>again, i was talking about HISTORY, not comparing 1900 to today.
>the concern that women spent 12 hours washing clothes was the target
>of my first rant. my point was that while they spent 12 hours doing
>a load or whatever, they did it once a month! cowan's point is that
>technological revolutions benefited men first and made more work for
>mother. again, this is historically. she also points out that we
>spend considerable more time waiting and driving places to get
>things done. waiting in the physician's/dentists office, waiting in
>line. we no longer have door to door sales people, delivery
>services, affordable neighborhood stories, etc.
>
>in brief, technology is both good and bad. makes work more
>efficient AND makes more work.
While technology doesn't directly help women counter sexism and solve the unequal division of labor, it doesn't "make more work" either. As you note in another post:
>as the industrial revolution severed "home" from "work" and
>technological developments were geared with an eye toward the
>convenience of those running factories (desire for greater
>efficiency), not for those doing the housework. combine that with
>heavy marketing shaping people's values re cleanliness, fashion,
>style, health and the like and you are easily talking spending much
>more time obtaining those standards.
It is the combination of sexism, a rise in standards of cleanliness, and continued privatization of household work that has not allowed us to make use of available technological advances in a way that really benefits women.
You say "cowan's point is that technological revolutions benefited men first and made more work for mother," but does she really make this argument? It seems her main point is that the class of women who used to be in a position to hire household help "lost" servants and "gained" household appliances and that for them "gains" may have been smaller than "losses." Cowan writes:
***** The significant change in the structure of the household labor force was the disappearance of paid and unpaid servants (unmarried daughters, maiden aunts, and grandparents fall in the latter category) as household workers and the imposition of the entire job on the housewife herself....The housewife is just about the only unspecialized worker left in America -- a veritable jane-of-all-trades at a time when the jacks-of-all-trades have disappeared. As her work became generalized the housewife was also proletarianized: formerly she was ideally the manager of several other subordinate workers; now she was idealized as the manager and the worker combined. Her managerial functions have not entirely disappeared, but they have certainly diminished and have been replaced by simple manual labor; the middle-class, fairly well-educated housewife ceased to be a personnel manager and became, instead, a chauffeur, charwoman, and short-order cook. (Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century," available at <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/r_uth.html> *****
It seems that there is a problem in Cowan using the same term "middle-class housewife" to refer to the white farm wife in colonial America, the lady of a petit-bourgeois house at the turn of the century, and the wife of a workingman with a "family wage" in the 1950s. Sounds like comparing apples and oranges. Anyhow, if her argument about the disappearance of "unpaid servants (unmarried daughters, maiden aunts, and grandparents...) as household workers" holds true, it undermines her observation below: "Historical demographers working on data from English and French families have been surprised to find that most families were quite small and that several generations did not ordinarily reside together; the extended family, which is supposed to have been the rule in preindustrial societies, did not occur in colonial New England either" ("The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century").
Perhaps the way in which Cowan formulates her questions generates problems, given the looseness with which she uses the term "middle class":
***** [F]or the purposes of this initial study, deliberately limited myself to one kind of technological change affecting one aspect of family life in only one of the many social classes of families that might have been considered. What happened, I asked, to middleclass American women when the implements with which they did their everyday household work changed? Did the technological change in household appliances have any effect upon the structure of American households, or upon the ideologies that governed the behavior of American women, or upon the functions that families needed to perform? Middleclass American women were defined as actual or potential readers of the betterquality women's magazines, such as the Ladies' Home Journal, American Home, Parents' Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and McCall's." Nonfictional material (articles and advertisements) in those magazines was used as a partial indicator of some of the technological and social changes that were occurring. ("The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century") *****
Yoshie