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More work for mother
BOOK REVIEWS
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother,
371
New York: Basic Books, 1983
_ The author, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written two books. Without alerting the reader or perhaps even herself, she indiscriminately shuffled them together under one cover. One is an interesting history of the technologies of home and hearth in America over the past three centuries. The other, in its way potentially more significant, is an anti-male, anti-corporate diatribe that is watered down, vague, intrusive, and, saddest of all, unsubstantiated. Links between the two books are made through several unfortunate confusions that should never have occurred. The central confusion is between time spent at work and energy in a physiological or thermodynamic sense expended on work. The thesis implicit in the title is sustainable if one takes work to mean time on task. It is unsupported by the author’s analysis if one takes work to be human energy expended. One of the author’s key points is that there is a legitimate history of household technology distinguishable from the history of housework because the availability of tools for households is mediated by social institutions, which keep some tools off the market and promote others. The author’s grasp of systems thinking, that is, thinking about complexity, is shaky. She makes a nondiscovery (page 9) in announcing “that housework (indeed, all work) is a series not simply of definable tasks but of definable tasks that are necessarily linked to one another.” She characterizes one household technological system in which “each implement used in the home is part of a sequence of implements-a system-in which each must be linked to others in order to function appropriately” (page 13). The author has made an unnecessary division in what would best be defined as a total system-the work process and the technological system. The author’s central thesis in neutral terms appears on page 14. “To put the case more generally: the industrialization of the home was determined partly by the decisions of individual householders but also partly by social processes over which the householders can be said to have had no control at all, or certainly very little control.” The author’s difficulty, to use an analogy with anthropology, comes from never having talked to the natives. For example, she draws what 1 conclude from experience is a perverse observation, that it is much harder to move a vacuum cleaner than it is to move a broom in removing dust from a rug. The author sees as an essential historical fact (page 53) the advent of industrialized flour, which brought with it a profound shift in the responsibilities and time allocation of the two sexes. Men’s share in domestic activity began to disappear while women’s share increased. Thus housework was becoming “women’s work” and not an obligation shared by both sexes. This statement is almost surely correct, but the author neglects from here through the rest of the book to look at the changes in the men’s work roles as society overall became industrialized. Men moved into the factory, with all its technical, economic, and temporal conditions and constraints. The author has difficulty dealing with the relationships across categories and between quantity and quality. She seems to celebrate simple styles of cooking and notes, for example (page 62), “The diet of the average American may well have become more varied during the nineteenth century, but in the process women’s activities became less varied as their cooking chores became more complex.” The author points out on page 70 that the conventional academic wisdom-the movement of the household from a unit of production to a unit of consumption-is false and two of its key implications are false and misleading. These implications are that the 0 1985 by Elsevier Science Publishing Co.. Inc.
0040-1625/85/$3.30
372
BOOK REVIEWS
ties that bound the family so tightly to each other have come undone and that the factory has replaced home production, leaving adult women with little to do at home. In contrast the author argues that twentieth century technology consists of eight interlocking technological systems that tie women to domestic work: the systems that supply us with food, clothing, health care, transportation, water, gas, electricity, and petroleum products. From her analysis of these systems, which comprises chapter 4, the author concludes “the conventional model is, at best, incomplete, and worse, grossly misleading.” Chapter 5 will be fresh and interesting to most readers since the author explores the alternative social and technical approaches to housework that failed. The discussion of gas versus electricity for domestic refrigeration is most interesting. It is her sharpest indictment of the corporate devils. We have compression, rather than absorption, refrigerators in the United States today not because one was technically better than the other, and not even because consumers preferred one machine (in the abstract) over the other, but because General Electric, General Motors, Kelvinator, and Westinghouse were very large, very powerful, very aggressive, and very resourceful companies. while Serve) and SORCO were not.
The author in her push for ideological explanations neglects two important realities of the gas refrigerator which may have given the edge to the electrical competitor. First, there is a substantial infrastructure cost in piping the gas to the refrigerator. Second, the gas refrigerator, unlike the electric refrigerator, is fixed in place, reducing the opportunity to clean, rearrange or redecorate. Again, the author should have talked to the natives. Like a grade B movie of the old days where justice triumphed after an entertaining round of murder and mayhem, the hardheaded historian author, instead of coming to grips with the details, retreats to what is almost as empty as some of the beliefs she so aggressively attacks. Her explanation for the choices on the acquisition of household technologies: When given choices, in short, most Americans act to preserve the family life and family autonomy. The single-family home and the private ownership of tools are social institutions that act to preserve and to enhance the privacy and the autonomy of families. The allocation of housework to women is, as we have seen, a social convention which developed during the 19th century because of a specific set of material and cultural conditions. It is a convention so deeply embedded in our individual and collective consciousness that even the profound changes wrought by the 20th century have not yet shaken it. (page 150)
Aside from the circularity of explaining the events by generalizing them. it would be difficult to understand how the author could make that last statement about the twentieth century without further analysis. How could this acculturation have occurred so quickly in the last century and yet remain so durable in the present century? How does she stack up the obvious changes including women’s mass entry in the workforce, declining family size, and scores of other social changes with the claim of high stability in these household roles? 1 believe the author stops her story too short of the present and yet draws conclusions about the present which could only fuel the fires of other ideologues. In a commentary on the book’s dust jacket, Carroll Pursell, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says “More Work For Mother means more work also for historians of technology,” with which I certainly concur, as an irony. The author has demonstrated that ideology and scholarship are often at mutually destructive odds with each other. JOSEPH F. COATES Washington, D.C. ReceivedJanuary 21, I985
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother,
371
New York: Basic Books, 1983
_ The author, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written two books. Without alerting the reader or perhaps even herself, she indiscriminately shuffled them together under one cover. One is an interesting history of the technologies of home and hearth in America over the past three centuries. The other, in its way potentially more significant, is an anti-male, anti-corporate diatribe that is watered down, vague, intrusive, and, saddest of all, unsubstantiated. Links between the two books are made through several unfortunate confusions that should never have occurred. The central confusion is between time spent at work and energy in a physiological or thermodynamic sense expended on work. The thesis implicit in the title is sustainable if one takes work to mean time on task. It is unsupported by the author’s analysis if one takes work to be human energy expended. One of the author’s key points is that there is a legitimate history of household technology distinguishable from the history of housework because the availability of tools for households is mediated by social institutions, which keep some tools off the market and promote others. The author’s grasp of systems thinking, that is, thinking about complexity, is shaky. She makes a nondiscovery (page 9) in announcing “that housework (indeed, all work) is a series not simply of definable tasks but of definable tasks that are necessarily linked to one another.” She characterizes one household technological system in which “each implement used in the home is part of a sequence of implements-a system-in which each must be linked to others in order to function appropriately” (page 13). The author has made an unnecessary division in what would best be defined as a total system-the work process and the technological system. The author’s central thesis in neutral terms appears on page 14. “To put the case more generally: the industrialization of the home was determined partly by the decisions of individual householders but also partly by social processes over which the householders can be said to have had no control at all, or certainly very little control.” The author’s difficulty, to use an analogy with anthropology, comes from never having talked to the natives. For example, she draws what 1 conclude from experience is a perverse observation, that it is much harder to move a vacuum cleaner than it is to move a broom in removing dust from a rug. The author sees as an essential historical fact (page 53) the advent of industrialized flour, which brought with it a profound shift in the responsibilities and time allocation of the two sexes. Men’s share in domestic activity began to disappear while women’s share increased. Thus housework was becoming “women’s work” and not an obligation shared by both sexes. This statement is almost surely correct, but the author neglects from here through the rest of the book to look at the changes in the men’s work roles as society overall became industrialized. Men moved into the factory, with all its technical, economic, and temporal conditions and constraints. The author has difficulty dealing with the relationships across categories and between quantity and quality. She seems to celebrate simple styles of cooking and notes, for example (page 62), “The diet of the average American may well have become more varied during the nineteenth century, but in the process women’s activities became less varied as their cooking chores became more complex.” The author points out on page 70 that the conventional academic wisdom-the movement of the household from a unit of production to a unit of consumption-is false and two of its key implications are false and misleading. These implications are that the 0 1985 by Elsevier Science Publishing Co.. Inc.
0040-1625/85/$3.30
372
BOOK REVIEWS
ties that bound the family so tightly to each other have come undone and that the factory has replaced home production, leaving adult women with little to do at home. In contrast the author argues that twentieth century technology consists of eight interlocking technological systems that tie women to domestic work: the systems that supply us with food, clothing, health care, transportation, water, gas, electricity, and petroleum products. From her analysis of these systems, which comprises chapter 4, the author concludes “the conventional model is, at best, incomplete, and worse, grossly misleading.” Chapter 5 will be fresh and interesting to most readers since the author explores the alternative social and technical approaches to housework that failed. The discussion of gas versus electricity for domestic refrigeration is most interesting. It is her sharpest indictment of the corporate devils. We have compression, rather than absorption, refrigerators in the United States today not because one was technically better than the other, and not even because consumers preferred one machine (in the abstract) over the other, but because General Electric, General Motors, Kelvinator, and Westinghouse were very large, very powerful, very aggressive, and very resourceful companies. while Serve) and SORCO were not.
The author in her push for ideological explanations neglects two important realities of the gas refrigerator which may have given the edge to the electrical competitor. First, there is a substantial infrastructure cost in piping the gas to the refrigerator. Second, the gas refrigerator, unlike the electric refrigerator, is fixed in place, reducing the opportunity to clean, rearrange or redecorate. Again, the author should have talked to the natives. Like a grade B movie of the old days where justice triumphed after an entertaining round of murder and mayhem, the hardheaded historian author, instead of coming to grips with the details, retreats to what is almost as empty as some of the beliefs she so aggressively attacks. Her explanation for the choices on the acquisition of household technologies: When given choices, in short, most Americans act to preserve the family life and family autonomy. The single-family home and the private ownership of tools are social institutions that act to preserve and to enhance the privacy and the autonomy of families. The allocation of housework to women is, as we have seen, a social convention which developed during the 19th century because of a specific set of material and cultural conditions. It is a convention so deeply embedded in our individual and collective consciousness that even the profound changes wrought by the 20th century have not yet shaken it. (page 150)
Aside from the circularity of explaining the events by generalizing them. it would be difficult to understand how the author could make that last statement about the twentieth century without further analysis. How could this acculturation have occurred so quickly in the last century and yet remain so durable in the present century? How does she stack up the obvious changes including women’s mass entry in the workforce, declining family size, and scores of other social changes with the claim of high stability in these household roles? 1 believe the author stops her story too short of the present and yet draws conclusions about the present which could only fuel the fires of other ideologues. In a commentary on the book’s dust jacket, Carroll Pursell, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says “More Work For Mother means more work also for historians of technology,” with which I certainly concur, as an irony. The author has demonstrated that ideology and scholarship are often at mutually destructive odds with each other. JOSEPH F. COATES Washington, D.C. ReceivedJanuary 21, I985