Chapter 1: An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools

From the year 1860 to the year 1960, American households underwent an enormous transformation. Before 1860 most American households performed housework in roughly the same way that it had been performed for centuries. By 1960, American households had become industrialized. Even though people rarely associate industrialization with households (associating it instead with places like factories), the industrialization of households was such a prominent process that most housework and household tools after 1960 would have been completely unrecognizable to people a century prior. This book is an attempt to describe the different pathways and patterns in American household industrialization over time, with a particular focus on housework and household technology. 

Work is an essential part of our lives. It is something that everyone does as they grow older, and the type of work we do often becomes a part of our identities. This is as true for individual people as it is for whole communities. Think about farming communities, factory towns, or tech cities, to get an idea of how a whole community can be defined by the kind of work it does. However, despite the importance of work, history usually does not focus on work, and especially not housework. Even when history does focus on work, it tends to focus on market labor – work that is done outside of the home to produce goods or provide services. In a history class, this might include studies of the work done in factories during industrialization, or the work done by members of the military during a war, to give a couple examples. Yet housework, in many ways, is more relevant to society as a whole than the market labor covered in history. Everyone in society experiences or participates in housework, including infants who, from birth, rely on the care provided to them, which is a form of housework. Hence, the omission of housework from history is unfortunate, if not tragic. 

However, this book is not just about housework. It is also about the tools that people use to do housework: household technology. This focus on tools is essential to understanding human society. In addition to our ability to speak, some anthropologists (people who study human culture) argue that our ability to use and refine tools is what differentiates us from other primates. The fact that humans use tools to do work is also one of the only things that can be generalized about people from across history and culture. Strangely, however, we usually do not associate “tools” with “women’s work”, despite the fact that this generalization is as true for housework as it is for any other kind of work. 

When we study tools, it is important to think not only about how we use the tools, but also about how the tools shape what we do. Trying to complete the same task with different tools can require vastly different processes. Tools impose work processes on us in intended, and often, unintended ways. To give an example, in my house, we recently installed standard wall cabinets with doors above the counters in our kitchen; these cabinets are tools that we intended to use as containers for other tools (most notably our dishes), with the specific intention that they would make those other tools easy to locate when needed and would keep them clean between washings. Before we had the cabinets we kept our dishes on a remodeled floor-to-ceiling bookcase that did not have cabinet doors; we thought our new cabinets would make our housework easier to perform. Before we installed our new cabinets, the process of having our table set for dinner involved: 

1. an adult's decision that it was time to have the table set; 

2. the communication of that decision to children – which communication needed to be repeated more than once and in increasingly insistent tones; 

3. the removal of the dishes by the children and their placement, in appropriate order, on the table. 

The adults in the family functioned as managers and decision makers; the children, as workers – often workers under duress. Our new cabinets have changed all of our behavior patterns. Since the children are too small to reach the shelves on which the dishes are now placed, the adults must become involved in the work process. Not only must my husband and I make the decision that it is time to set the table, but we must also do part of the physical labor; we have ceased to be the managers of the work and have been forced to become unwilling participants in it. In addition, if we have erred in our labor ("But, Mommy, you didn't give me the water pitcher!"), then we must be responsible for correcting our errors. The acquisition of this one new tool has temporarily (at least until the children grow taller) altered our domestic work process as well as the set of emotional entanglements that that work process entailed. At the very least, the acquisition of that new tool will now require us to acquire yet another tool (a stool) in order to return to the work we did before – a behavioral alteration that was also unintended.

Imagine the countless other examples like this, in which tools organize our work. It is because of this that it would be impossible to understand the history of housework without understanding the history of household technologies – and vice versa. 

Housework is as difficult to study as it is to do. Market labor has clear physical boundaries and organizational structures that help historians study it. For instance, someone can be classified as working if they are at work, or if they are doing something that their boss told them to do. Workers in market labor often have contracts that can be analyzed to understand their work. Conversely, in studying housework, historians have to decide, for instance, where a certain activity begins and where it ends, what is essential and what is unessential, what is necessary and what is compulsive. If you are doing a time study of housewives, are you supposed to define the time they spend watching their children play in the park as leisure or as work? If you are trying to keep house yourself, is it really necessary to remove the chocolate stains from the front of a toddler's playsuit? These questions point out the challenges of generalizing about housework among individuals, and no less in generalizing across the diverse communities within the United States. While this book is necessarily limited in its ability to speak across all of these important and confounding factors, understanding the dynamics of housework and household tools is nonetheless an essential undertaking in illuminating American history, and this book will serve as one piece of that broader picture.