More Work For Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan

Modern labor-saving devices eliminated drudgery, not labor. Both notions are false, deriving from an incomplete understanding of the nature of these particular technological changes. They have led us to believe that households no longer produce anything particularly important, and that, consequently, housewives no longer have anything particularly time consuming to do. 'Our commonly received notions about the impact of twentieth-century household technology have thus deceived us on two crucial grounds. At the conclusion of this survey, she summarizes her thesis in this way: She also examines in detail the processes of industrialization in the food system, the clothing system, the health care system, and water and heating systems over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

She shows this by comparing the total social and work processes that were involved in creating a meal in colonial America and creating a meal in the home of a middle-class family in the industrializing 19th century. The basic thesis of the book is that the industrialization of productive processes from the days of colonial America have changed but not appreciably reduced the workload for the woman of the house.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan challenged this idea in her book More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, which was published in 1983. Women are told that over the course of especially the latter half of the 20th century, so many labor-saving devices were introduced into the home that we are largely freed from such labor and are therefore expected to join the labor force, spending up to 8 hours of the day outside the home at a workplace.

More Work For Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan