Customer Reviews

More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave

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This book is history of housework and household technology in America. Cowan's thesis is that American women have paradoxically been required to take on more and more work as "labor-saving" technologies have been adopted. At the outset of the book, Cowan seems to state that she will show that developments in technology have not really made women's lives easier, but have served to bind women ever more tightly to the home. But by the end of the book, the message seems to be slightly different: that household technology has raised society's expectations of what women should be able to accomplish in the home, and that women must now work harder because of double duty- -doing the housework in addition to holding down fulltime jobs.

The book is organized along chronological lines, starting with pre-industrial conditions, moving on to industrialization, and finishing with the years following the Second World War. Food and laundry are two topics that receive heavy focus throughout the book. Cowan points out that in the pre-industrial times, food preparation required considerable help from men, for such things as butchering animals. But once meat was available in tins, men were released from such food preparation chores, while women's work increased, since new stove technologies made it possible for women to undertake more complicated methods of food preparation. Cowan argues that laundry duties also increased following industrialization, since when fabric was homespun, people only owned a few items of clothing that were hardly ever washed, but once cheap factory-made fabric became available, people got in the habit of changing clothes quite often, resulting in mounds of items to be laundered.

But I'm not sure I fully agree with these arguments. Cowan seems to suggest that the change from cooking over an open-hearth to cooking on a stove complicated women's lives by increasing possibilities, hence expectations and time spent on the task. Had Cowan been able to observe first-hand lunch preparations over an open-hearth during a hot summer day, she might have been more appreciative of the benefits of a stove. Anyone who has visited such reenactment museums as Plimouth Plantation in July, or even tried cooking a full meal over a campfire, comes away amazed at how women managed to deal with the heat and frustrations of cooking over an open hearth, especially when wearing long skirts that were constantly prone to catching fire from drifting into the coals or getting hit with sparks. And the health benefits of having enough clothing to allow frequent laundering are also tremendous- -memoirs of even the well-to-do of the pre-industrial age are full of descriptions of the usual louse and flea colonies that were an active part of every household. Industrialization in the areas of food preparation and laundry may have not have resulted in time savings for mother, but it certainly made it possible for her to greatly increase the health and safety of herself and her family.

Cowan notes that running a household in pre-industrial conditions involved so much work that no single person could manage it alone. That's why men got married, and why anyone who could afford to hired maids. But following industrialization, Cowan argues that maids could get better-paying factory jobs, so mother got stuck doing the work of the maids. But is this really more work for mother? If the work load was so heavy that a housewife couldn't get by without a maid, and the maid disappeared consequent with the adoption of household technology, it's not that mother was stuck spending more time than ever getting her housework done, but that the new technologies enabled her to accomplish more in the time she had available. Indeed, Cowan even cites time studies that confirm that women were spending more or less the same amount of time doing housework, but they were able to accomplish far more in that time thanks to new technologies, such as automatic washers. And the problems of the double-duty mother never even arose until technology had improved enough so that a woman could hold down an outside job as well as keep the home running.

From the outset, Cowan states that this book is about the history of American housewives and their work, so she doesn't look beyond our borders for evidence that would support or negate her thesis. Her cultural blinders seem overly tight, however, when she discusses the difficulty of finding and keeping hired help as being a peculiarly American problem. Anyone who has tried to work with hired help anywhere in the world has had similar experiences- -nobody grows up wanting to be a maid. Traditionally and worldwide, maids come from an immigrant class, migrating from rural to developed areas, if not across borders, and leaving at the first opportunity of higher pay or prestige elsewhere. Living with household help has an additional disadvantage that Cowan does not consider- -the loss of privacy for the family. Perhaps letting the family cook or laundress go meant more work for mother, but the benefits of finally getting food cooked the way you like it, and not having the maid sort through the family's dirty laundry made it all worthwhile, especially if household technology made it possible to get the chores done by yourself anyway- -and get them done right for a change!

I know that it's impossible to write history free from subjective judgments. However, I have rarely encountered a history where the political leanings of the author come through so blatantly. Although Cowan never states explicitly that she is a "Marxist-feminist", the term arises in several places in the text, suggesting a clear political affinity. Cowan came of age and wrote this book in an earlier time. Today, perhaps, conditions have changed, taking the edge off the urgency of the issues she was implicitly battling by writing this book. The factual information and the window that she provides into household material culture is fascinating, if you can free it from her political agenda and wavering argumentation.

I had sort of avoided this book because if its title--it sounded like it was going to be one of those books about how since Year One women have been shamelessly victimized by the evil patriarchy.

Boy, was I wrong! The book is a masterpiece of American social, cultural, and technological history. In a clear and sympathetic manner, it shows how home maintenance and upkeep have gradually changed in the U.S. over time. During colonial/pioneer days, everbody in a family had essential work to do: men chopped wood, plowed, and harvested; children carried wood and water; women spun, sewed, and cooked. If anybody fell down on the job, all suffered. Gradually, things changed--men (and sometimes children) increasingly left the house to work for wages during the day.

Superficially, this makes it look like, over time, American households quit being net producers of goods (grain, milk, eggs, cloth, etc.) to net consumers of finished products (pre-made clothes, canned goods, etc.). Cowan shows that this is not exactly the case. While "hard" goods did cease to be produced at home, services--health care, cooking, cleaning, etc.--were still produced for family use. And these services, in spite of in introduction of labor-saving appliances and tools--still, to this day, require both time and skill to use. In fact, while much of the drudgery (heavy lifting and water hauling, for example) was reduced, the complexity of the duties actually increased.

Cowan writes in a very clear style, and provides excellent examples to make her points. For example, she shows how diets changed with time, and gives a number of example of "failed alternatives" to private housework (co-operatives, residential hotels, etc.) Ultimately, she shows how housework/way of life evolved to the present day--working mothers, self-serve stores, few home deliveries--with the tacit consent of both the men and the women who created our current society. It provides an insightful study of many aspects of American life, addressing including such questions as "If I have so many labor- and time-saving devices, why am I so busy and tired so much of the time?"

I love books that challenge convetional wisdom, such a book is "More Work for Mother." The assumptions it challenges are many, but the major two are that separate spheres of work have always been the norm, and that industrialization left nothing for women to do at home.

As a mother myself, I was gratified to see historical and statistical confirmation for what I suspected all along: that the household technologies that enable us to live more sanitary and comfortable lives have not necessarily made our lives less difficult or less laborious. As Cowan points out, industrialization decreased the labor involved mostly in the work that was traditionally performed by men and children.

Prior to industrialization it took an entire family working together to make a meal: children drew the water, men obtained the fuel and prepared the grain, and women cooked the meals. After industrialization, water was brought to the home by pipes, coal and prepared grain were purchased (by women--now an extra task), but women still prepared the meals--often more complex and labor-intensive meals because expectations were raised by the greater variety of foodstuffs available and the new cookstoves. At the same time, the family no longer worked together quite as much and a lot of the "togetherness" was lost. The father became less central to child-rearing because he was no longer available in the home all day long, thus more familial responsiblities were also laid on women's plates.

I highly recommend this book to women who find their days exhausting but can't figure out why.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book which provides a lot of insight into why modern women still are spending an amazing number of hours doing housework, in spite of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers.

When one thinks of industrialization, the image of a factory comes to mind. However, Cowan looks at the home as a productive venue. According to Cowan's thesis in an industrial society the work women perform as homemakers is tied to technological systems just like in a factory. Work inside or outside the home utilizes electricity, gas, or petroleum as sources of power, and manufacturing and homemaking each require the use of specialized tools.

Tools used in the home help to accomplish specific tasks but, Cowan argues, they "have a life of their own" and "set limits to our work."(9) While tools define behavior within the home, it is outside institutions (manufacturing firms, advertising agents, market researchers) that "mediate"(11) which devices are available for the woman to use in the home. For example Cowan points out that the electric refrigerator likely won out over the gas-absorption design due to the aggressiveness of electric utilities verses the more conservative gas manufacturing companies between 1920 and 1950.

Notwithstanding the use of labor savings devices, women's work has not become easier or less time consuming. Affluence and technology have made a woman's role more complicated and demanding. Partly due to circumstances such as the reduction of numbers of servants available to do drudge work in the home, the change has more to due with an innate human desire for "privacy and autonomy."(149) It is a "convention so deeply imbedded in our individual and collective consciousness that even the profound changes wrought by the twentieth century have not yet shaken it."(150)

Perhaps Cowan's best example of the effects of technology on the home is the stove. Food preparation was a cooperative effort between women and men to produce a simple one-pot meal over an open hearth in pre-industrial days. While the stove reduced the man's effort to maintain the fire, it allowed more complex meals to be prepared by the woman.

If industrialization seemingly reduces the effort necessary for a women to prepare and preserve food, make and maintain clothing, or be the health provider within the home, an entirely new role came with the advent of the automobile. The woman became the household's transportation provider!

The net effect of technology on homemaking has been to reduce drudgery but not labor. While women have become more productive in the home, what time is saved is now consumed by other tasks. In a further irony house work has helped to perpetuate the idea of homemaking as women's work thus reinforcing the stereotypical inequity between genders. However the decline in domestic servants would seem to imply greater equality between classes.

Unlike market labor, women are unpaid, work in isolated workplaces, and perform as unspecialized workers. The value of housework is difficult to quantify and critics argue that household's do not "produce" anything. But is not that the goal of industry; to produce a good or provide a service? Why does homemaking have to be seen in terms of output? What about family and childrearing? These are intangibles beyond monetary value.

I loved this book, what a fascinating study on how our culture evolved and the choices that we made that define our home life. I found the book to be well researched and engaging. I have recommended it to many friends.

More work for mother? Gimmie a break!! This book attempts to further the fiction that it's women who are still doing the housework. While this may have been true 40 years ago, the feminization of the American male that's occurred since then makes this a thing of the past. Just look around! Men are pushing strollers, cleaning houses, cooking dinners, involved in selecting décor, PLUS doing all the "men's work" that they previously did, such as yard work, fixing the car, and doing all those other heavy and dirty jobs. To make matters worse, these are often men who work demanding jobs with lots of travel to bring in the money, often for wives that are just sitting home on their asses! When these men come home from a grinding business trip, the wife is on them to "be more involved," so you see them running around killing themselves around the house and with the kids while their wives are over at the spa or having coffee with their yenta friends. More work for Mother? The book we need is "Modern Marriage: What's in it for Father?"