For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English

Author:Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307764164
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-01T14:00:00+00:00

Domesticity Without the Science

Ellen Richards and her colleagues never doubted the eventual success of their movement. Once she fantasized about “the college woman in 1950”:

She will be so fair to look upon, so gentle and so quiet in her ways, that you will not dream that she is of the same race as the old rebels against the existing order, who, with suspicion in our eyes and tension in our hearts, if not in our fists, confront you now with the question, “What are you going to do about it?85

By the fifties, something had long since been done about “it”—the haphazardly managed, endangered home—though not entirely through the direct efforts of the domestic science experts. In fact, domestic science itself had become almost unnecessary. There was no more need for crusading writers and lecturers to set the standards and dictate the tasks of homemaking. By the mid-twentieth century, the exhortations of the domestic scientists—the principles of “right living”—had been, for a growing proportion of women, built into the material organization of daily life.

Home ownership, long a dream of the domestic scientists, expanded steadily throughout the twentieth century. The domestic science reformers had believed that the single family, owner-occupied home was the necessary material condition for the full practice of domestic science, if not for the totality of “right living.” Business leaders believed that “socialism and communism does [sic] not take root in the ranks of those who have their feet firmly planted in the soil of America through home ownership.86 With postwar federal financing, home ownership expanded into the blue-collar working class. By the late nineteen seventies more than 60 percent of non-farm homes were owner-occupied, compared to 36.5 percent in 1900.87 With home ownership, homemaking took on an importance which went beyond the maintenance of daily existence; it becomes the maintenance of an investment.

Even more important, new taskmasters arose to dictate the regimen of domestic work. Consider the strange effect of “labor-saving” devices which began to be mass-marketed in the nineteen twenties. Historian Heidi Hartmann provides ample documentation to show that the introduction of new appliances has not in any way reduced the time spent on housework.88 In one well-known study, Joann Vanek found that “the time devoted to laundry has actually increased over the past fifty years”—even with the introduction of washers, dryers, and wash-and-wear clothing—“apparently because people have more clothes and wash them more often.”89 Washing machines permit you to do daily, instead of weekly, laundries. Vacuum cleaners and rug shampooers remind you that you do not have to live with dust or countenance a stain on the carpet. Each of them—the dishwasher, the roll warmer, the freezer, the blender—is the material embodiment of a task, a silent imperative to work.

So, if they had lived a few more decades, the early domestic science reformers would have been pleased to see so many of their goals realized: standards of cleanliness have risen to perfectionist levels; “managerial” activities, such as shopping, have vastly expanded; the problem of the “domestic void” has been all but forgotten.

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