HOUSEWORK

In the preindustrial culture of colonial America, most unpaid household labor produced goods and services to be used by household members. Few households produced everything they used; most made occasional purchases of ironware, pottery, and salt, and wealthier families bought imported textiles, tea, and other luxuries. But the fundamental household chores—cleaning, food preparation, the manufacture and maintenance of clothing, the care of children, the aged, and the infirm—involved a considerable amount of productive labor. Women spun wool and flax, wove cloth, sewed it into clothing, grew food and prepared it for eating or storage, and made soap and candles. Other family members shared those tasks and (usually according to a gendered division of labor) worked in adjoining fields and small crafts shops. The colonial household, then, served as the central institution of economic production.

During the ensuing centuries, much of the production work of the household was subsumed by private industry and moved from the domestic realm to the public one. Unpaid work in the home abetted industrial production by preparing workers to go to work daily and by feeding, clothing, and caring for the children who would eventually join their parents in the factories. Increasing numbers of households had to adapt to industrial workers' new schedules; natural cycles of light and dark could not dictate routine when some family members lived by the clock. Factories began to produce goods that helped people adapt to urban life—soap for urban dwellers who had no reserves of fat left from slaughtering, lamps and lamp oils to brighten the time left after work. Manufactured textiles were ubiquitous by the eve of the Civil War.

Still, because only the wealthy could afford gas or plumbing until late in the century, the major daily tasks of housework continued to represent a substantial burden, and even small households required the labor of at least one adult working full-time. Nearly every chore demanded fire building and water hauling. Cast-iron stoves, widespread during the last half of the century, represented a substantial advance over fireplaces but still entailed fuel hauling, fire tending, and ash sifting and disposal. Oil and kerosene lamps required frequent cleaning and wick trimming. Heavy pails of hot water had to be carried for dishwashing and laundry, the latter task followed by hanging clothes on the line to dry and ironing them with heavy flatirons that had to be heated on the stove. Spring housecleaning was a necessity because of the soot deposited by heating and cooking with wood and coal. Nor did the production work disappear entirely: most men wore ready-made clothes at the end of the century, but most women's and children's clothing was still made at home.

All this labor was performed by unpaid married women, although others also worked in the home. Indentured servants did housework before the Industrial Revolution, and slaves were used in the South before the Civil War. Women often enlisted the help of their children. Upper-class and some middle-class households employed servants, especially for particularly burdensome tasks like laundry and those requiring special skills.

As the new industrial order developed and increasing numbers of men and single women went to work in factories and offices during the nineteenth century, work in the home became separate from the rest of society. Married women labored alone without pay, supervising themselves, isolated from the dominant trends of the new culture. Factory workers left home to work; most women worked at home. Factory workers had bosses; married women decided what needed to be done according to the task and not the clock, controlling their own work process. Around 1825, popular writers began to codify these distinctions in an ideology of separate spheres for men and women that, though not totally accurate, reflected the reality of industrial society. Even midcentury domestic writers like Catharine Beecher, who denounced the degradation of unpaid domestic labor that had gone along with the steady expansion of the money economy, held to that ideology.

Between about 1890 and 1920, mass production and mass distribution brought new products—gas, electricity, running water, prepared foods, ready-made clothes, factory-made furniture and utensils—to large numbers of American families. Even energy could now be consumed at the flick of a switch or the turn of a knob. The new utilities literally connected the household to the public sphere with wires and pipes. Standardized uniform goods that cost money replaced the various makeshifts most people used. This dealt a blow to the satisfactions of home production but brought about a general end to the arduous labor of the household and a rise in the standard of living. Some poor farm families, however, still produced most of what they used, did without plumbing or electricity, and consumed few industrial products other than tools. Housework increasingly assumed the new economic function that Beecher had noticed among the urban and suburban upper classes around the end of the Civil War: no longer primarily producers, American housewives became consumers.

Despite new cleaning products and technologies, houses, bodies, and clothes still got dirty. The vacuum cleaner and electric washing machine, both within the means of the middle class by the 1930s, had to be operated. (The washing machine substituted not only for hand laundering but for work done at the commercial laundry, and represented an unusual but important instance of a task being returned to the home after having been substantially commercialized.) Despite canned, packaged, and later frozen foods, and even through the development of the restaurant industry in the 1970s and 1980s, and the prevalence of fast food, regular daily meal preparation remained central. Finally, the care of small children, the elderly, and the infirm continued to require substantial labor and to present a significant concern to individual households as increasing numbers of married women entered the paid labor force.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982).

Susan Strasser

See also Beecher, Catharine; Cookery; Domestic Work; Women and the Work Force.