More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave
by Ruth Schwartz Cowan
Modified by Alexandra Thrall & Paige Arnell
Chapter 3: The Invention of Housework: The Early Stages of Industrialization
The United States embraced industrialization in the nineteenth century, and the shifts brought about by industrialization have been well documented. The invention of new technologies impacted transportation, communication, and commerce. It has been widely assumed by historians that these new technologies must have made the work of the home easier. It seems indisputable that purchasing milk is easier than twice-daily milkings of a cow and that purchasing ready-made cloth relieves the work of spinning and weaving. In addition to the changes brought about by industrialization, historians presume that home life became easier because of the decrease in fertility rates. In 1800, the average family had 7.04 children, but by 1900 that number had dropped to 3.56. A decrease in children meant not only fewer caretaking hours, but also fewer physical limitations for women as they experienced less time pregnant and nursing. For these reasons, industrialization has predominantly been viewed as a period that significantly lightened the load for American women.
Yet, when we look at primary source documents of the time, these are not the comments women are making. “A woman's work is never done, and happy she whose strength holds out to the end of the [sun's] rays," wrote Martha Moore Ballard in her diary in 1795, after she had spent a full day preparing wool for spinning. Her feelings were echoed almost a century later in a letter written by Mary Hallock Foote: "I am daily dropped in little pieces and passed around and devoured and expected to be whole again next day and all days and I am never alone for a single minute." Famous women, even when they had several servants, were not immune to pressure either. "The arranging of the whole house . . . the cleaning ... the children's clothes and the baby have seemed to press on my mind all at once. Sometimes it seems as if anxious thought has become a disease with me from which I could not be free," wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe to her husband, Calvin, in 1844. Observers of the American scene frequently commented on the ill health of American married women. In 1832, Frances Trollope attributed their pale complexions, slumped shoulders, and worn faces to the burdens of their domestic work. Twenty years later Gro Svendsen, a young Norwegian immigrant, made a similar observation in a letter to her parents: We are told that the women of America have much leisure time but I haven't yet met any woman who thought so! Here the mistress of the house must do all the work that the cook, the maid and the housekeeper would do in an upper class family at home.
Catherine Beecher, an early disciple of what later came to be called "home economics," waged many a long campaign against what she regarded as the widespread ill health of American married women, and also laid a good part of the blame on the nature of the work that they did:
There is nothing which so demands system and regularity as the affairs of a housekeeper ... and yet the perpetually fluctuating state of society seems forever to bar any such system and regularity. The anxieties, vexations, perplexities and even hard labor that come upon American women ... are endless; and many a woman has, in consequence, been disheartened, discouraged and ruined in health.
Census statistics, articles in women's magazines, economic histories, genre paintings, patent records, and the extant artifacts themselves all converge to tell us that hundreds of household conveniences were invented and diffused during the nineteenth century. There were hand-driven washing machines and taps for indoor sinks, eggbeaters and pulley-driven butter churns, tinned milk and store-bought flour, porcelainized cookware, airtight heating stoves, and a multitude of additional small gadgets and large utilities, from apple parers to piped coal gas, that were intended to make housework easier. Yet, when discussed by the people who actually did housework, or by the people who watched the people who were actually doing it, it is clear that housework did not get one bit more convenient – or less tiring – during the whole of the century. What a strange paradox that in the face of so many labor-saving devices, little labor appears to have been saved!
While one might be tempted to resolve the paradox by assuming that the commentators were, in some ways, biased: that, as housewives, Mary Hallock Foote and Harriet Beecher Stowe were either a bit paranoid, or a bit spoiled, or particularly poor organizers, or perhaps that they were trying, as some housewives always have, to "do too much." Similarly, we might want to argue that, as observers, Frances Trollope, Gro Svendsen, and Catherine Beecher were either misguided, or observing the wrong housewives. However, the paradox can be most obviously resolved with this assumption: Labor-saving devices were invented and diffused throughout the country during those hundred years that witnessed the first stages of industrialization, but they reorganized the work processes of housework in ways that did not save the labor of the average housewife.
This point can best be shown if we analyze the household labor involved in preparing a beef stew in 1850. Meat was still a dominant part of the average American diet, and stewing was still (as it is today) a standard form of preparation. Let us imagine what it might have been like for the grandchildren, or perhaps the great-grandchildren, of the young Connecticut couple who appeared in the last chapter, to be preparing the same dish a century later, some place in Connecticut, perhaps in a farm town in the Connecticut River Valley, which was just beginning to feel the impact of industrialization. The stew would require, then as it does now, roughly the same ingredients: meat, vegetables, salt and other spices, water to do the stewing, fuel to heat the water, and grain to thicken the liquid so that it could be served effectively as sauce. In a farm household in rural Connecticut in 1850, these ingredients would have been obtained in much the same fashion as was common one hundred years earlier – with one exception. The meat would have come from an animal that was owned by the family and butchered at home, and the vegetables from a garden that was likely to have been tended by the wife; the fuel to have been cut by the husband and his assistant on their own woodlot; the salt and some of the spices obtained by trade (either in cash or in kind); and the water carried, by hand, from their own well or from a nearby spring. The single exception would have been the grain – the thickening agent for the stewing juices; and thereby hangs a significant point about the ways in which household labor changed in the early years of industrialization.
Milling Flour and Making Bread
Though discussed less than textiles and weapons by historians, the first product of industrialization in the United States was actually flour. Milling inventions that required less labor and produced finer flour made for good business soon after the Revolutionary War. These inventions combined with improved trading opportunities through canals, resulted in purchased, fine-milled flour being readily available to American families.
Given this shift, it seems likely that our imaginary rural couple, living in Connecticut in 1850, would have switched from the home-grown wheat, rye, and cornmeal, with which their ancestors had been familiar, to the fine and superfine wheat flours that were being produced at large automated flour mills scattered throughout the eastern half of the country. They would thus have made, in one, not insignificant aspect of their lives, the crucial transition from being producers to being consumers, from being involved with the product (grain) at almost all stages of its preparation, to encountering it only at the very last stage – and acquiring it only through trade. They would have, in short, begun the first stages of the industrialization of their household.
The impact of this transition would have been different on each member of the family. It had traditionally been the job of men to see to the grinding of the wheat into flour. The effort of grinding grain into flour was a challenging, physically demanding one. Large quantities cannot be ground at once, because the flour will start to rot in a fairly short amount of time. Hand-grinding at home was a monotonous, repetitive task that would need to be done every few days. Some communities had a local mill where wheat could be brought for grinding. Nonetheless, hauling the wheat for grinding was also a male job. In some cases, it might take a man a whole day to travel to a mill, and that trip would have to be made at least once a month. The switch from home-grown to "store-bought" grains relieved men and boys of one of the most time-consuming of the household chores for which they had been responsible.
At the same time, this ready-made fine, white flour created new expectations and tastes when it came to cooking, a job that was typically female. Before the industrialization of flour milling, the coarse flours that were produced by hand grinding or grist milling of wheat and rye were prepared into "quickbreads," porridges, and griddle cakes, none of which required complex or laborious preparations. With the introduction of fine flour, much more delicate items could be made in the average household, such as pie crusts and cakes. With the introduction of yeast (and lots of kneading) a softer, more delicate bread began to dominate American tables. Because purchasing flour cost money, and making bread took a lot of time, making white bread became a social status symbol for households.
Changing attitudes are clearly reflected in this passage from Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home:
Bread: What ought it to be? It should be light, sweet, and tender. This matter of lightness is the distinctive line between savage and civilized bread … the true housewife makes her bread the sovereign of her kitchen–its behests must be attended to in all critical points and moments, no matter what else must be postponed. Some persons prepare bread for the oven by simply mixing it in the mass, without kneading, pouring it into pans and suffering it to rise there. The air-cells in bread thus prepared are coarse and uneven: the bread is as inferior in delicacy and nicety to that which is well kneaded as a raw servant to a perfectly educated and refined lady.
Quickbreads were, in short, thought to be only for the oppressed classes in society: Blacks, Native Americans, and the Irish. The maintenance of status (as well, it was thought, as the maintenance of good digestion) required the whitest breads, prepared in a manner that was both time and energy consuming.
What was true of breads was also true of cakes. Meals and whole flours do not lend themselves to cake making; only fine flours can be used successfully in pastries, cakes, and other confections. Eighteenth-century travelers rarely reported that cakes constituted an important part of the American diet, but the situation had clearly changed one hundred years later. Charles Latrobe, a Frenchman who toured the United States in 1836, was just one of many foreign visitors who noticed this phenomenon:
Nowhere is the stomach of the traveller or visitor put in such constant peril as among the cake-inventive housewives and daughters of New England. Such is the universal attention paid to this particular branch of epicurism in these states that I greatly suspect that some of the Pilgrim fathers must have come over to the country with the Cookery book under one arm and the Bible under the other.
Under the conditions that prevailed in nineteenth-century kitchens, cake baking required a great deal of hard work and a considerable amount of time. Cake making involved breaking up bricks of sugar and hand whisking eggs and butter. It takes quite a long time to achieve the proper texture of eggs, butter, and sugar when whipping by hand. Even the most energetic of cooks could well have been exhausted after making a simple cake.
The industrialization of flour did not make women’s time in the kitchen easier. To the contrary, it created new standards for food that required considerably more time and effort from women. At the same time, it completely eliminated a repetitive and burdensome household chore for men. Thus, housework was becoming truly "women's work”, and not an obligation shared by both sexes.
The Evolution of the Stove
The imaginary nineteenth-century stew described above – the one now containing fine white flour instead of coarse brown meal – would have been prepared with tools that were also slightly, but significantly, different from its eighteenth-century predecessor. The knives, spoons, pots, and brushes that the Connecticut couple used to do their work in 1850 would have been more or less similar to the ones their grandparents had used a century earlier; but the open hearth – with its andirons, bellows, cranes, and trammels – would have disappeared, to be replaced by that marvelous product of American ingenuity, the gigantic cooking stove. The cast-iron cooking stove could well serve as the single most important household symbol of the nineteenth century; kitchens are almost invariably represented with open hearths in the early years of the century and with stoves later on.
Despite this, when stoves were first invented and sold, some Americans greeted them with hesitation. The hearth, with its blazing fire, had long been a potent symbol of home to people of English descent. The roasted joint cooked in front of that fire (when we make a roast beef today we are actually baking, not roasting, it) had also been a symbol of prosperity, particularly in England's American colonies, where meat had been abundant. Albert Bolles, an early historian of the stove industry, was probably expressing the sentiments of the dominant English part of the population (and consequently ignoring the attitudes of people of non-English descent) when he wrote:
The old-fashioned fireplace will never cease to be loved for the beautiful atmosphere it imparts to a room, and the snug and cheerful effect of an open wood-fire. When stoves were first introduced, a feeling of unutterable repugnance was felt by all classes toward adopting them and they were used for a generation chiefly in school houses, courtrooms, bar-rooms, shops and other public and rough places. For the home, nothing except the fireplace would do. The open fire was the true centre of home-life, and it seemed perfectly impossible to everybody to bring up a family around a stove.
Ethnicity, symbolism, status, and tradition aside, cooking and heating stoves had replaced the open hearth in most American homes by the close of the Civil War. People wanted stoves in their homes because stoves were economical, portable, and efficient.
Stoves were economical for two reasons: first, because they required less fuel (meaning firewood) than fireplaces; and, second, because they were cheaper to install. In a stove the flow of air to the fire is restricted and controlled, thus slowing combustion and extending the useful life of the fuel. We cannot be certain precisely how much fuel was saved by converting from fireplace to stove, but promoters of stoves estimated savings ranging from 50 percent to 90 percent. As coal began to replace wood as a cheaper form of fuel, stoves found even greater favor because they could burn the cheaper fuel more effectively. Stoves could burn coal and vent the smoke out of the house, whereas coal in the fireplace would certainly lead to foul air and filthy walls.
Another reason why Americans transitioned from fireplaces to stoves was because stoves were more efficient at providing heat for a house. Since a stove could be placed more centrally in a room, the heat that it provided could warm a greater portion of the area where people actually spent their time. The room with a stove seemed warmer, even when one was at some distance from the source of heat; with a fireplace "one could see one's breath upon the air while sitting at the fireplace and find apples frozen upon the table in the centre of the room when the family were roasting in the blaze of the log fire." Some people thought that the extra heat, coupled with dry air and poor ventilation, caused stoves to be terrible for health; but others were willing to suffer with these complaints rather than return to the formerly frigid conditions. When this kind of efficiency was combined with economy (and, for westward migrants, with portability as well), the stove was hard to beat.
The cast iron stove was fairly expensive, but still not out of the reach of ordinary people. Through the middle decades of the century stoves ranged in price from five to twenty-five dollars, at a time when the standard pay for common laborers was one dollar a day, and a barrel of flour, enough to last a family of five for eight weeks, cost between five and six dollars. Most people, except the very poorest, could probably have afforded to install some kind of stove in their living quarters.
The impact of those stoves on the houses in which they were installed is not difficult to discern: stoves were labor-saving devices, but, as with fine milled flour, the labor that they saved was male. The important activity that was radically altered by the presence of a stove was fuel gathering; if a stove halved the amount of fuel that a household required, it thus halved the amount of work that men had to do in cutting, hauling, and splitting wood. The labor involved in cooking, which was the female share of the work, seems barely to have been affected at all; the process of frying bacon on a stove is little different from the process of frying bacon over a hearth. Pots and pans and kettles continued to be exceedingly heavy (as they continued- to be made from cast iron for most of the century); and although the advent of the stove may have somewhat reduced the amount of stooping that had to be done to tend those implements, the stove did not eliminate the need to move thirty- and forty-pound burdens awkwardly back and forth.
Changing from hearth to stove may well have created more work for mother, rather than less. One of the advantages of the stove – according to contemporary cookbooks – was that different kinds of cooking (say, fast boiling, slow simmering, and baking) could be accomplished with the same fire; the skilled cook needed to know how to regulate the dampers of her stove and how to move her pots various distances from the firebox; but once she had conquered this art, it was possible for her to boil potatoes, simmer a soup, and bake an apple pie for dinner all at the same time; this combination would have been near to impossible on a hearth. The stove, in short, took away the simplicity of one-pot cooking or one-dish meals and increased the amount of time that women spent in preparing food for cooking. The diet of average Americans became more varied during the nineteenth century, but in the process women's activities became less varied as their cooking chores became more complex. Furthermore, a stove had to be cleaned. As stoves were made from cast iron, they would rust if left dirty (or undried) for any length of time. Once a stove started to rust, it would, if left unattended, eventually wear thin and crack. Thus stoves, unlike fireplaces, had to be cleaned at the end of each day, and stove polish (a black, waxy material) applied fairly regularly, in order to ward off the danger of rust. This work was done by women, since cleaning, like cooking, was one of the jobs that was stereotypically allocated to women, and to women alone.
More Chores for Women, Fewer for Men
Industrialization created the material conditions under which the doctrine of separate spheres could take root and flourish. Merchant flour and cast iron stoves had made it possible for men to work at wage labor without endangering (indeed, with some chance of improving) the standard of living of their families. As time wore on, the need to pay cash for flour, or for coal or for any of the other commodities that were so swiftly appearing on the market, ensured that, once having entered the market for wage labor, men would stay there. Once that had happened, they ceased to train their sons in the housework that had been men's work and then the process of separating men’s work from the home was complete. A new generation of men came into adulthood having learned the skills needed to work for wages, not the skills needed to work at home. For these men the doctrine of separate spheres served to make sense of the new patterns by which they were living, and it was this new pattern of living and thinking that they taught to their sons.
For women the industrial transition was different. Merchant flour and cast iron stoves did not free them from their labors. These commodities created new jobs that only women could perform and women became tied even more strongly to their cast-iron hearths. Angel food cakes, strawberry preserves, and leavened bread may have made life easier and pleasanter for their families, but they also kept women working at home. The factories and the schoolrooms may have lured some women into workplaces outside of the home, but most of these women were either unmarried or in dire distress. For the rest, the material conditions of domestic life during the first phases of industrialization required women to stay at home so as to protect (and even to enhance) the standard of living of their families. When women were absent, meals were irregular, infant mortality was higher, clothes were dirtier, and houses poorly maintained. Grown daughters were needed at home as well (at least until they married) because, in the absence of servants, who was left to help? Girls learned the housework that their mothers practiced; boys did not. In this way the doctrine of separate spheres, the side that identified women with home and with homely virtues, was sealed in the best social cement of all: the patterns of daily life and the relations between parents and children.
Chapter 3 Questions
Why did people start buying flour, instead of making it, during the early 1800’s?
What is the difference between the flour that people bought and the flour that people made?
How did buying flour, rather than making it, change household work for men and women?
How did people feel about stoves when they were first invented?
Why are stoves more “economical”?
How did stoves change household work for men and women?