Ruth Schwartz Cowan: "More Work for Mother"

First of all, Mr. Keel, how did you know I would like this article?

-Cowan discusses the implications technology has had on women both in the home and in the workforce outside of the home.

-First of all, she argues that due to expansions in welfare, paid domestic labor has decreased. Due to the general expansion of the economy, commercial services such as food, milk or clean laundry delivery services have disappeared, with those remaining being quite costly. So now women are left to do housework without the aid of these servants/services. On top of that, the creation of electric appliances has reduced the amount of work children and husbands do around the house. Instead of men taking out the garbage, they let the wife dump the trash down the garbage disposal when she is doing the dishes. And the dishwasher seems to have eliminated any help a woman may receive from her husband and children in doing the dishes. So now the woman is left with even less help. So although electric appliances may make household jobs easier, they are still no less time consuming because whatever help a woman had before appliances has been eliminated.

-Secondly, she discusses the functionalist interpretation of the recent history of the family. It says that the beginning of industrialization caused households to become deprived of their essential productive roles in the economy (for example, people make clothes in a factory now instead of making them at home to sell later), hence women became deprived of their essential productive functions (making dresses). One solution for women to gain back a sense of their function in society would be for them to seek a new function in the workplace outside of home. Contrary belief, however, feels that a woman should now instead devote her time to raising her children and to tension management (what a lame word, which in essence means taking care of household chores so that the husband and children do not have to suffer the stresses of doing it themselves). So instead of redefining a woman's function in society to outside of the home, technology has only moved it to another facet inside of the home. A second solution would be to create a new ideology in which women's functions are not confined to the home. In this situation, a woman would not have to go through this "role anxiety". This, of course, is a better solution. Cowan goes on to say that industrialization was a participant in the "backward search for femininity". Because some of women's roles in the household were being replaced by technology, women were searching for new ways of being a woman (which still meant "finding themselves" within the home). Because a woman's function was now directed towards raising children, couples began having more children, hence the baby boom. Women also began to return to the "fruitful" and "productive" ways of before industrialization. They began knitting, crocheting, baking and growing vegetable gardens.

-Some theories suggest that appliances are what caused women to go to the workforce outside of the home. They now had free time on their hands since their jobs were made easier. For example, the washing machine cleans clothes much faster than a washtub did. Cowan disagrees with these theories, however. As stated earlier, time was not always reduced by household appliances. Also, housewives began to enter the labor market outside of the home before modern household technologies were widely used. Thirdly, she claims that housewives who were entering the workforce outside of the home were the ones who did not have and could not afford these amenities. So technology is not a cause of women entering the workforce outside of home but rather it is a catalyst. It did not free them into the workforce outside of the home but rather allowed them to work and still maintain a decent home. Women, for whatever reason, wanted or needed employment and saw that amenities could allow them to work outside of the home without endangering the living standards of their family. Wives could come home from work tired, and still prepare a decent dinner (thanks to frozen dinners) and do a load of laundry so that their children and husband would have clean clothes to wear the next day.

-Cowan states that technological systems which dominate our households, and which households are built around (things like water, gas, sewers), were built with the assumption that somebody would be around to operate them, and that somebody just happens to be the wife. She goes on to say that since utility companies operate twenty four hours a day, this is evidence that society believes households should function around the clock. She also states that if householders had intended to pay women for the work that they did inside of the home, then appliances such as washing machines would not have been preferred over laundry delivery services.