Indeed, the disappearance of paid and unpaid servants (unmarried daughters, maiden aunts, grandparents, and children fall into the latter category) as household workers, and the imposition of the entire job on the housewife herself, was arguably the most significant change. The proportion of servants to households in America dropped from one servant to every fifteen households in 1900 to one to forty-two in 1950.9 Most of this shrinkage took place during the 1920s. The disappearance of domestic servants stimulated the mechanization of homes, which in turn may have hastened the disappearance of servants.
This change in the structure of the household labor force was accompanied by a remodeled ideology of housewifery. In the early years of the twentieth century, the domestic science movement, the germ theory of disease and the idea of “scientific motherhood” led to new exacting standards of housework and child care.10 As standards of personal and household cleanliness rose, the introduction of washing machines, for example, increased laundering to meet higher expectations of cleanliness. There was a major change in the importance attached to child rearing and mother’s role. The average family had fewer children, but modern child-centered approaches to parenting involved spending much more time and efort.
Housework began to be represented as an expression of the housewife’s afection for her family. The split between public and private meant that the home was expected to provide a haven from the alienated, stressful, technological order of the workplace and was expected to provide entertainment, emotional support, and sexual gratification. The burden of satisfying these needs fell on the housewife.
With home and housework acquiring heightened emotional significance, it became impossible to rationalize household production along the lines of industrial production. Rather than following Fordist principles of large-scale production systems and a cooperative application of labor, the dominance of single-family residences and the private ownership of correspondingly small-scale amenities is, as Cowan aptly puts it, a completely irrational use of technology and labor time within the home:
Doing Domestic Time
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