Housework and Its Tool
An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools
of the concept of work process, turns up some surprises, and some of these surprises will be central to my analysis.
Just as the activities of which housework is composed are com- plex, linked, and heterogeneous, so are the implements with which it is done-a situation that justifies my using the second of those awkward phrases, technological system. Each implement used in the home is part of a sequence of implements-a system -in which each must be linked to others in order to function appropriately. To put it bluntly: an electric range will not be much good if electric current is missing, and a washing machine cannot function in the absence of running water and grated soap. I have often thought that if the concept of a technological system were more generally understood, no one would have poked fun at the inhabitants of Appalachia who were reported (perhaps apocryphally) to have put coal in the bathtubs that were given them through federal largesse during the Depression. If you were obliged to haul your bathwater from stream or pump to stove and tub, what would you want with a four-footed, enamel-over-cast- iron bathtub on your porch? A stream, a pond, a lake, or a light- weight zinc tub would be infinitely preferable. Heavy bathtubs (indeed, recessed unmovable bathtubs) are part of a technological system that contains (among other things) municipal reservoirs, underground pipelines, hot water heaters, not to speak of soap- manufacturing plants and textile mills (would you bathe very often if you had no towels?). Some of those items could be dropped from the system without entirely 1altering it (one could make one’s own soap if it came to that), but others (the drain- pipes, for example) are absolutely essential.
The concept of a technological system becomes important in understanding the processes by which the American home be- came industrialized. On a superficial level, the industrialization of the home appears to have been composed of millions of indivi- dual decisions freely made by householders: the Jones’s down the block decided to junk their washtub and buy a washing machine, and the Smiths around the corner fired the maid and bought a vacuum cleaner. On this level, industrialization of the home seems to have been the product of the perpetually rising expecta-
~·· ,tions of American consumers-expectations that had been rising ‘~
MORE WORK FOR MOTHER
from at least the 1830s, when de Tocqueville toured the country, if not before. But the matter is not as simple as that. The Jones’s washing machine would not have done them a bit of good if the town fathers had not decided to create a municipal water system several years earlier, and if the local gas and electric company had not gotten around to running wires and pipes into the neighbor- hood. Similarly, the Smiths’ new vacuum cleaner might have cost a good deal more than it did (and might have thus forestalled the Smiths’ decision to replace a maid with it) if the managers of the company that made it had not earlier decided to shift to assem- bly-line modes of production. To put the case more generally: the industrialization of the home was determined partly by the deci- sions of individual householders but also partly by social pro- cesses over which the householders can be said to have had no control at all, or certainly very little control. Householders did their share in determining that their homes would be transformed (indeed, we have very few records of any who actively resisted the process), but so did politicians, landlords, industrialists, and managers of utilities.
These two concepts, the work process and the technological system, are the warp and the woof with which I hope to weave a description of the changes that occurred in the work that was done in American homes in the last one hundred years. The phrases are awkward, but the concepts that they denote are im- portant. On one level, they seem to introduce complications that may be annoying; but on another level, they simplify de- scriptions and analyses so that certain essential features can emerge more clearly-to put it another way, they help us to see the forest through the trees. Housework is as difficult to study as it is to do. The student, like the houseworker, is hard pressed to decide where the activity begins and where it ends, what is essential and what is unessential, what is necessary and what is compulsive. If you are doing a time study of housewives, are you supposed to define the time they spend watching their chil- dren play in the park as leisure or as work? If you are trying to keep house yourself, is it really necessary to remove the choco- late stains from the front of a toddler’s playsuit? The two prob- lems have many conceptual similarities. I have found that the
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