Abstract
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.