MORE WORK FOR MOTHER
MORE WORK FOR MOTHER
tainers for other tools (mostly notably our dishes), with the specific intention that they would make those other tools easy to locate when needed and would keep them clean between washings. Before we had the cabinets we kept our dishes on a remodeled floor-to-ceiling bookcase that did not have cabinet doors; we thought our new cabinets would make our housework easier to perform. Before we installed our new cabi- nets, the process of having our table set for dinner involved: (1) an adult’s decision that it was time to have the table set; (2) the communication of that decision to children-which communi- cation needed to be repeated more than once and in increasingly insistent tones; (3) the removal of the dishes by the children and their placement, in appropriate order, on the table. The adults in the family functioned as managers and decision mak- ers; the children, as workers-often workers under duress. Our new cabinets have changed all of our behavior patterns. Since the children are too small to reach the shelves on which the dishes are now placed, the adults must become involved in the work process. Not only must my husband and I make the deci- sion that it is time to set the table, but we must also do part of the physical labor; we have ceased to be the managers of the work and have been forced to become unwilling participants in it. In addition, if we have erred in our labor (“But, Mommy, you didn’t give me the water pitcher!”), then we must be re- sponsible for correcting our errors. The acquisition of this one new tool has temporarily (at least until the children grow taller) altered our domestic work process as well as the set of emo- tional entanglements that that work process entailed. At the very least, the acquisition of that new tool will now require us to acquire yet another tool (a stool) in order to return to the status quo ante-a behavioral alteration that was also unintended.
Multiply this small example millions of times, and you will have some sense of what it means to say that tools are not entirely passive instruments. This is precisely the lesson that the sorcerer was trying to teach his apprentice in the famous fable. Our tools are not always at our beck and call. The less we know about them, the more likely it is that they will command us, rather than the other way round.
10 ~:
An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools
Thus the history of housework cannot properly be understood without the history (which is separate) of the implements with which it is done-and vice versa. The relation is reciprocal, per- haps even dialectic. Tools have set limits on what could be done in households, but inventors have repeatedly broken through those limits by fashioning new tools. The tools have reorganized the work process, creating new needs, for which some people have attempted to provide new tools-and so on. What makes the history of household technology separate and distinguishable from the history of housework is the existence of social institu- tions that mediate the availability of tools to households. In times past, these mediators were institutions such as blacksmith shops and blacksmith guilds, peddlers, and international trade arrange- ments. As industrialization has progressed, the nature of the in- stitutions has changed-we now have manufacturing firms and advertising agencies and market researchers; but the impact of the institutions remains structurally the same. They mediate the availability of tools by keeping some tools off the market and promoting others, or by organizing the pricing and distribution of tools. Just as the history of industrialization cannot properly be written without the history of housework, so the history of household technology cannot be written without the history of the social and economic institutions that have affected the char- acter and the availability of the tools with which housework is
done. In order to make the complex task of writing this multifocused
history less daunting, I have made use of two organizing con- cepts: work process and technological system. Both awkward phrases need to be explained before I proceed farther. The phrase work process is used instead of the simpler term work in order to highlight the fact that no single part of housework is a simple, homogenous activity. One might be tempted to say that housework can be divided into a series of separable tasks-cooking, cleaning, laun- dering, child care, et cetera. This analysis does not go far enough, however, because each of these tasks is linked to others that it does not resemble. Cooking, for example, involves the treatment of raw or semi-raw foodstuffs so that they can, or will, be con- sumed; that much is obvious. Perhaps not so obviously, cooking
MORE WORK FOR MOTHER
