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Work and Home

Introduction

Our relationship with domestic spaces has transformed over the past few centuries, yet certain patterns of gendered labor have proven resilient. This chapter examines how the nature of work inside the home changed from pre-industrial times to the present day, noting the interactions between technological innovations and gender. As industrialization moved production away from households and into factories and offices, the notion of separate masculine and feminine spheres came to define idealized gender roles in middle- and upper-class contexts. The development of technologies promised to liberate women from household drudgery, yet it often reinforced gendered divisions of labor while establishing new standards of cleanliness and domestic management that required considerable labor. By tracing these historical shifts, we can better understand how technologies come to interact with social structures and why seemingly "labor-saving" devices haven't necessarily reduced the domestic workload.

Pre-industrialization

In the pre-industrial era, most people worked inside or directly outside their homes and didn't commute to work at another location. Words were coined that defined people by their homes: "housewife" for instance, or "husband," which comes from the Old Norse for "master of a house" ("Husband" 2024). Although people in pre-industrial societies needed to purchase items like metal pots and pans, they produced much of what they needed at home. The period that followed, now known as the Industrial Revolution, began in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century and in the United States in the early nineteenth. The introduction of the steam engine at that time meant that work processes like spinning wool into yarn could be sped up and done more efficiently by machines at mills and factories than by individuals at home. Making textiles was in fact one of the first processes to be industrialized in both England and the United States (Thompson 1966; Coleman 2009). Textile mills and then other kinds of factories offered jobs away from home. People didn't have to raise crops and/or livestock, or hunt or fish, to support themselves. They didn't have to make all of their clothes. They could earn a wage working at a factory and buy food and clothing.

The pre-industrial system of home-centered labor was harsh, and it could be particularly brutal for widows and widowers who didn't remarry, because no single person could do all the necessary jobs on what were essentially subsistence farms (Cowan 1983, 34-7). Industrialization improved the living and working situations of some people by creating a large number of jobs away from home.

It wasn't just that there were new jobs in factories. The rise of large-scale industry meant that there was a greater need for white-collar management jobs in the companies that owned and ran the factories, in financial services and legal services outside of the factories, and in professions like medicine and law to serve urban dwellers (Wiebe 1967, 112-14). These new jobs contributed to a notion that was especially popular among the growing middle class in the industrializing world of the mid-nineteenth century: the idea that men and women should occupy "separate spheres."

The new middle class and "separate spheres"

The "ideal" middle-class home touted in popular writing was a domestic haven, a space free from the rough world of commerce and hard labor outside its front door. The domestic sphere was the feminine sphere (Boardman 2000, 150), a place a man could come home to at the end of a long day at work and relax, free from the concerns of the outside world. According to the notion of separate spheres, the home was a place of leisure for men, but primarily a place of work for women (Boardman 2000, 155).

The "cult of true womanhood" associated with the Victorian home and the idea of separate spheres argued that this was the natural order of things. Men were (supposedly) aggressive, stronger, and naturally meant to participate in public life, while women, although the weaker sex, were morally superior and therefore the best people to raise children and maintain a decent household (Boydston 1999). While extolling the virtues of women, this discourse served to inscribe limits on middle-class women's movements and activities (Jorgensen-Earp 1990, 86; Downey 2002, 109). Much of our current thinking about gender and technologies is rooted in the idea that there are separate spheres, whether we are aware of it or not.

It is important to emphasize that the notion of separate spheres was a middle- and upper-class ideal, and one that emerged primarily in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States. It wasn't and isn't a universal value, and because it was presented in popular discourse as an ideal, it wasn't actually attainable for many people. As work moved away from small farms and businesses and into the factories, many households couldn't afford to have one spouse work outside the home while the other earned no income for the family. In addition, there were adults who didn't marry.

In poor families, such as those of recently arrived immigrants or of domestic migrants moving from rural areas to urban areas (including, and maybe especially, freed slaves from the rural South in the United States), all family members might be required to work outside the home so that the family could afford food and housing. Kay Boardman observes that upper-middle-class women often strove to achieve idealized standards of housekeeping and childcare by using the labor of poor women forced to work in another family's home (2000, 157). Unlike in pre-industrial society, in industrial society people less often sold goods they had made and/or bought goods from craftspeople, and more often sold their labor as a commodity in exchange for money with which to buy mass produced goods.

Traditionally, and in most societies, there has been a division of labor between men and women. In the pre-industrial household, although men and women tended to have gender-defined tasks, there was significant overlap, and accomplishing any task from start to finish required both a husband and a wife, each using specific skills and tools (Cowan 1983). In order to have butter, for example, it is most likely that a husband would build a barn for cows and any other livestock he might go on to purchase; the wife and children would then feed and milk the cows; and the wife would churn butter from the collected milk. At some point the family might need meat from the cow more than it needed milk, so the husband would kill and butcher the cow and the wife would salt and preserve the meat.

The chores that were considered "women's work" were often as physically demanding and dangerous as men's jobs. Cooking using a cast iron oven, for instance, made the kitchen incredibly hot, and users had to shovel coal into it to keep it going. There was no temperature control on the ovens, and the lack of uniform temperatures across stove models meant that there weren't really recipes like we know them today. And on top of all this, most women in western countries wore long dresses with long sleeves over layers of undergarments, making doing housework more unpleasant than it is for most people in the developed world today. Let's look in detail at a few illustrative examples.

Washing

Doing laundry was a difficult and unpleasant chore. It's hard for many people today to imagine trying to wash clothes without detergent and hot water, instead depending on naturally occurring rushing water. Prior to the nineteenth century, women had to take their families' weekly laundry from their houses to water sources that moved with enough intensity to get clothes clean (Leto 1988, 173-4). Monday became the commonly held "washday," likely because people changed their clothes for the week on Sunday night, so Monday was the logical laundry day; it also allowed women to serve leftovers from the large Sunday dinner so that they could devote all of their energy to doing laundry on Monday (Green 2016). Victoria Leto notes that having a shared communal laundry day meant that the sheer drudgery of doing laundry could at least be a social event (1988, 163).

Until the 1800s, laundry took up about one-third of women's work time (Leto 1988, 163). During the 1800s, commercial laundry soap became widely available in the United States (Ridner 2020), and cast iron stoves made it easier to boil water indoors (Mintz and McNeil 2021). While these advances meant that women didn't have to carry dirty laundry year-round to the rushing water of a stream, they didn't alleviate all or even most of the difficulties associated with doing laundry. Women had to haul water into the house from a well or stream. In addition, as the nineteenth century progressed, people became more concerned with sanitation as the germ theory of illness came to be widely accepted in the United States and Europe, which meant that clothes were expected to be very clean (Gourgey 2022). Laundry was such a despised and labor-intensive chore that if women didn't have family members or boarders available to help, then - if they could afford it, even just barely - they would hire domestic help to assist in doing it (Shehan and Moras 2006, 43).

With the increased concern for cleanliness, doing laundry...