Is Women's Liberation A Myth?
Interview by Rebecca Coulter
In North America, full-time homemakers in the 1980s work virtually the same number of hours a week as their predecessors did three hundred years earlier. How is this possible when the home, like other work places, has been transformed by technology, by so-called labour-saving devices?
This is one of the key questions which the historian of technology, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, addresses in her recently published book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. In the best tradition of women’s studies, Cowan has combined an understanding of her own and other women’s personal experiences with the rigorous scholarship of a trained historian to write a book which is bound to change the way you think about household labour. She offers important re-interpretations of historical materials particularly in her examination of the widely accepted belief that during the period of industrialization, the home became a centre of consumption rather than production. And she shows how the development of household technology meant, as her book’s title suggests, more work for mother and less work for father and the children.
Dr. Cowan, who is Director of the Women’s Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written a book that is deservedly an award-winning one. Not only is it highly readable, well written, and interesting, it is also thought provoking and original. In our interview, Dr. Cowan discusses her view of the industrialization of the American household and the impact technological change has had on the organization of that workplace.
Aurora: How has your work as an historian had an impact on your life as a woman, a wife, and a mother?
Cowan: The best kind of scholarship is life, and the best kind of life is scholarship because that’s what happened to me in the ten years that it took to begin the research and then finish the writing of More Work for Mother. My personal life during that period was profoundly affected by what I was simultaneously doing as a scholar. It seems I was doing a great deal of housework. The period of time involved in writing the book spans the time from when I was pregnant with my first child, which was when I began the research, until she was thirteen. During this time, she had been joined by two others. So I had a chance to do lots of housework while writing the book. I also had many good reasons to think about feminism, about my way of life, and the effect that it was going to have on my children. The book and the research really changed our lives a good deal. My oldest daughter loved to kid me and sometimes said she wished she had a mother who hadn’t written this book because part of what’s happened in our house has been the spreading of the work among all the members capable of doing it. My husband now shares much of the housework with me and so do the two older children. The third child, who is five, is coming along.
My attitudes have changed a great deal. As I indicated in the book’s epilogue, it was difficult for me to give up the chores to which I was accustomed. I began to understand the extent to which women like controlling housework because it is a way of exercising power over other people, over a budget, and over a significant domain of your own life and other people’s lives. Sometimes it’s difficult to give that up even though you have a deep conviction that the work is boring or that it’s exhausting or that somebody else could do it better than you could. Control is not always easy to give up, as I have discovered in the process of learning to do it, and I feel strongly that this had a significant influence on the research I did. Going through the process myself made me understand the role that housework plays in other women’s lives.
Aurora: Your book really spoke to my personal experience, and I think it will to the experience of anyone who reads it. It certainly gave me a new way of thinking about housework. Let’s turn to the main arguments made in your book. How was housework done in pre-industrial America, who did it, and how was work organized?
Cowan: The principle point I try to make in the first two chapters of More Work for Mother is that women’s work is thought of as being continuous over the ages. Women have always done housework. Women have always cooked. Women have always laundered. Women have always cared for small children. This is both true and not true. In Europe and North America it is true that women have cooked, that they have laundered, that they have cared for small children, but what is not true, is that they have always done it alone. Men and women shared the work. Adults and children shared the work. Any single meal that got to the table, let’s say in a household somewhere in North America in 1680 or 1720, couldn’t have gotten there unless men and women, adults and children had participated and co-operated in the endeavour.
One simple example of this is the processing of grain. Corn was the staple of the North American diet in the pre-industrial period. Once the corn was ripe, it was cut from the stalk, and a number of things had to happen. The husk had to be removed, and the kernels had to be taken off the cob. The corn had to be dried. Until that had been done, it couldn’t be ground, and it couldn’t be cooked. The somebody who did these things, husking and grinding, nearly always was male. In this instance, men did more of the work that was required to get a meal to the table or to get clothing on people’s backs or to raise small children. What we now call housework was indeed done by women but was also done by men. Men’s work and women’s work was all housework in the pre-industrial period. The vast majority of people, male or female worked at home.
Aurora: How did industrialization affect the household and the way it was organized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
Cowan: We often talk about industrialization as if it were a process of changing methods of producing things. Spinning wheels were replaced by spinning jennies and hand-operated looms. Foot-operated looms were replaced by waterpower and steam engines. What about the economic side of the coin, which is consumption? Who was using all of the cloth that was coming out of these productive processes? How does the household work when it consumes the new products of industrialization? An extraordinary number of the early products coming out of the first factories replaced male labour at home. I’ll give you two examples. The wood or coal burning stove was one of the first products to enter people’s homes after the industrial revolution began in North America. These stoves were wonderful appliances, but what labour did they save? They didn’t save cooking labour, they saved fuel-related labour. They were energy efficient compared to an open hearth, and so they saved the labour of the person who previously chopped wood, and those persons were male.
Another similar example has to do with grain. One of the first activities to be industrialized in North America was milling. The flour produced was sold in general stores across the continent. What did it mean in a household when you purchased a sack of flour? It meant that somebody no longer had to husk and grind, or carry the wheat to the mill to be ground, and those somebodies, again, were male. Furthermore, the flour was made from wheat which meant that not only did men have less work to do at home, but that women had more work to do since with wheat flour, food is more labour intensive than cornmeal food. So women were doing more labour-intensive baking as a result of this alteration. These processes represent all aspects of housework in the first phase of industrialization in North America.
Aurora: What you are saying is that the impact of industrialization on housework was that there was at least as much, if not more, work for women and less for men?
Cowan: Exactly, and as the years went on, less also for children. Take the introduction of running water. Everyone in a household, including children, was expected to carry water. Another example is the elimination of carrying in coal and taking out ashes when people shifted to gas and electric stoves. We then lifted off the backs of children another set of chores that they used to do.
Aurora: You also say that while many technologies were marketed as labour-saving devices, they were generally no such things for women.
Cowan: I first began to understand this when I examined the time studies that home economists have done on housework during the twentieth century. These time studies reveal that, overall, there has been almost no change in the time that housewives have spent doing housework from about 1910 until roughly 1980. The average figure in all the studies say that it takes about 50 hours per week for an average housewife without a large number of small children at home. Now that’s extraordinary given the transformation in technology that has occurred between 1910 and 1980 in our households. In trying to understand why housewives continue to work 50 hours a week, I came to the conclusion that there were three reasons.
Some appliances simply created more work than there used to be. A classic example of this is the washing machine which relieved the drudgery involved, but it also encouraged people to do more laundry. We simply wash huge quantities of things compared to what our foremothers did at the turn of the century. People change their personal linen more often, they change their bed linen more often, they change their towels more often. Much more of our clothing is washable. The quantities of wash have increased, the drudgery involved has decreased, but the time involved has not decreased. The second reason is that new activities have been created with new technology. The classic example of this is connected to the automobile. Before the automobile existed, children did not expect to be transported to any great extent. They either got to where they had to go on public transportation or they walked or they went on bicycles or they didn’t go. With the advent of the automobile, it has become the responsibility of the household to transport children to all kinds of places. Housewives started making doctor calls, supermarket calls, piano lesson calls, pick up the children at school calls, or taking the television set to be repaired calls. The third reason why the amount of time women spend doing housework hasn’t changed remarkably during the twentieth century is that some of the new technology replaced commercial services that previously did the work, or in some cases, servants were replaced by the housewife as the person doing the work. The automatic washing machine killed the commercial laundry business.
Aurora: One of the things that really interested me was the book’s analysis of the interlocking technological systems that make up housework. This is a new way of thinking about housework, and it calls into question a whole body of conventional wisdom that says households in the twentieth century became centres of consumption rather than production. For example, you wrote that increased standards of cleanliness when translated into the language of production and consumption essentially means increased productivity. You said, “women have to produce clean toilets, bathtubs, and sinks". I wonder if you could pursue that argument a little bit further for the sake of our readers.
Cowan: I knew almost no economics when I started this research project. I had never learned the way economists, sociologists, and historians distinguished between consumption and production, and when I tried to apply it to what I knew about housework, it made no sense at all. It was simply clear to me that housewives were doing productive work all the time. What gets called consumption in the literature is also a form of production. The distinction between consumption and production maybe makes sense in the labour market, but it makes no sense at all in household labour. If I were employed as a chef, I’d go into the economic statistics as part of the production process because I would be producing meals, but if I cook at home, I’d get into the statistics as part of the consumption process because according to economists, all I am doing is consuming foodstuffs. The absurdity of this distinction became clear to me while doing housework. Women produce clean toilets and nutritious meals, but the most important thing that housework produces is people able to go out every day into the marketplace and work. They are fed, they are rested, they are clothed; these workers are produced by housework. Like all other economic activities, households take in raw materials and send something out. That, in my view, is both consumption and production.
Aurora: In one chapter you look at alternative approaches to housework and what other options were tried or looked at in the past to help women working within the house. You also make the point that as women go out into the work force, they juggle two things: their work in the home and their work in the paid labour force. Servants are making a comeback as middle-class professional women use nannies and domestic help in a return to what you saw as the conservative solution to the problem of not enough time to do housework. Some other women are trying co-operative ventures for childcare. I wonder if you could talk about alternative approaches or historical attempts that might help working women think of ways to manage the work in the house. Specifically, how is change possible?
Cowan: That’s a complicated question and one to which I’ve given a great deal of thought. Let’s start with the servant’s issue. In studying the history of housework I’ve looked at what has been called the servant problem since early in the nineteenth century. In the labour force that developed in North America, there was simply a shortage of servants. The people who wanted to employ servants were always complaining about the quality and the quantity of servants. This situation has not changed, despite the fact that a new group of middle-class households are in the servant market. As near as I can tell, the total number of people available for domestic services has not changed markedly. Throughout all those decades, servants have been a problem from the point of view of the household. They are workers that don’t stay in one place for very long. What the household wants are permanent, not transient, workers. The reasons for the transience of domestic servants are not located in the household itself. It’s not because your children are rude. It’s not because you don’t know how to properly employ people. People who end up in domestic service are people who want to get out of domestic service and they can, in many instances. I have chosen not to go the route of the domestic servant because I thought it would be bad for my household and also because I felt the disappearance of domestic servants as a form of labour was worth encouraging.
Unfortunately, that leaves us in the 1980s with very few alternatives. The only viable alternative for most households is for members of the household to share the work between them and also not demand standards of performance that result in other people having to do so much work.
Aurora: I can understand that argument for households where there are two or more adults. But what about the case of single-parent households with young children?
Cowan: It also becomes difficult for men with small children. Many of my correspondents have been male single parents who have complained to me that my book does not acknowledge that men in this situation face exactly the same problems that women do. The single-parent family is a situation I don’t think anyone envies. I wouldn’t presume to suggest to someone in that situation how best to deal with it because I never had to face it myself. If what I’ve learned historically is any guide, communal and commercial alternatives are better than the domestic servant alternative.
Aurora: Do you think that the technology of computers is going to change the way we organize work within a household?
Cowan: No, I don’t think the computer will aid in the part of work we call housework. I have some experience with computer ordering of groceries. The little experience that I have and what I’ve read indicates, not surprisingly, that that is going to be an expensive mode of purchasing food because the services involved, like delivery services, are costly. People who do that kind of labour get paid a great deal more in proportion to the level of prices than they did in 1910 and 1930 which means that service is not going to be cheap. And it’s not going to be attractive to a large number of households until it gets cheap. It’s a vicious circle. The fewer people who are interested in it, the more expensive it’s going to be, so it doesn’t strike me as likely in the present economic system that computer substitutes for housework are going to make much difference. The potential, however, exists for considerable change to occur when people begin working at home with computers. If the work place can become less centralized, if the computer allows for an increasingly larger number of both men and women to do some or all of their market work from their own home, we will begin to turn back to the kinds of domestic environments that existed in the pre-industrial period when both men’s work and women’s work was physically done at home. Then the potential to change things is great because both men and women will be physically available to do the housework.
More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Dr. Coulter is Co-ordinator of Women’s Studies at Athabasca University
Dr. Cowan continues to publish in a number of journals, lectures and guests on radio shows such as Radio National. Recent publications include A Social History of American Technology, 1997 and Our Parents' Lives: Everyday Life and Jewish Assimilation, 1996.
She is currently the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Related Links:Ruth Cowan, Penn Arts and Sciences
Updated March 2012
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Citation Format
Coulter, Rebecca (2001). Is Women's Liberation A Myth?: Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Aurora Online: