some of their tools (especially those made of pottery, glass, or metal), but today we buy almost everything we use-from forks to microwave ovens. As a result, despite the diversity of what is available for purchase, almost nothing that we buy has been made "for us," to fit special needs that we may have. In addition, the implements that we have today are more complicated than the implements with which our foreparents worked-so much more complicated that most of us either ca11not or will not repair them ourselves. If a brick fell out of an eighteenth-century fireplace, someone in the household would probably have known how to make and apply the mortar with which to replace the brick. If, on the other hand, a resistance coil comes loose on a twentieth-century electric oven, no one in the household is likely either to know what to do or to have the appropriate tools at hand. In these senses houseworkers are as alienated from the tools with which they labor as assembly-line people and blast furnace operators. In sum, we can say that there are three significant senses in'\ which housework differs from market work (in being-most \ commonly-unpaid labor, performed in isolated workplaces, by unspecialized workers) and three significant senses in which the ) two forms of work resemble each other (in utilizing nonhuman -or non-animal-energy sources, which create dependency on a network of social and economic institutions and are accompanied by alienation* from the tools that make the labor possible). If we take all six of these criteria and group them together, we will have a good definition of industrialization. Then we might be able to : see that, in the West over the last two hundred years, women's work has been differentiated from men's by being incompletely industrialized or by being industrialized in a somewhat different manner. *I am using the term alienation here in the psychosocial sense of "strangeness." 7 MoRE WoRK FOR MoTHER How-and why-this situation came to pass is one of the great unresolved puzzles of Western history. Although the social arrangements to which we have become accustomed seem sometimes to have a rationale and a life of their own, there really is no a priori reason why things should have worked out in quite the way they did. Even if we assume, as the anthropologists tell us we should, that every society will construct some sexual division of labor for itself, there is no apparent reason why, for example, men's work could not have been incompletely industrialized instead of women's. We might then have had communal kitchens, to which we would repair for all of our food needs, but household metal goods that we forged in smithies in our own backyards; or perhaps electronic looms in every kitchen and communal nurseries in which children of our female physicians could be cared for and reared. Clearly we have the technological and the economic capacity to have constructed our society this way, but for some complex of reasons we did not do so. This book is an attempt to discover some of those reasons and to describe the historical path that led us from one particular pattern of work to another. We all know that work is one of the activities through which we define ourselves as we mature; by analogy we might say that a society does the same thing, defining itself through the work that it does as it matures. Social scientists know that the industrialization of work has been one of the most traumatic processes of recent Western history, and yet work has not been a particularly popular focus for historical attention-and housework even less so. I regard this omission as unfortunate, even tragic. In the last decade or two, some historians have attempted to repair the damage and to write the history of work as it has altered for different classes of people in the last few centuries; but, as admirable as these studies have been, they have focused almost exclusively on market labor-work that is done in order to produce products or services to be sold. 2 Yet in many ways housework is more characteristic of our society than market work is. It is the first form of work that we experience as infants, the form of work that the largest proportion of us (to wit, almost all women) identify as the work that will be the principal definition of our adulthood.

Thus, the changes that occurred in household technology during the twentieth century had two principal effects. The first was ' to separate the work of men and children from the work of women, continuing a process that had begun in the previous : century; and the second was markedly to increase the productiv-, ity of the average housewife. This conclusion can be put more succinctly by saying that, in the second phase of industrialization, American households and American housewives shifted not from production to consumption but from the production of one type of commodity to the production of another in even greater quantities. Prior to industrialization (which means, in the United States, prior to 1860), American households (and the adult women who lived in them) produced goods intended for sale in 99 MoRE WoRK FOR MoTHER the market place, but they also produced goods and services that were intended for use at home: foodstuffs, clothing, medicines, meals, laundry, health care-and much more. During the first phase of industrialization (say, between 1860 and 1910), households stopped producing goods for sale. They did not, however (and this is the crucial point), cease to be productive locales: they continued to produce goods and services intended for use at home or, as the Marxists would say, for the production and the reproduction of labor power. During the second phase of industrialization (after 1910), those latter productive functions did not leave the home. The industrialization of the household did not entail, as that of the market had, the centralization of all productive processes; the household continued to be the locale in which meals, clean laundry, healthy children, and well-fed adults were "produced"-and housewives continued to be the workers who were principally responsible. What changed most markedly was the productivity of these workers: modern technology enabled the American housewife of 1950 to produce singlehandedly what her counterpart of 1850 needed a staff of three or four to produce: a middle-class standard of health and cleanliness for herself, her spouse, and her children. Moreover, from the perspective of the household, the transportation system had developed in a direction that was precisely the opposite of the one taken by the food, the clothing, and the health systems. The shift from production to consumption of such goods as strawberry jam, petticoats, and medicine meant that less time needed to be spent in housework in order to provide the same standard of living; but the shift from the horse and buggy to the automobile canceled many of the potential benefits of this extra time. Our commonly received notions about the impact of twentieth-century household technology have thus deceived us on two crucial grounds. They have led us to believe that households no longer produce anything particularly important, and that, consequently, housewives no longer have anything particularly time consuming to do. Both notions are false, deriving from an incomplete understanding of the nature of these particular technological changes. Modern labor-saving devices eliminated drudgery, 100 Twentieth-Century Changes in Household Technology not labor. 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. Before industrialization, women fed, clothed, and nursed their families by preparing (with the help of their husbands and children) food, clothing, and medication. In the post-industrial age, women feed, clothe, and nurse their families (without much direct assistance from anyone else) by cooking, cleaning, driving, shopping, and waiting. The nature of the work has changed, but the goal is still there and so is the necessity for time-consuming labor. Technological systems that might have truly eliminated the labor of housewives could have been built (as we shall see); but such systems would have eliminated the horne as well-a result that (as we shall also see) most Americans were consistently and insistently unwilling to accept.