Housework and Its Tools

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Chapter 1

An Introduction:

Housework and Its Tools

I NDUSTRIALIZATION transformed every American house- hold 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 immedi- ately 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 condi- tions that would have been familiar in the Middle Ages, and the very next generation may have been completely modernized- inhabitants, 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 hap-

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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-indus- trial mode; after 1960 there were just a few families (and those either because they were very poor or very isolated or ideologi- cally committed to agrarianism) who were not living in industri- alized 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 in- dustrialization occurred outside the four walls of home. The popu- lar imagination goes one step farther; industrialization is con- ceived 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 “heart” 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 ra- pidly 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 mi- crowave oven is involved in a work process that is as different

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An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools

from her grandmother’s methods of cooking as building a car- riage 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 preced- ing hundred years, and so have the implements with which it is done; this is the process that I have chosen to call the “industri- alization of the home.”

Households did not become industrialized in the same way that other workplaces did; there are striking differences be- tween 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 arrange- ments; indeed, they cannot fairly be said even to have employ- ers. Most of their work is performed in isolation, whereas most of their contemporaries work in the company of hundreds, per- haps 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 rem- nant of precapitalist conditions somehow (miraculously) vault- ing 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

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trialized housework resembles industrialized market labor in sig- nificant ways. Modern housework depends upon nonhuman en- ergy sources, just as advanced industrialized manufacturing sys- tems do. Those of us who regularly perform household chores may regard this as an erroneous, or at least an ironic, ~tatement, 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 market- ing 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 per-

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An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools

formed with tools that can be neither manufactured nor under- stood 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 eomplicated than the implements with which our foreparents worked-so much more complicated that most of us either ca~not 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 housework- ers 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.”

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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 ar- rangements to which we have become accustomed seem some- times 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 in- stead 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 nurser- ies 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 particu- lar 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. So- cial 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 his- torical 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 stud- ies have been, they have focused almost exclusively on market labor-work that is done in order to produce products or ser- vices to be sold. 2 Yet in many ways housework is more charac- teristic 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 wi( almost all women) identify as the work that will be the principal definition of our adulthood.

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An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools

It is also the form of work that each of us-male and female, adult and child-pursues for at least some part of every week; and it is the occupational category that encompasses the single largest fraction of our population-to wit, full-time house- wives. The absolute number of full-time housewives may be decreasing with every passing year, but more people spend their days in this “peculiar” form of labor than in either of the two more “standard” forms-blue-collar or white-collar work. If work shapes individual lives and social forms, and if industriali- zation has reshaped work in the past two centuries, then to fail to understand the history of housework is to fail to understand ourselves. If housework is a dominant social activity, and if it has been only incompletely industrialized, then, as a society, we may not be as industrialized as we think we are, or as “modern” as our pundits would have us believe.

In truth, however, this book has a dual focus. As its title is meant to suggest, it is a history not just of housework but also of the tools with which that work is done: household technology. Human beings are tool-using animals; indeed, some anthropolo- gists believe that, along with speech, the ability to use and to refine our tools is precisely what sets us apart from other species of primates. One of the few generalizations that can be made about people living under vastly different social conditions is that they all use tools to do their work. Because of our peculiar set of cultural blinders, we do not ordinarily associate “tools” with “women’s work”-but household tools there nonetheless are and always have been.

Tools are not passive instruments, confined to doing our bid- ding, but have a life of their own. Tools set limits on our work; we can use them in many different ways, but not in an infinite number of ways. We try to obtain the tools that will do the jobs that we want done; but, once obtained, the tools organize our work for us in ways that we may not have anticipated. People use tools to do work, but tools also define and constrain the ways in which it is possible and likely that people will behave. Here is a simple example. In my house, we recently installed standard wall cabinets with doors above the counters in our kitchen; these cabinets are tools that we intended to use as con-