Several million American women cook supper each night in several million separate homes over several million separate stoves—a specter which should be suficient to drive any rational technocrat into the loony bin. . . . Out there in the land of household work there are small industrial plants which sit idle for the better part of every working day; there are expensive pieces of highly mechanized equipment which only get used once or twice a month; there are consumption units which weekly trundle out to their markets to buy 8 ounces of this nonperishable product and 12 ounces of that one.11
This was not inevitable. There were many examples of alternatives, such as British and American experiments in social housing in the 1930s, with communal restaurants and laundries.12 However, these initiatives foundered and, consequently, domestic technology has been designed for use in privatized single-family households, requiring individuals to have a multiplicity of skills.
The relationship between domestic technology and the time spent on household work provides a good illustration of the general problem of technological determinism, where technology in itself is said to have resulted in social changes. The demise of domestic servants, changing standards of hygiene and child care, the ideology of the housewife’s role, and the symbolic importance of the home reflect social as much as technological developments. Indeed, it is impossible to separate out changing housework practices from concurrent technological innovations.
Gender Specialization of Household Work
Domestic technology, then, has not directly reduced the time spent on housework. However, the way that men and women relate to technology may be a significant factor in determining how they spend time at home. This section will consider whether domestic innovations have had any efect on the gender specialization of household labor.
As I have already noted, a key factor fueling time pressure is the growth of the dual-earner family. Although this has been accompanied by a widespread belief in the value of sharing domestic duties in modern marriages, in reality, women are particularly harried because of their disproportionate load. Although men’s contributions have increased substantially, women’s labor still accounts for over two-thirds of the total time devoted to unpaid work.13 While the sheer volume of work is bound to influence feelings of time pressure, so too will the kind of work performed. Here, therefore, I want to look at diferent types of housework that men and women undertake and what this means for their experience of time.
Chapter five
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