To understand the persistent demands of household labor, we will look at two different types of primary sources from the 1960’s: interviews and time studies. 

Here is an interview from a housewife in the 1960’s: 

Well, naturally, I get up first, make breakfast for my husband and put a load of clothes in my washer while breakfast cooks. Then I wake him up, give him his breakfast and he's off to work. Then I make breakfast for the children. After the children eat I dress them and they go out to play. Then I hang the clothes up and clean lightly through the house. In between times I do the dishes-that's understood of course. Then I make lunch for the children and myself and I bring them in, clean them up, and they eat. I send them out to play when they're done and I do the dishes, bring the clothes in and iron them. When I'm done ironing it's usually time to make supper, or at least start preparing it. Sometimes I have time to watch a TV story for half an hour or so. Then my husband comes home and we have our meals. Then I do the dishes again. Then he goes out to work again -he has a part time job-at his uncle's beverage company. Well, he does that two or three nights a week. If he stays home he watches TV and in the meantime I get the kids ready for bed. He and I have a light snack, watch TV a while and then go to bed. 

In the 1950s (and the 1980s) the housewife of the "professional classes" and the housewife of the "working classes" were assisted only by machines. Few such women had paid household help, and fewer still had food or milk or clean laundry delivered to their doors. The differences between these women of different classes were no doubt profound – differences in levels of education, in families of origin, in annual household income; but those profound differences did not produce equally profound variations in the ways in which the women did their work.

Apparently, also, there were no significant variations in the time that women spent at that work. Here are insights from time studies:

One sophisticated statistical analysis of time-use data collected from a large national sample of households in 1965 found that the average American woman spent about four hours a day doing housework (or twenty-eight hours a week) and about three and one-half hours a day (or twenty-six and a half hours per week) caring for children (a fifty-four-hour week). These figures were startling in two respects. First, they were not strikingly different from the work of affluent housewives in 1912 or from what other researchers had reported for rural and urban housewives in 1935. Second, these averages were not markedly affected either by the income level of the household or by the educational attainment of the housewife: women who managed on less than four thousand dollars a year in household income spent 245 minutes per day at housework and 207 at child care; while, at the other end of the income scale, housewives who could dispose of over fifteen thousand dollars put in 260 and 196 minutes at housework and child care, respectively. Housewives with college educations were logging in 474 minutes a day of housework and child care (a little under eight hours); and housewives who had not completed grade school put in almost equally tiring days of 453 minutes (or seven and one half hours). 

Neither the working-class wife nor her middle-class contemporary could have expected her husband to help much with this work. For a while, in the 1950s, there was a hullabaloo in the popular press about "new husbands" in suburbia who were diapering babies and drying dishes and cooking barbecues and otherwise becoming "feminized." Again, in the late 1970s, a spate of books and national magazine articles appeared touting the virtues of "househusbandry," most of these articles written, it turned out, by free-lance writers and journalists who had decided to stay home for a while with their children when their wives went back to work. If the results of sociological studies are to be trusted, not much lay behind either one of those journalistic episodes. Men do very little housework; and the few "househusbands" there have ever been seem not to have stuck to it for long. Whether men are asked to estimate the time that they spend at housework, or wives are asked to estimate their husbands' time, or outside observers actually clock the amount of time that men spend at it, no one has ever estimated men's share of housework at anything higher than one and a half hours per day. 

No one delivers anything (except bills and advertisements) to the door any longer, or at least not at prices that most people can afford; and domestic workers now earn salaries that have priced them out of the reach of all but the most affluent households. Household technologies have eliminated the chores that men and children used to do as well as the household workers who once were willing and able to assist with the work. The end result is that, although the work is more productive (more services are performed, and more goods are produced, for every hour of work) and less laborious than it used to be, for most housewives it is just as time consuming and just as demanding.