Household Technologies Made Life Harder For Mothers

I want to pick up on something I said tangentially in a recent Substack article but didn’t develop.

In discussing the numerous burdens placed on mothers that are unique to the contemporary situation, I mentioned that household technologies created the assumption that women should be able to do all the housework chores without help because now it’s supposedly “easy.”

I made this observation based on the research Ruth Cowan collected for her book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Heath to the Microwave. Cowan points to a little-known and counterintuitive fact of twentieth-century history, namely, that innovations ranging from the vacuum cleaner and automobile to the electric iron and washing machine did not make life easier for women and, in many cases, actually made life harder.

I shared my notes from Cowan’s book in a 2015 blog post, but here’s the short and skinny. “Time-saving” devices resulted in rising expectations and therefore more domestic labor. For example, once the electric iron became common, it was no longer socially acceptable to wear a wrinkly blouse or dress. It even began to be expected that children’s school clothes should be neatly ironed, an idea that previously would have seemed preposterous. Thus, the time saved by the electric iron was largely cancelled out by the increased workload, due to our changing expectations. A similar process occurred with the washing machine. When washing machines became widespread for American households in the early twentieth century, it came to be expected that you should never wear dirty clothes, and that it was disgusting to wear the same underwear two days in a row. As a result, the ability to wash clothes more easily led to far more washing, drying, and folding than people previously had to do. Another example of this is kitchen conveniences. Before the electric oven, and before the availability of pre-ground flour, Americans were content with a much simpler diet. I could go on and on with multiple examples, but essentially household technologies created the terrible burden of making everyone feel they have a right to a lifestyle once appropriate only to the very rich.

Electrical household appliances also accelerated changing ideas of “separate spheres” (i.e., the wife’s work is inside the home, while the husband’s work is outside the home). Of course, other scholars have looked at how the industrial revolution contributed to this, but Cowan traces two stages that are often overlooked. The first stage happened when household technology altered the nature of household work to allow the notion of separate spheres for men and women to develop. On the assumption that household work was now easy, women were left to get on and keep house without as much help from husbands and community as had previously been available. (Rug cleaning, for example, had previously been a community effort, with the whole neighborhood pitching in once a year. After the vacuum, the neighborhood was no longer involved in rug cleaning. That is only one example of how the pre-industrial woman was never expected to keep the home running on her own.) The second stage, building on the first, occurred when advertisers, inventors, and entrepreneurs simply assumed that the burden of connecting the household to services and merchants should rest not with the merchant or service provider (as it had previously been the case) but with the housewife. So merchants stopped coming door to door, or selling wears in walkable neighborhoods, leaving women to drive to large department stores. Then driving errands simply became one additional task resting on mothers. The Great Depression also played a part in solidifying this growing trend, since the merchants and service-providers who still did travel to the household could no longer afford to compete with the bigger centralized businesses and chain stores.

Few people anticipated that household technologies, plus the economic infrastructures implicated by the larger industrial project, would create more work for mothers. In my video, “Industrialism in America: Consequences & Paradoxes,” I shared Thomas Edison’s utopian idea that electricity would transform the household, liberating the housewife. In a 1912 interview for Good Housekeeping Magazine, Volume 55, Edison was cited as saying that the housewife would become more like “a domestic engineer” instead of “a domestic laborer,” thanks to “the greatest of handmaidens, electricity, at her service.”

Edison’s utopian idea of labor-saving decides reminds me of some of the claims now being made for AI by people like Sam Altman, whose essay “Moore’s Law of Everything,” promises untold wealth and prosperity as long as society submits to benevolent AI. We might not have any choice about submitting, just like 20th century housewives had no choice but to submit to the new technologies once the networks that supported the older way of life were removed.

A takeaway from all this—one that Joshua Pauling and I make again and again in our book Are We All Cyborgs Now?, —is that technologies always bring unforeseen side-effects (but not totally unforeseen, as there are usually incisive sages whose wisdom is ignored).

Another takeaway is that we should all do more to help mothers, especially those in your parish who are struggling with young children. Remember that mothers and housewives labor today under pressures that are quite novel in the history of our species. If you are a dad, don’t believe the worldly logic of separate spheres – help your wife whenever and however you can! Even if you’ve had a long and tiring day at work, your wife’s day may have been even more tiring, especially if she is a stay-at-home-mom looking after kids. Single mothers have it particularly hard, and so those with any surplus time have no excuse not to use at least some of it to volunteer to check in, help with babysitting, chores, or anything they can do to lighten their load.

Household technologies have not been the only culprit in the shift toward incredible pressures placed on moms. A lot of it also has to do with the erosion of community resulting from the itinerary of the nation-state and the way industrial capitalism has shifted the economic locus from villages to large cities. Much research still needs to be done on how the erosion of community has worked in tandem with the trends mentioned above in creating conditions that disproportionately impact mothers. As the proprietor of the “Light on Ascent” substack recently observed:

Our communities have changed.

There simply isn’t a village anymore. There has not been a village for decades. In fact what you think is a village, still isn’t one. You still have to return a favor, drive to someone’s house, take time out of your day, arrange help, fellowship, and fun. Back then, people lived in the same huts and structures, there was a common area where women and men worked and everyone distributed responsibility, everyone was there. The burden was shared. (thanks Robin Phillips for sharing your tidbit on Ancient Israel)

Now, like complicated legos directions, (I got a Lego’s Harry Potter set thinking it would be “fun,” think again!) you have to intentionally create your village—even hire outside people . When you manage to do that, it isn’t comparable to the communities women had generations ago.
See Also

Cold War

Memories of Germany During the Cold War

Historically, women often lived within extensive networks of family, neighbors, and other women. Child-rearing wasn’t always this isolated experience in which one mother was expected to meet every need of her children by herself.

Other people were around.

People took turns.

Support was woven much more organically into everyday life. It wasn’t seen as a failure on the mother, it was necessary.

There is still something worth examining about what happens when responsibility that was once dispersed among many people becomes concentrated onto one or two exhausted adults—and very often disproportionately onto the mother.

Her reference to Ancient Israel has to do with archeological discoveries referenced in Sandra L. Richter’s book on the Old Testament, which show that typically child-rearing among the ancient Hebrews was a community endeavor, with larger family networks taking turns to help with the child-rearing. But I’ll save discussion of that for another time.

Further Reading