History of Women in the United States: Volume 4/2 Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110968842, 9783598414756

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities Edited by Nancy F. Cott Series ISBN 3-598-41454-4 1.

Theory and Method in Women's History ISBN 3-598-41455-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41477-3 Part 2

2.

Household Constitution and Family Relationships ISBN 3-598-41456-0

3.

4.

Domestic Relations and Law ISBN 3-598-41457-9 Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work ISBN 3-598-41458-7 Parti ISBN 3-598-41475-7 Part 2

11. Women's Bodies: Health and Childbirth ISBN 3-598-41465-X 12. Education ISBN 3-598-41466-8 13. Religion ISBN 3-598-41467-6 14. Intercultural and Interracial Relations ISBN 3-598-41468-4 15. Women and War ISBN 3-598-41469-2

5.

The Intersection of Work and Family Life ISBN 3-598-41459-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41476-5 Part 2

6.

Working on the Land ISBN 3-598-41460-9

17. Social and Moral Reform ISBN 3-598-41471-4 Parti ISBN 3-598-41695-4 Part 2

7.

Industrial Wage Work ISBN 3-598-41461-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41693-8 Part 2

18. Women and Politics ISBN 3-598-41472-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41697-0 Part 2

8.

Professional and White-Collar Employments ISBN 3-598-41462-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41694-6 Part 2

19. Woman Suffrage ISBN 3-598-41473-0 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41696-2 Part 2

9.

Prostitution ISBN 3-598-41463-3

10. Sexuality and Sexual Behavior ISBN 3-598-41464-1

16. Women Together: Organizational Life ISBN 3-598-41470-6

20. Feminist Struggles for Sex Equality ISBN 3-598-41474-9

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

4

•

Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work

PART 2

Edited with an Introduction by

Nancy F. Cott Yale University

K G · Saur Munich · London · New York · Paris 1992

Publisher's Note The articles and chapters which comprise this collection originally appeared in a wide variety of publications and are reproduced here in facsimile from the highest quality offprints and photocopies available. The reader will notice some occasional marginal shading and text-curl common to photocopying from tightly bound volumes. Every attempt has been made to correct or minimize this effect Copyright information for articles reproduced in this collection appears at the end of this volume. Library of Congress Cataloging-ln-Publlcation Data History of women in the United States : historical articles on women's lives and activities / edited with an introduction by Nancy F. Cott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: 1. Theory and method in women's histoTy — 2. Household constitution and family relationships ~ 3. Domestic relations and law — 4. Domestic ideology and domestic work — 5. The intersection of work and family life - 6. Working on the land — 7. Industrial wage woTk - 8. Professional and white-collar employments — 9. Prostitution ~ 10. Sexuality and sexual behavior — 11. Women's bodies — 12. Education — 13. Religion — 14. Intercultural and interracial relations — 15. Women and war — 16. Women together — 17. Social and moral reform — 18. Women and politics 19. Women suffrage — 20. Feminist struggles for sex equality. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (set) 1. Women—United States—History. 2. Women—United States-Social conditions. I. Cott, Nancy F. HQ1410.H57 1992 305.4'0973-dc20 92-16765 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP - Einheitsaufnahme History of women in the United States: historical articles on women's lives and activities / ed. with an introd, by Nancy F. Cott. - Munich ; London ; New York ; Paris : Saur. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 NE: Cott, Nancy F. (Hrsg.) Vol. 4. Domestic ideology and domestic work. Pt. 2. - (1992) ISBN 3-598-41475-7

©

Printed on acid-free paper/Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier All Rights Strictly Reserved/Alle Rechte vorbehalten K.G.Saur Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich 1992 A Reed Reference Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America Printed/Bound by Edwards Brothers Incorporated, Ann Arbor ISBN 3-598-41475-7 (vol. 4/part 2) ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (series)

Contents Series Preface Introduction

ix xi Part 1

American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815 RUTH H. BLOCH

3

To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence JEANNE BOYDSTON

29

The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860 BARBARA WELTER

48

Sentimental Womanhood and Domestic Education, 1830-1870 PHILLIDA BUNKLE

72

Women Shoeworkers and Domestic Ideology: Rural Outwork in Early Nineteenth-Century Essex County MARY H. BLEWETT

90

The Domestic Balance of Power: Relations Between Mistress and Maid in Nineteenth-Century New England CAROL LASSER

116

Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks JAMES OLIVER HORTON

134

Women's Perspective on the Patriarchy in the 1850s ANNE FIROR SCOTT

160

Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History LINDA K. KERBER

173

Household Values, Women's Work, and Economic Growth, 1800-1930 W.ELLIOT BROWNLEE

204

American Women and Domestic Consumption, 1800-1920: Four Interpretive Themes JEAN GORDON and JAN McARTHUR

215

Women as Woikers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West ELIZABETH JAMESON

244

Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market JOAN M. JENSEN

264

"The Sphinx in the Household": A New Look at the History of Household Workers BETTINA BERCH

291

Part 2 The Black Washerwoman in Southern Tradition HEATHER BIOLA

307

From Frontier Activism to Neo-Victorian Domesticity: Mormon Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries LAWRENCE FOSTER

317

Technology and Women's Work: The Lives of Working Class Women in Pittsburgh, 1870-1900 SUSAN J. KLEINBERG

336

Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915 LIZABETH A. COHEN

351

The "Industrial Revolution" in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century RUTH SCHWARTZ COWAN

375

The Manufacture of Housework BARBARA EHRENREICH and DEIRDRE ENGLISH

398

Time Spent in Housework JOANN VANEK

433

Experts and Servants: The National Council on Household Employment and the Decline of Domestic Service in the Twentieth Century FA YE E. DUDDEN 443 The Dialectics of Wage Work: Japanese-American Women and Domestic Service, 1905-1940 EVELYN NAKANO GLENN

464

Regulating Industrial Homework: The Triumph of "Sacred Motherhood" EILEEN BORIS 504 Chicanas Modernize Domestic Service MARY ROMERO

523

Copyright Information

539

Index

543

Series Preface In the space of one generation, women's history has become the fastest-growing area of scholarship in U.S. history. Since the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, insistent questions about the historical meanings of "woman's place" have sowed and reaped a garden of scholarship. Where scholarly works used to be bare of mention of women, academic enterprise has now produced a vigorous growth of books and articles, bringing to light diverse women of every region, race, class and age. This research is marked by a renovating intent that refuses to accept as "human" history a history of men. Interest is lively and debate is stimulating and sought after: attendance at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women rivals the size of the annual convention of the American Historical Association. While books in women's history are daily increasing in numbers and strength, as in any fast-developing field the scholarly literature in the form of articles is most expansive and up-to-the-minute. All the history journals now publish articles on women's work, domestic settings, family relations, household matters, female politics and organizations and so forth, and new journals have sprung into being to concentrate on such topics. Women's historians publish in numerous regional and thematic history journals as well as in feminist outlets and in journals of other social science disciplines. This series brings together a collection of outstanding articles from the field, almost all written in the past twenty years and more than half published during the 1980s. It brings together, in volumes organized by topic, essays otherwise widely dispersed. These volumes reprint only articles that originally appeared in journals, not chapters of books; review articles are not included. Articles have been chosen for overall quality and for range. Each one was chosen for one or more of the following reasons: because it is the standard authority on its subject matter; represents an important statement on a topic by a recognized scholar; presages an important book to come; provides a first look at new evidence or new methods; or opens an untapped area or new controversy. Older articles have been reprinted if their data or interpretation have not been surpassed or if they marked an important stage in the historiography, even if since superseded. The historical coverage of the series extends from the Revolutionary era to the 1960s. The articles themselves are dated from the 1940s through 1988. Volumes are organized by topic rather than time period. Within each volume, the ix

χ

SERIES PREFACE

articles are ordered chronologically (with respect to substance), so that the whole can be read as an historical overview. The only exception to this ordering principle is volume 1, on Theory and Method, in which the contents are arranged in order of publication. Within each volume there is an attempt to include articles on as diverse kinds of women as possible. None of the volume topics is regionally or racially defined; rather, all volumes are topically designed so as to afford views of women's work, family lives, and public activities which cut across races and regions. Any volume in the series stands on its own, supplying as full a treatment of a designated subject matter as the scholarly literature will provide. Several groupings of volumes also make sense; that is, volumes 2 through 5 all center around domestic and family matters; volumes 5 through 9 consider other varieties of women's work; volumes 9 through 11 concern uses and abuses of women's bodies; volumes 12 through 14 look at major aspects of socialization; and volumes 15 through 20 include organizational and political efforts of many sorts. As a whole, the series displays in all its range the vitality of the field of women's history. Aside from imbuing U.S. history with new vision, scholarship in this area has informed, and should continue to inform, current public debate on issues from parental leave to the nuclear freeze. By bringing historical articles together under topical headings, these volumes both represent accurately the shape of historical controversy (or consensus) on given issues and make historians' findings most conveniently available for current reference.

Introduction Since Barbara Welter found and described, in 1966, a "cult of true womanhood" in popular prescriptive literature of the early nineteenth-century United States, probably the most-sounded theme in women's history has concerned the definition of "true womanhood," and its accompanying ideal of "domesticity." The conflict between ideology and actuality in women's domestic lives, the differing relations of women of different classes and statuses to the ideal of domesticity, and regional and ethnic adaptations or rejections of "true womanhood" have been the subject of historians' inquiries in the last two decades. The articles in this volume develop these themes, treating not only the dominant ideology which linked respectable femininity to domestic occupations but also exploring the content of domestic labor and domestic production, for both the mistress and the female servant of a household. To all appearances the mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of a peculiarly American religion whose goddess was the wife and mother at her household hearth. In ladies' magazines, novels, sermons, and manuals on marriage and childrearing--even in newspaper chatter-a stereotype of feminine goodness, mercy, and service through domestic ministrations was widely proposed to the reading public. Although significant eighteenth-century writers in England and Europe had proposed models of decorous and appropriate womanhood-Rousseau's Sophie, in his book of education, Emile, was only one of the famous~in the nineteenth century the ideology of female domesticity was much more wide-ranging and influential. Transportation and communication advances as well as population migration westward meant that an ideal propagated in eastern cities carried its influence to rural towns and pioneer settlements. The domestic ideal of womanhood had such wide effect because it concerned not only feminine characteristics but also the nature and functions of family life. It promised that the virtuous wife and mother, by behaving appropriately in her "domestic sphere," by securing harmony in the home, by providing for her husband's comfort and her children's morality and good character, could assure social order. Under woman's reigning presence, the domestic realm appeared to be the source of personal virtue and social adjustment, the preserve of Christian morality. Less and less the engine of economic production or community formation outside, the home was more xi

xii

INTRODUCTION

assiduously celebrated for emotional and moral accomplishments centering on the family members within. For many women-including opinion-makers such as Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the magazine Godey's Ladies Book, or Catharine Beecher, author of The American Woman's Home and other popular treatises-this restructured understanding of the family supplied a positive concept of womanhood and a means of elaborating the responsibilities to society that women could and should carry out without departing from (indeed by fully understanding) "woman's sphere." In their view, the most important contribution women could possibly make to society-a contribution essential and irreplaceable-lay in Christian nurture of their husbands and children. The garment of true womanhood and domesticity covered the shape of woman's work as much as woman's character. Despite the way that the ideology of domesticity made women's operations in the home a matter of presence, love, and being, the work involved in a nineteenth-century household was continuous and demanding. Contrasting men's sphere of "work" to women's sphere of "home," the ideology glossed over how much work was done at home. True, urban households never saw the growing of foodstuffs (except small kitchen gardens), or butchering or dairying, and soap, candles, rugs and the material for clothing were no longer made at home. But women's work even in the urban household still included sewing, knitting and mending most of the family's clothing, all the cleaning tasks (including the arduous family wash), and provision of three meals a day. And-perhaps more important~the majority of households in the U.S. were not urban until after 1920. Although the preeminent public media speaking of woman's place emanated from cities, most women lived on frontiers, farms or rural towns, where growing food, milking cows, collecting eggs, and bringing water and firewood into the house were parts of daily tasks. Indoor running water was not a regular feature of the nineteenthcentury household until the latter part of the century, and even then, only for the more prosperous. Cooking on a woodbuming or coal stove was hardly less timeconsuming, though perhaps somewhat less dangerous, than cooking on an open hearth. At the same time the growing commercial and industrial prosperity of the urban parts of the U.S. dictated higher standards of consumption and display, so that meals became more varied and elaborate, and items of household decoration more numerous, requiring more maintenance, among those who could afford them. In prosperous households, the lady of the house did not do all the domestic work requisite to sustaining gentility: her servant or servants did, under her watchful supervision. Throughout the nineteenth century domestic service remained the single largest occupational category for women: in the latter part of the century, when the possibility of factory employment enlarged, still half of all employed women were domestic servants. The work necessary to households-

INTRODUCTION

xiii

cleaning, cooking, mending-was so far identified with women that a nineteenthcentury person had only to say a girl or woman was wanted to make it clear what kind of job was being offered.' By the same token, immigrants to America-if female-were assumed to be suitable to be hired into domestic service, although in practice the differences in outlook between them and their female employers occasioned much conflict between them. For generations of female immigrants, domestic service acted as a form of forced socialization into American ways of life. As soon as other employment opportunities presented themselves, girls and women in the labor force put domestic service at the bottom of their lists of choice. By the twentieth century, white women were much more likely to be found in factory and clerical work than domestic service but black women, rural migrants or urban residents, were still kept out of alternatives to laundry and domestic work by employers' and workers' prejudice. As these articles show, the investigation of women's work in the household is as much a look at employer-employee relations between mistress and maid as it is a study of some family members serving others, and as much a study of work for wages as it is of unpaid work.

Notes 1. See Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press,

1983).

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

307

The Black Washerwoman in Southern Tradition

by Heather Biola Georgia State University

White Americans have many different stereotypes of the Negro woman. The lost comfortable one is that of the great black mammy who represents an earthmother figure tending to all her little chillun—black and white alike. A more unsettling but equally typical image is that of the blues singer belting out the frustration of a downtrodden race and echoing the sorrows of all humanity. Popular novelists, vaudeville, and Hollywood have helped to shape these stereotypes and make them seem real, but one must look more carefully into the daily lives of black women to understand who they are when all the false images have been washed away. One folk figure, who has contributed quietly and constantly to the American way of life, is the black laundress. In spite of the fact that whites have often claimed that blacks have a strong odor and are unclean, a great deal of cleaning and washing has been done by black women since the first slaves came to this country over three hundred years ago. This study will seek to find the truest images of the black washerwomen by analyzing historical ideals, literary characterizations, and folk traditions concerning laundry. The black laundress has always been a familiar folk figure in the South. She was first seen working outside, as in the picture used as the frontispiece of a collection of slave interviews entitled Slavery Time When I Was Chillun Down on Master's Plantation. There she stands rubbing out clothes in a wooden tub, and a young slave girl is stirring the boiling laundry in a black iron pot over an open fire. Much has changed since those days, but the black laundress has continued to do her work under many different conditions. The slaves who were allowed to leave the fields to come work in the big plantation houses had a better life than the field hands. Seamstresses, cooks and laundresses had skills that made them valuable and gave them prestige in the hierarchy of plantation life.* White owners often treated these slaves almost like members of their own families, calling them aunt or auntie as a term of endearment. Louise Pyrnelle portrayed the warm family spirit that developed within such a family group in her book, Diddie, Damps and Tot/ or Plantation Child-life. In the household she describes, there is an old laundress named Aunt Edy, who is never too busy to stop her work and play with the children. ^ In this idealized account of plantation living, everything seems comfortable and orderly; there is no hint of racial resentment within the warm family atmosphere. Perhaps a more realistic picture of the life of black domestic slaves in to be found in the story of Mammy Lou written by Harriet G. Castlen. As u child Hammy Lou had been taken from her parents in Africa and brought to Savannah. When she was in her early teens her first owner sent a "nigger buck" to her cabin to impregnate her, but she fought him off and won for herself the reputation of being difficult to handle because of her moral convictions. Finally, she was bought by a young master who respected her and allowed her to marry and raise her own family, sharing experiences with this white master's family. She described wash day as follows: "Dey heated water and biled de clothes in a big black iron pot, settin' out in de yard."3 Manny Lou'a life as a domestic servant was clearly much more wholesome and happy than her life as a field hand. On most plantations the domestic slaves were encouraged to develop good hygienic habits, while the vast majority of field hands were kept much like animals in small cabins where they had little opportunity to clean themselves

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

or their clothes. On some plantations these field hands were only allowed to wash on Saturday evenings.4 This weekly ritual later became the time for maids and other working women to clean up their own things> the English custom of washing on Monday was a luxury black women rarely enjoyed in their own homes. With the terrible poverty experienced by many blacks after freedom came, hygiene continued to be a problem. The notion that their black skin was a sign of their uncleanliness was not only held by white people, but it pervaded the black man's psychic image of himself. According to an old Negro creation myth, God began His creation with black men. These original colored people discovered a pool of water with the power to wash away the dark color of their skins. Those who washed themselves first came out pure white, but as the water supply dwindled, the skin color of the succeeding groups of people got darker and darker until the last ones who reached the pool were only able to dip in their palms and the soles of their feet.® The idea that all people were created black made it easier for blacks to tolerate their experience in white America, but the fact that this myth expresses the idea that the blackness could be washed off indicates that there was a feeling among black people that their skin was not clean. The well-known black author and scholar, H.E.B. DuBois, wrote about the dilemna of a black man in white culture. He used the word hleach as a metaphor for the sort of change a Negro would have to moke in himself to feel that he could be completely accepted in white society: The history of the American Negro is the history of strife— this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.6 Here the idea of the Negro bleaching himself means a loss of a sense of his own history and all that makes him different from other Americans. DeBois had a keen sense of the duality of his own experience and he longed for unity—not so much integration with the whites as a sense of integrity for blacks. Perhaps this sort of bleaching—this loss of distinguishing characteristics—is what being boiled in the melting pot does to all Americans. DuBois was right to dread the loss of the sense of history. Booker T. Washington did not share the philosophical doubts of his contemporary, W. Ε. B. DuBois. Born a slave, Washington knew what it was to sleep on a pile of filthy rags on a dirt floor and to wear a rough, flax shirt. But he struggled to get an education himself; he worked to build Tuskegee Institute, and he traveled widely to preach the message that Negroes could achieve their own personal goals if they would follow the same work ethic that energized most white Americans at the turn of the century. Washington's simplistic optimism made him a symbol of hope for his race, and his support of segregation v*>n him the admiration of the white race. His idea was that the five races should be separate but equal like the five fingers of the hand. He exhorted his people to put down their buckets where they were, and they would find the water they needed for life. Washington encouraged his students to practice better hygiene because he believed it was an important part of their upward progress. He noted that the toothbrush had the effect of helping students reach a higher degree of civilization and that cleanliness of the body was an essential part of his education.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

309

He also worked very hard to see to it that Tuskegee could provide two sheets for each student so that they could experience the novelty of sleeping between two clean sheets. All this seems so rudimentary now; but, for a man who had suffered the indignities of slavery, it was a step toward equality. Washington had a gift for recognizing and solving practical problems. He could see that the great masses of Negroes in the South needed very basic lessons about how to live and work in the white man's world. While DeBois delved deeply into the psychological problems of the Negro, Washington tried to provide solutions for obvious practical problems. He had no patience with educators who gave students unrealistic hopes and dreams; he wanted his students to be able to care for themselves. On the training of laundresses Washington wrote: In Washington I saw girls whose mothers were earning their living by laundrying. These girl9 were taught by their mothers, in rather a crude way it is true, the industry of laundry. Later, these girls entered the public schools and remained there perhaps six or eight years. When the public-school course was finally finished, they wanted more costly dresses, more costly hats and shoes. In a word, while their wants had been increased, their ability to supply their wants had not been increased in the same degree. On the other hand, their six or eight years of book education had weaned them away from the occupation of their mothers. The result of this was in too many cases that the girls went to the bad. I often thought how much wiser it would have been to give these girls the same amount of mental training—and I favour any kind of training whether in the languages or mathematics, that gives strength and culture to the m i n d — b u t at the same time to give them the most thorough training in the latest and best methods of laundry and other kindred occupations.® This debate over the relative value of a classical over a technical education is one of the perennial issues of American public education. Nevertheless, it is curious to note that Washington singled out the laundress as one whose folk techniques could be handed down from mother to daughter. He obviously recognized the fact that the trade was one that could support a woman and perhaps her family, and he saw the value in educating young black women to become laundresses who could use the best methods. The contrast between DeBois and Washington reflects two different types of leadership that the black race had during the century after slavery. One group was more interested in bringing about psychological liberation, and the other was more concerned about helping improve the daily lives of black people. DuBois has been more popular with modern liberal thinkers; but, in his time, Washington made a real contribution to the advancement of his race. The kind of regular washing that Washington advocated may in effect have been part of the "bleaching" process that DuBois feared, but it was necessary that some of these changes should take place before blacks could deal with the rigidity of the white social order. In spite of Washington's efforts to educate Negroes to practice better hygiene, whites continued to believe that black people were unclean well into the 1950s. A good account of the types of hardships encountered by Negroes in Georgia is the book Willie Mae by Elizabeth Kytle. Willie Mae, who was born at Carrolton, Georgia, moved to Atlanta after her mother died. Her first paying job was in a commercial laundry where she was known as "the baby" because she was so young. After the grotesque death of her father in a train accident, Willie Mae tried to care for her younger sisters. She became a maid for several white families, and her life was full of hard work and hard times. During her years of working for white people she noticed that they did not want to be near her and that they did not allow her to sit on their toilet seats for fear that she might be unclean. The irony of Willie Mae's situation

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

is that she was the agent of cleanliness for the whites, but she was not clean enough to touch them or the things that touched their nether parts.® The black servants in America often experienced this curious sort of social class distinction) they could touch the food and clothing of the white class, but they could not touch or be touched by the white people themselves. This estrangement which often existed between servants and their employers in urban settings is mentioned in the poetry of Langston Hughes. He paints portraits of the great frustration of young black girls who work constantly trying to please a white mistress who is never quite satisfied. In "Madam and Her Madam" a maid laments: Wash, iron, and scrub Walk the dog around It was too much Nearly broke me down^ Here the menial tasks that maids must do build one on another to create the sense of hopelessness this young woman feels. During the century after slavery, many blacks went to the city in hope of finding a better way of life; instead they found that they were crowded into dirty ghettos where they were lucky to find any sort of work. Nevertheless, many of them continued to have a strong Christian faith, and they practiced the regular ritual of cleaning and washing on Saturday to prepare for Sunday. In the poem "Passing" Hughes depicts the special importance of cleaning up for Sunday: On sunny Sunday afternoons when the kids look all new and far too clean to stay that way, and Harlem has its w«shed-and-ironed-and-cleanedbost out 11 In the early twentieth century this cleanliness-next-to-Godliness emphasis was characteristic of social attitudes in America, but it seemed particularly important to black Americans. The habit of cleaning and preparing for Sunday was a ritual that white owners had encouraged during the slave period, and black working women continued to practice it when they moved to the city. Washing and cleaning seemed to be part of the religious life of the times. In his first novel. Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes created one of the most appealing characterizations of a Christian washerwoman to be found in literature. In this novel. Hager Williams does laundry in her own yard for a different white family each day. Like the favorite Negroes in Diddie, Dumps, and Tot, she has the endearing title Aunt Hager, and she is much beloved by both white and black people. Like William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, Aunt Hager is very old, and she gives security to two younger generations. Both Dilsey and Aunt Hager have the blessing of constant hope that grows out of their strong Christian faith. When younger women seem to be weak and unable to meet challenges of daily life, Dilsey and Aunt Hager have the courage to do what needs to be done to keep getting the meals on the table and to tend the snail children. Dilsey is, of course, a maid in the Compson home and she takes care of the family for the ailing Mrs. Compson, who symbolizes the fading glory of Southern Womanhood. On the other hand. Aunt Hager stays in her own home and supports her children and grandchildren by taking in laundry. She is seen in juxtaposition with her own daughter, who wants a better way of life, but is not always able to support her dreams. Her situation is much like the one described by Booker T. Washington; she knows what she wants, but she does not have the skills to earn the money that she needs. Her son Sandy, like Hughes himself, lives in a small town with his grandmother until his mother takes him to the

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city to go to high school. Although the novel is somewhat autobiographical, the character of Aunt Hager is not a true representation of Hughes' own grandaother. Mary Sajnpson Petterson, Hughes' maternal grandmother, kept him as a boy, but she proudly avoided ever working in other peoples' kitchens or taking in laundry.*2 This grandmother was a character so remarkable that she would not have been believable in a novel. Her own ancestry included a Cherokee Indian and a French trader as well as Negro slaves. She went to college in Oberlin, Ohio and her husband died in one of John Brown's r a i d s . T h e influence of this grandmother and the divorce of his parents created considerable conflict within the young Langston Hughes. His father was part Jewish and part Negro; he always encouraged the poet to leave the United States and move to South America where he would not have to live like a second class citizen, but Hughes loved his homeland and always felt the duality that W.E.B. DuBois described as "his double self." Hughes did not want to bleach away his memories of the black people he loved in America. Aunt Hager seems to be the embodiment of the good-hearted black Americans who did great amounts of menial work without feeling sorry for themselves. Although the character of Aunt Itaqer is somewhat fashioned after Hughes' grandmother, his knowledge of washing may have come from the man who took him in after her death. In 1914 the twelve-year-old Hughes went to live with Uncle Reed, who stayed home and washed his overalls in a great iron pot in the yard while his wife went to church on Sundays. The novelist put the ^jshing and church-going habits together and created his lovable Aunt Hager. In Not Without Laughter, Aunt Hager's washing equipment becomes the symbol of her endless work. The novel begins just after an earthquake (which had actually occurred at Hughes' grandmother's home), and Aunt Hager thanks the Lord that she only lost a chimney and two washtubs from the yard. Hager would do as much as a dozen washings a week and would receive about seventy-five cents from each family. Her methods included soaking, boiling, beating, rubbing on the board, hanging on the line, and ironing the clothes. Note the vivid contrast in the following description: "The suds rose foamy white about the black arms as the clothes plushed up and down on the zinc washboard. 'Lawd deliver me from a lazy darkyI'"15 Although Not Without Laughter fails to be a great novel, it is at least a great affirmation of the unselfconscious goodness of women like Aunt Hager. She is such a powerful character that critic Donald Dickinson has suggested that the novel might have been better if the action had centered around her rather than her grandson, S a n d y . I n d e e d she does seem to be the center of the turning world where Sandy's family lives, and her willingness to do her work never seems to end. Her faith in God and her love for mankind—black and white alike—make her washing a symbol of the constant renewal of life and hope. In juxtaposition with the rejuvenating power of Hughes' Aunt Hager, the black washerwomen in the works of Richard Wright are characters who work to purge rather than renew life. There may be some credence to Sylvia H. Keady's argument that Wright had a sexist bias and that his women characters are often stereotyped.*7 Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Wright's novel Native Son,is awakened in the opening scene by his impatient mother who tells him to turn off the alarm clock. She then calls to her younger son, "Buddy, get up from there I I got a big washing on my hands today and I want you all out of here." She makes it her business to purify and get rid of things—even her own children must get out of the way when she has washing to do. Diane Long Hoeveler's article on Wright's oedipal dilemna offers a reasonable psychological explanation for his harsh attitudes toward women characters and mothers in particular.*9 Bigger's mother is certainly the sort of woman

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who castrates her son by constantly disapproving of him. After he has killed a large rat lurking in the room where the family lives, she says, "He would not have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you. Bigger' s turbulent hone life seems to be constantly stirred by the chiding of this laundress. Later, when he kills Mary Dalton and Bessie, the acts of nurder become the expression of his desire to kill his mother. Finally, the police wash him down off a water tank with a powerful hose from the fire department and society is purged of Bigger by great blasts of water. In the short story "Bright and Morning Star," Wright creates another intensely violent situation, and the protagonist is a washerwoman named An Sue. She is the mother of two sons who belong to the Cosmunist party. Her elder son, Sug, has already been incarcerated because of his affiliation with the party, and the sheriff is after her younger son to force hi® to reveal the names of the local party members. The story opens as An Sue consnences to do the ironinq: She glanced at a pile of damp clothes in a zinc tub. Waal, Ah bettah get ta work. She turned, lifted a smoothing iron with a thick pad of cloth, touched a spit-wet finger to it with a quick, jerking motion: sjniiiCzl Yeah, its hotl Stooping, she took a blue work shirt from the tub and shook it out. With a deft twist of her shoulders she caught the iron in her right hand; the fingers of her left hand took a piece of wax from a tin box and a frying sizzle came as she smeared the bottom. She was thinking of nothing now; her hands followed a life-long ritual of toil. Spreading a sleeve, she was deep in the midst of her work when a song rose up out of the far off days of her childhood and broke through half-parted lips: Hes the Lily of the Valley, the Bright η Mawnin Star Hes the Fairest of Ten Thousand t ma soul. . . Here Wright has created a character who has much in consnon with Hughes' Aunt Hager. She loves her sons and has done washing all her life to earn her living for her family. She has become strong carrying as much as a hundred pounds of laundry across the fields on her head, but these baskets did not seem heavy to her while her sons were both with her. Her work has become more arduous now that she has lost one of her boys to the white man's law and she fears that she will lose the other one soon. In her younger days, she believed in Christ; but when her sons became Communists, her allegiance shifted from the church to the party. Still, like Aunt Hager, she struggled to keep hope alive and was a source of comfort to her black and white friends. Nevertheless, she never felt that she could trust most white people. A few white friends call her An Sue with sincere affection, but the Sheriff and his men mock her with the name "Anty." The old family feeling that once existed between masters and their domestic slaves has become a joke in the turbulent years of racial strife. Throughout the first third of the story. An Sue is pictured with her iron in hand doing her rhythmic work by habit. When her son finally comes home that rainy night, she feeds him and carefully finishes the ironing before she tells him that the sheriff is trying to track him down and sabotage the party meeting scheduled for the next day. Finally, after she has been beaten and then beguiled into revealing the names of the party members to a white informer who poses as a friend. An Sue carries her son's gun in a winding sheet to the place where her son is being interrogated. During the course of the action she must watch her son's legs be broken and see the sheriff burst his eardrums, but all her son's suffering does not dissuade her from her mission. Like Christ, her son's body must be broken to save others. When An Sue shoots the white informer, she eliminates the last person who might reveal the names of party members

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to the sheriff. She will not save her son's life because she wants to correct her own mistake—telling the names. She prefers death with purification to life with failure. The hand that has held an iron for so long must ultimately wield a gun. In order to understand some of the biographical reasons for the vast difference in the ways Langston Hughes and Richard Wright portray the washermen, it becomes necessary to study the influence of their mothers and grandmothers. Hughes' mother was a warin person and life flowed in his grandmother like the rivers of many civilizations. On the other hand, Wright's mother once beat him so bitterly that he lay in bed for days with a fever. 22 His maternal grandmother was a light-skinned, moralistic woman who had more Irish and Scottish blood than that of African ancestors. She dominated her family and gave her children strong, driving ambitions. Wright's mother and grandmother comnanded his respect, but his memories of them and their laundry practices are mingled with fear and unhappiness. In his autobiographical novel. Black Boy, Wright preserved an image of two women (his mother and grandmother) chiding each other as they boiled their laundry in the courtyard. The children were hungry, and they were forbidden to come near the wood fire where the women worked like witches over their black iron p o t s . I n d e e d the laundress-mother image in the works of Richard Wright takes on the proportions of a priestess of purgation. The sinister qualities of Wright's washerwomen are not unlike the image of the wicked, old folk character known as Soap Sally. White children in the South were told to be good or Soap Sally would get them and boil them with her lard and lye to make them into soap. John Burrison, folklore professor at Georgia State University, pointed out that Soap Sally was referred to much as the Boogieman was referred to in white folk tradition of G e o r g i a . A s true as it may be that some whites loved their Negro laundresses, there were also many who had mixed feelings about these women who did so much hot work to make clothes cleaner. In order to confirm the authenticity of the literary and folkloric references to black washerwomen, I interviewed Ella Mae Hendrix, who works as a maid in Atlanta and lives in a housing project near Atlanta University. Ella was raised by her mother in an old shotgun house in the section of Atlanta known as Lighting. Her mother worked five days a week for a white family that had the latest laundry equipment of the 1940s and 1950s, but at her own home on Saturdays, Ella's mother washed in the yard the oldfashioned way. Ella vividly describes this laundry operation: Well, Mother used to have us to make a fire, around dis black iron pot, and den she'd take de water after she'd be done makin de soap and pour it over in dere. And den she'd take all de sheets and all de white clothes and put 'em over in de pot and let 'em come to de bo'1, she'd take a big old long stick and pull 'em out and put 'em over in de tub and rench 'em in about three or four waters, and in de last water she would have dis little box of stuff you'd call bluin and you'd shake it over in dere, and den we'd hand de clothes out on de line after we'd get through. 2 ® After this process of boiling, rinsing, bluing and hanging the clothes on the line, the work was still not complete. Ella also describes the way her mother used to heat her old smoothing irons on the stove and iron clothes on a board propped up between the table and the back of a chair. Ella's mother also made

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her own soap by boiling "Red Devil" lye with her leftover grease. As she did her laundry in the yard, Ella*s mother would often sing, "I'm on the battlefield; I'm on the battlefield for my Lord." Like Hughes' Aunt Hager, Ella's mother did her work with Christian dedication to her rituals of renewal. Ella has seen many changes in the laundry process. She remembers when her mother got their first wringer washing machine, and she owns an automatic washer of her own now. Ella is glad polyester was invented to save her from having to do the ironing in the homes where she works. The only trick is that she has to "catch" the shirts out of the dryer before they wrinkle. At her own home, Ella still hangs her sheets on the line because she likes to sleep with the smell of sun in her sheets. Much has changed since slavery time, but black women can still be found doing their laundry outside. During a trip through the South in the spring of 1978, reporter Chet Fuller photographed Nadine Rouse pumping water and doing her washing in an old wringer washer in the yard near her home in North Carolina.^ Indeed, the sight of a black woman doing the laundry is so faBiliar that many advertisers ask Negroes to endorse their detergents and laundry appliances. One example of this is the 1977 White-Westinghouse advertisement for a trim washer and dryer set that can be stacked up to hide in the closet. There stands Pearl Bailey preparing a table with a "spread" for six guests in one picture and folding her fluffy towels on the same table in the next picture. ° The implications are that Pearl knows about good washing nachines because she is black, and she has no better place in the house to serve guests than her laundry room. No doubt about it, America expects black women to get the washing done. However, the black washerwomen cannot be neatly stereotyped as a warm black maimy or an evil Soap Sally. Hughes' character, Aunt Hager, did her work with her children and grandchildren nearby, and Bigger Thorns' mother, like Wright's own mother and grandmother, wanted the children out of the way. The one characteristic that energized Aunt Hager, An Sue, and hundreds of women like them is the willingness to do what needs to be done regardless of the working conditions. In spite of great hardship, these women have been able to survive and raise their children because they have done the work that was at hand. The washerwoman's regular ritual of purification and renewal is an enduring part of the American way of life. Notes

1 Bryan Fulks, BlacJc Struggle: A History of the Negro in America (New York: Dell, 1969), p. 69.

^Louise Pyrnelle, Diddie, Dumps and Tot; or Plantation Child Life (New York: Harper, 1Θ82), p. 13. 3 Harriet Gift Castlen, That Was a Time (New York: 1937), p. 23.

Dutton & Co. Inc.,

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4 Ronald Killion, Slavery Time When I Was Chillun Down on Hasters Plantation: Interviews with Georgia Slaves (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1973), p. 37_ Lawrence w. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 85. 6

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics (New Avon 1965), p. 215.

York:

7 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon, 1965), p. 123.

B

Ibid., p. 77.

9 Elizabeth Kytle, Willie Mae (New York: Knopf, 1959), pp. 3-4. 10 Langston Hughes, Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 13.

11

Ibid., p. 258.

12 Charlemae H. Rollins, Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), p. 27.

^Langston Hughes, The Big Sea in the Langston Hughes Header (New York: Braziller, 1958), p. 323. 14 Rollins, p. 29. 15

Langston Hughes, Kot Without Laughter (New York: Knopf, 1930), p. 64.

16 Donald Dickinson, A Bio-bibliography of Langston Hughes 1902-1967 (New York: Archon, 1967), p. 54. 17 Sylvia H. Keady, "Richard Wright's Women Characters and Inequality, Black American Literature Forum, 10 (Winter 1976), 124. 18 Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; rpt. New York:

Harper & Row, 1966),

p. 7. 19 Diane Long Hoeveler, Oedipus Agonistes: Mothers and Sons in Richard Wright's Fiction," Black American Literature Forum, 12 (Summer 1978), 65.

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20

Wright, Native Son, p. 12.

21 Richard Wright, "Bright and Morning Star," in Uncle Tom's Children (1936; rpt. New York: Harper 6 Row, 1940), p. 182. 22

Michel Fahre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (New York: Morrow, 1973), p. 10. 23 Ibid. p. 3. 24 Ibid. p. 8. " John Burrison, interviewed at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, July 1978. 26

Ella Mae Hendrix, interviewed in Atlanta, Georgia, April 1978.

27 Chet Puller, "A Black Man's Diary, The Atlanta Journal, The Atlanta Constitution, 27 August 1978, Sec. A, p. 2, Cols. 2-3. 28

National Geographic, 151 (March 1977), 1.

Author's note: I wish to dedicate this article to the memory of Frances Bailey Wilson who taught me how to avoid mashing my fingers between the white roller and the black roller of an old wringer washer in the 1950s.

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From Frontier Activism to Neo-Victorian Domesticity: Mormon Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

By Lawrence Foster

The role of women in Mormonism has always been a paradoxical one, the subject of intense interest and controversy both in the larger culture and within Mormon society itself. During the last half of the nineteenth century, when polygamy became an integral part of Mormon life in the Intermountain West, women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were viewed by the outer world, as a benighted and oppressed class, the victims of a system of institutionalized lust perpetrated by a wicked and unscrupulous male Mormon priesthood. In fact, however, despite this negative public image, Mormon women in frontier Utah enjoyed a remarkable degree of real power, influence, and independence. Utah established one of thefirstcoeducational colleges in the country in 1850; Mormon women voted in Utah earlier than women in any other state or territory in the United States, including Wyoming; women of the Mormon church were active in the professions, including medicine and teaching; and leading Mormon women established a distinguished womenmanaged, -edited, and -written newspaper of their own, the Woman's Exponent, which ranged far and wide over issues of concern to women of the period. Nineteenth-century women's rights and suffrage advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke to large and enthusiastic Mormon audiences, audiences whose participation in such meetings was accepted if not actively encouraged by Lawrence Foster is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Church History in San Francisco, California. 30 December 1978.

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church authorities. Through their powerful women's organization, the Relief Society, and through numerous other ventures, Mormon women became an essential part of the culture and economy of frontier Utah. They also developed significant contacts with women's activities of the larger society. Nearly a hundred years later in the later half of the twentieth century, the image and the reality of life for women in Mormonism has become roughly reversed from that which prevailed in the nineteenth century. Today the popular image of Mormon women is an essentially favorable one, influenced by the church's emphasis on close-knit, well-run families and idealizing the important role that women play in Mormon family-oriented culture: In fact, however, despite this basically positive image, the activities and range of personal options for women in the Mormon church may never have been so narrowly circumscribed as in the present. During the past twenty years. Mormon women have lost control over the financing of their women's organization, the Relief Society; they have lost their RelieJ Society Magazine, which provided a forum for women's concerns and self-expression; and they have faced what appears to be an almost monolithic church front that encourages them to stay out of public life and the job market, stressing instead the idea that their primary function and only ultimate importance in life comes from their role as wives and mothers. Far from being in the forefront of woman's rights activities, the present-day Mormon church and its women have come out in vigorous and effective opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, organizing mass meetings to oppose its ratification and giving a cold shoulder to pro-ERA speakers such as Bella Abzug. One moderate, independently edited and produced Mormon women's journal, Exponent II, does judiciously attempt to raise some of the important women's issues which the current male hierarchy has largely ignored, but it falls far short of the vigorous advocacy of its model, the original Woman's Exponent, which reached out not simply to a small audience of intellectual women on the fringe of Mormonism but also to the mainstream of the church in every village and hamlet. Today, although Mormon women continue to play an essential role in the home and in grassroots church activities, their participation in the larger society is discouraged in many ways, both by direct exhortation and by subtle community sanctions against deviance from the church-approved ideal that women should try to become the perfect wife and mother in an almost neoVictorian sense. What accounts for this apparent shift from the late nineteenth-century Mormon emphasis on women's active participation in almost all aspects of society (except the formal governance of their church) to the present, more narrow stress on domesticity as almost the sole end of woman's life? Some have suggested that the shift is only illusory; the underlying Mormon stress on authority and obedience to the church, they say, has remained a constant despite shifts in the particular issues to which the church addresses itself. Brighai.. Young in the nineteenth century told women that the church needed them to gel out into the world and work to build up the kingdom, so they did; Joseph Fielding Smith in the twentieth century told women that the church needed them to stay home and eschew work outside that sphere, so th-.-y also tried to oblige. The basic Mormon stress on the importance of the family, this argument goes, has remained the same over time, with continuing emphasis on large

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families, opposition to birth control, and the conviction that, in the final analysis, women ideally should remain in the home whenever possible. Mormonism looks more conservative today only by comparison with the larger society which has undergone such fundamental transformations during the past century. Even though circumstances and specific policies to deal with those circumstances may have undergone some modifications, the Mormon church itself has remained eternally and immutably the same on first principles. This argument has much to recommend it, but it needs to be qualified if it is to help explain the profound changes that do appear to have occurred in the role of Mormon women during the past century. Even if such changes are only apparent, they deserve explanation and analysis. The gap between ideal and practice may well be a most revealing indicator of the underlying dynamics of a culture. Moreover, one must also remember that church policies and practices are not produced by the male hierarchy acting in isolation. Mormon women have never been simply faceless automatons or pretty marionettes operated by strings, but have had considerable influence on the policies which affect them. Finally, even if church policy, developed and controlled ultimately by men, has been the major factor leading to changes in the status of women in Mormonism, one still must ask why and to what extent the church has changed its policies. The Mormon church has never acted in a social and intellectual vacuum; it has always had to take into account both its own internal concerns and those of the larger society. Thus to understand the changing role of Mormon women, one must view their experiences within the total gestalt of Mormon culture and society within which they have lived. This article is a preliminary attempt to identify and open up some of the most important issues which must be addressed if one is to understand the varied experiences of Mormon women during the past century. It focuses, first, on women's status in late nineteenth-century Utah, particularly on the ways in which the frontier and polygamy may have contributed to women's independence. This nineteenth-century period is then contrasted with the present and with some of the factors leading to increasing restrictions on women's sphere of influence within Mormonism. Finally, some broader perspectives on present and future prospects for Mormon women are suggested. The changing role of Mormon women is clearly an unusually ambitious topic which can be sketched only in outline. The analysis presented here is limited by being based primarily on the lives and statements of public figures. More detailed quantitative and comparative analyses will be necessary before one can determine whether, in fact, the lives of average Mormon women actually have changed in the ways suggested here. Nevertheless, impressionistic studies of the articulate and outstanding may highlight important issues worthy of further investigation, opening up new perspectives on the problems and prospects for women within Mormonism. 1 'Among the important scholarly treatments of Mormon women's lives in the nineteenth century, see Leonard J. Arlington, "Blessed Damozels: Women in Mormon History," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 [Summet 1971): 22-31; Leonard J. Anington, "The Economic Role of Pioneer Mormon Women," Weilern Humanities Review 9 (Spring 1955): 145-64; Leonard J. Arlington and Jon Haupt, "Intolerable Zion: The Image of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century American Literature," Western Humanities Review 22 (Summer 1968): 243-60; Charles A. Cannon,

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T o understand llie role of Mormon women in ninelccnth-ccntury Utah, o n e musi first briefly attempt to understand something of the relationship between women and Mormonism as a whole. Mormonism is both a religion and a culture system. Seeing itself as a church not a sect, it attempts to encompass the whole of life. Although Mormonism appears quiniesseniially American in so many ways, it has, nevertheless, since its f o u n d i n g in 1830 set itself in radical opposition to the prevailing American religious and social pluralism. Latter-day Saints believe that they belong to the one true church, restored through the agency of their prophet-founder Joseph Smith and embodying a synthesis of all previously valid h u m a n truth. Facing highly disruptive religious and social conditions in his home in the "burned-over district" of central New York state, Smith sought to set u p a totally cohesive new order which in spirit had much in c o m m o n with the high medieval R o m a n Catholic synthesis. Selfish individual interests were always to be subordinated to the good of the community as a whole. Hierarchy and control were essential parts of the effort literally to realize the k i n g d o m of heaven on earth. 2 In few areas of life were M o r m o n concerns for social order and control more evident than in their efforts to revitalize the family. Faced with the marital and familial disorders of central New York, Smith dreamed of " t u r n i n g the hearts of the children to the fathers" prior to the coming of the millennium. As part of his attempt to establish cohesive Mormon community life in the 1830s and 1840s, Smith increasingly look over responsibility for overseeing the marriage a n d divorce practices of members of his church. Elsewhere a detailed discussion is " T h e Awesome Power of Sex: T h e Polemical Campaign against Mormon Polygamy." Pacific Historical Review 63 (February 1974): 61 -82; and Gail Farr Casterline," ' I n l h e T o i l s ' o r O n w a r d Cor /.ion': Images o( the Mormon Woman, 1852-1890" (M.A. thesis, Utah Slate University, 1974). Serious scholarship on the lite experiences of twentieth-century Mormon women is sparse. Claudia Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters: H omert in Early Utah (Cambridge, Mass.: Emmeline Press Limited, 1976). includes some essays which bear on the twentieth century as well. General studies such as James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story o) the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deserel Book, 1976) also suggest insights into the status of women within Mormonism. Marilyn YVarenski, Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978) presents a critical interpretation of the changing role of Mormon women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of particular value for future scholarship are the interviews with women conducted by the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. Utah, and the interviews conducted by Marilyn Warenski as part of the Status oi Mormon Women Project in conjunction with the Utah Slate Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah. A bibliographic study by Carol C. Madsen and David J. Whitlaker, "History's Sequel: A Source Essay on Women in Mormon History," appears in this issue of Journal of Mormon History 6 (1979). In preparing this paper, the assistance of many fine Mormon scholars has been of inestimable value. As a non-Mormon, I should note that the interpretations presented here are my own responsibility and do not necessarily represent those ol any other individuals who may have shared their concerns and reHections with me. 'For accounts suggesting some of the main themes of this early period, see especially T h o m a s F. O'Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University o( Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 2-75: Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900(Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 3-35; Mario S. De Pillis, " T h e Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (March 1966): 68-88; Marvin Hill. " T h e Shaping of the Mormon Mind in New England and New York." Brigham Young University Studies 9 (Spring 1969): 351-72; and Jan Shipps, " T h e Prophet Purzle: Suggestions Leading toward a More Comprehensive Interpretation of Joseph Smith," Journal of Mormon History 1 (1974): 4-20.

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provided of how this increasing autonomy of the Mormon group from the larger society and the intense identification with the Old Testament Hebrew patriarchs as role models helped make possible the introduction of a polygamous marriage system under Joseph Smith's guidance in the early 1840s.5 Here it is enough to note that polygamy was envisioned, in part at least, as a means of expanding kinship ties and social solidarity among Mormons. As just one example of how this could occur, by the time that one polygamous Mormon patriarch died, he was related by blood or marriage to over eight hundred people.* For a heavily persecuted group such as the Mormons, the possibility of such expanded kinship linkages could prove enormously appealing. According to the elaborate and internally consistent religious ideology developed by Smith, marriage and family ties (including polygamy), were the basis for all social order and development, not only in this life but also throughout eternity, which was envisioned essentially as this life writ large. 5 The Mormons viewed themselves as part of a literal New Israel, restoring the polygamous practices of the Hebrew patriarchs and dedicating themselves to the group with an almost tribal quality of total loyalty. T h e role of women within this developing family- and kinship-oriented Mormon culture underwent some expansion during the 1830s and 1840s, although that expansion was always less than, and subordinate to, the expansion in the role of men. For males, Mormonism took literally the concept of the "priesthood of all believers," setting u p a hierarchial structure in which all 'For the development of polygamy prior to the assassination o( Joseph Smith, see my Ph. D. dissertation, "Between T w o Worlds: The Origins of Shaker Celibacy. Oneida Community Complex Marriage, and Mormon Polygamy" (University of Chicago, 1976), pp. 189-288. T h e Mormon sections of this dissertation constitute the first detailed study by a non-Mormon of the origin and development of polygamy based on a full access to the relevant materials in the Library and Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. Danel W. Bachman. "A Study of the Mormon Practice of Plural Marriage before the Death of Joseph Smith" (M.A. thesis, Purdue University, 1975) provides a detailed analysis of the early development of polygamy from a Mormon perspective. These two studies, done independently and from different theoretical perspectives, are, nevertheless, essentially complementary in their overall conclusions. 'Benjamin F. Johnson, My Life's Review (Independence, Mo.: Zion's Printing and Publishing Co., 1947), p. 94. For another early form of kinship linkage, see Cordon Irving, " T h e Law of Adoption: One Phase of the Mormon Concept of Salvation, I8J0-1900," Brigham Young University Studies Μ (Spring 1974): 291-314. ' T h e revelation on plural and celestial marriage, dictated by Joseph Smith on 12 July 1843, was first printed in the Deseret News Extra (or 14 September 1852, and has subsequently been reprinted many times. It now comprises Section 132 of Joseph Smith, Jr., The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1971). For a secondary treatment of the intellectual context within which polygamy was introduced, see O'Dea, The Mormons, pp. 53-63. O n e branch of the Mormon church, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with headquarters in Independence, Mo., has denied Joseph Smith's responsibility (or the revelation o n plural marriage and the introduction of polygamy, but this position is historical ly untenable and has been decisively refuted in Charles £. Shook, The True Origins of Mormon Polygamy (Cincinnati: Standard Publishing Co., 1914). According to Utah Mormon belief, normal earthly marriage, marriage "for time," lasts only until death, when it is dissolved. However, Mormons believe that when properly sealed by the authority of the Mormon priesthood on earth, marriages will also continue after death "for eternity." Such marriages for eternity serve as the basis (or eternal progression and development in an afterlife that is conceived as essentially an extension of this life on a higher plane of matter. Since status in this life and in the afterlife is based on kinship ties, including numbers of children, polygamous Mormon inen who had large families were viewed in the nineteenth century as occupying a higher status both in this life and in the afterlife.

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worthy adult male members had some leadership or direct participatory role within the lay structure of governance of the church. Although women only participated in this structure of church governance indirectly through association with their husbands, they did gain new rights in related areas. In the 1830s and 1840s, women securcd the right to participate in the public meetings of the church, to vote on important proposals brought before the group, to conduct their own women's organization (albeit under the ultimate direction of the male priesthood), and to receive various spiritual gifts and be "ordained" to administer to the sick. Significantly, the greatest liberalism toward women surfaced between 1842 and 1844 during the height of Joseph Smith's efforts to introduce polygamy into the Mormon church. T h e temple ceremonies which Smith set u p in part to support and validate plural marriage stressed that a reciprocal relationship between men and women was necessary for salvation. No man or woman could ultimately reach the highest exaltation in the afterlife alone, without being sealed in a celestial marriage to a worthy spouse. By emphasizing that the family and related kinship ties were the key to all growth and development, not only in this life but also t h r o u g h o u t all eternity, Mormon ideology gave new status and dignity to women's role in the family. 6 How was the changing status of women within M o r m o n i s m related to the changing status of women in other religious organizations and in antebellum society as a whole? Religiously, early Mormonism fell midway between the most conservative confessional churches such as the Episcopalians, in which women were almost totally exculded from leadership, and the extreme wing of the revivalistic and sectarian movements such as the Shakers, which permitted a high degree of equality for women. If new elements such as polygamy and temple marriage, which were only beginning to be introduced by 1844, are were almost totally excluded from leadership, and the extreme wing of the those of many mainstream Protestant groups such^ as the Methodists and Baptists. Church women's organizations, benevolent societies, and educational efforts are found not only in Mormonism, but in many other groups as well.' Moreover, the idealization of women's role as wife a n d mother has m u c h in common with the "cult of true womanhood," the nascent Victorian concerns for home and family life." Nevertheless, the extraordinary fluidity of Mormon belief and practice immediately preceding Smith's assassination a n d the exodus to Utah makes any secure generalizations about women's status in early Ά fine study o( early M o r m o n altitudes toward w o m e n , on w h i c h this p a r a g r a p h is based, is Ileen Ann W a s p r , " T h e Status of W o m e n in the P h i l o s o p h y ol M o r m o n i s m Irom 1830 to 1845" (M.A. thesis, B r i g h a m Y o u n g University, 1942). 'Ibid., p p . 195-216. "A classic and highly critical account of these ideals is f o u n d in Barbara Welter, " T h e C u l l of T r u e W o m a n h o o d , 1820-1860." American Quarterly 18 ( S u m m e r 1966): 151-74. Kirk Jeffrey, " T h e Family as a U t o p i a n Retreat f r o m the City: T h e N i n e t e e n t h C e n t u r y C o n t r i b u t i o n . " in Sallie T e Seile, ed.. The Family, Communes, and Utopian Societies ( N e w York: H a r p e r a n d Row, 1972), p p . 21-39, draws some provocative parallels between Victorian family ideals a n d the a p p e a l of c o m m u n i t a r i a n ventures in the mid-nineteenth century. M o r e positive i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s of t h e ideal of domesticity are found in Daniel Scott S m i t h , " F a m i l y L i m i t a t i o n . Sexual C o n t r o l , a n d Domestic Feminism in Victorian A m e r i c a . " in Mary S. H a r t m a n a n d Lois B a n n e r , eds., Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of I f o m e n ( N e w York: H a r p e r a n d R o w , 1974), p p . 119-36; a n d Kaihryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: Λ Study in Domesticity (New H a v e n : Yale University Press. 1973).

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Mormonism impressionistic at best. Only following the Mormon arrival in the Great Basin region in 1847, was the church able to set u p and develop its own distinctive way of life to the fullest extent. In Utah and other Mormon areas of the Intermountain West during the last half of the nineteenth century, at least four factors contributed to the development of a relatively egalitarian role for Mormon women in practice. First in importance undoubtedly was the frontier itself and the challenges that it posed for both men and women. Sheer survival in the arid and inhospitable Great Basin region initially demanded that all available talents and energies of both sexes be mobilized effectively for the good of the group. Brigham Young and his advisers were well aware of the vital role that women could play in the economic, social, a n d intellectual life of their communities.' Women were encouraged to do any work that they could do and were needed to do, and many of the conventional American sex role divisions in economics and other areas of life were temporarily deemphasized. Although the earlier research of Leonard Arrington suggested that Mormon women exhibited an almost u n i q u e degree of versatility d u r i n g the frontier period, more recent comparative investigations by Maureen Ursenbach Belcher find no significant differences in the economic roles and versatility of women in Mormon and non-Mormon areas of the American West. 10 Apparently the demands of the frontier tended to serve as an equalizing factor, quite apart from the specific ideologies that individuals may have adopted. Closely related to the frontier as a factor contributing to women's independence and equality in the Mormon West was, rather paradoxically, the practice of polygamy itself. Polygamy, of course, has conventionally been viewed as a blight on Mormon women, and certainly it was a difficult system for women, both emotionally a n d in other respects. Nevertheless, in the frontier environment of early U t a h the new marriage system actually tended to encourage greater a u t o n o m y of women from men. In the absence of their husbands, w h o could often be gone for extended periods of time, plural wives ran farms and businesses a n d became of necessity the acting heads of households, as some early federal census reports so identified them. Plural wives could and often did cooperate with each other in handling childcare and other work or in freeing an ambitious or talented wife to pursue a professional career. Many of the most active and influential women in late nineteenth-century Utah, including the feisty Martha Hughes C a n n o n , who became the first woman state senator in the United States, were wives of polygamists." Moreover, the intense antipolygamy 'For an analysis of Brigham Young's attitudes toward women, see Jill Mulvay Derr, "Woman's Place in Brigham Young's World," Brigham Young University Studies 18 (Spring 1978): 377-95. '"Leonard J. Arrington's pathbreaking article, " T h e Economic Role of Pioneer Mormon Women," has been qualified by the comparative analysis which Maureen Ursenbach Beecher presented in "Women's Work on the Mormon Frontier" (paper delivered at the Berkshire Conference on Women's History on 24 August 1978). Much further comparative research needs to be done before it can be determined with any certainty what aspects of nineteenth-century Mormon women's lives were unique to Mormonism and what aspects of their life experiences were similar to those of other American women in the Intermountain West. "Martha Hughes Cannon's case is doubly ironic since she gained her state senate seat by indirectly defeating her husband, who was also running for (he state senate on the opposing party ticket. Ten candidates were r u n n i n g for five seats; Martha Hughes Cannon was elected while her

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persecutions of the 1870s and 1880s caused many women who were unhappy with polygamy to subordinate their personal feelings and pull together in vigorous support of their husbands, their church, and their whole way of life." With many Mormons in prison, under indictment, or in hiding as a result of the intense harassment of federal officials, women who otherwise probably never would have concerned themselves with public affairs courageously took over the responsibility of running many aspects of Utah life and engaged in wellorganized public actions which helped politicize them to a degree that has never been seen in Utah before or since. In short, indirectly and almost in spite of itself. Mormon polygamy in the late nineteenth century contributed to a greater degree of autonomy and political activism among women of the church. 15 A third factor besides the frontier and polygamy which contributed to woman's influence in the Mormon church was the development of both a vigorous and effective woman's organization, the Relief Society, and a popular woman's newspaper, the Woman's Exponent. As reorganized under the dynamic direction of Eliza R. Snow, the most powerful woman in the history of the Mormon church, the Relief Society not only participated in and directed many complex economic and cultural projects of its own in Utah, but it also helped set up the educational programs for youth of both sexes which would serve as the foundation for the comprehensive church educational system of the twentieth century. 14 Similarly important was the Woman's Exponent, a largely womanmanaged, -supported, and -produced newspaper, the second periodical expressly for women to appear in the trans-Mississippi West. Although not officially sponsored or financed by the church, this lively and well-written paper served as the major voice for Mormon women's concerns during its publication between husband was not. For accounts o( this remarkable woman, see Jean Bickmore White, "Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon: Doctor, Wile, Legislator, Exile," in Vicky Burgess-Olson, ed., Sitter Saints (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), pp. S8S-97; and Barbara Hayward, "Teaching the Slavish Virtues: T h e Public Life o( Martha Hughes Cannon," Century 2: A Brigham Young University Student Journal 2 (Winter 1978): 1-15. "Perhaps the most striking of such cases was that of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, who personally disliked polygamy but nevertheless wrote one of the most moving public defenses of the practice in her book Why We Practice Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884). T h e development of political awareness and involvement among Mormons as they organized themselves to support polygamy is discussed in Casterline, "Images of the Mormon Woman," pp. 94100. "For frank and revealing persona] accounts of women's reactions to the late nineteenth century antipolygamy persecutions, see Annie Clark Tanner, A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969) and Juliaetta Bateman Jensen, Little Gold Pieces (Salt Lake City: Stanway Printing Co., 1948). Bibliographic introductions to the extensive literature against Mormon polygamy are found in Allen and Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints, pp. 681-87, and Davis Bitton, "Mormon Polygamy: A Review Article," Journal o/ Mormon History 4 (1977): 101-108. Among the most useful studies are Richard D. Poll. " T h e T w i n Relic: A Study of Mormon Polygamy and the Campaign by the Government of the United States for its Abolition, 1852-1890" (M.A. thesis. Texas Christian University, 1939) and Custive O. Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, Calif.: H u n t i n g t o n Library, 1971). "See General Board of the Relief Society, A Centenary of the Relief Society, 1842-1942( Salt Lake City: General Board of the Relief Society, 1942) and Arrington, "Economic Role of Pioneer Mormon Women." O n Eliza R. Snow and her role, consult the many articles by Maureen Ursenbach Bercher, including " T h e Eliza Enigma," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9 (Spring 1978): S1-4S; and Jill C. Mulvay, "Eliza R. Snow and the Woman Question," Brigham Young University Studies 16 (Winter 1976): 250-64.

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1872 and 1914. Going beyond explicitly Mormon issues and expressing an almost feminist awareness at times, the Exponent devoted much attention to the universally inequitable position of women in politics, education, and the professions. In the Exponent's wide ranging discussion of contemporary concerns, only polygamy, then a key element in Mormon self-definition as a group, failed to receive a critique. 1 5 Overall, the Relief Society and the Woman's Exponent served important identity-building functions and helped to reinforce a sense of pride and unity a m o n g women of the church. A final factor contributing to the independence of Mormon women and their active participation in many aspects of Utah life in the nineteenth century was the issue of woman suffrage. Although by the latter nineteenth century supporters of this key women's issue in the nation at large were still having relatively little success, in Utah (and in adjacent areas of the West, for a variety of other complex reasons) a different attitude prevailed. In Utah, influential Mormon figures such as George Q. Cannon and Orson F. Whitney did not see the vote for women as a threat that might undermine the social order and family stability. Instead, such men anticipated the later progressive arguments that if women had the vote they could more effectively aid in constructive reform and strengthening the family. Quietly and almost a half century earlier than the rest of the nation, the Utah legislature, with the tacit blessing of the Mormon hierarchy, therefore extended the vote to women in 1870. Confident of the loyalty of both men and women to their movement. Mormon leaders rightly realized that the votes of Mormon women would strengthen the position of the church on key issues. 16 Moreover, the vigorous participation of Mormon women in political life and in the suffrage efforts of American society as a whole provided positive publicity for the women of this group, who were so widely believed to be oppressed and degraded by polygamy. Somewhat ironically, Mormon women not only participated actively in national woman suffrage organizations and rallies but they also organized thousands of church women in mass meetings supporting polygamy against what they perceived as the efforts of the outside world to destroy the Mormon family system." Eventually, anti-polygamy forces, frustrated at the failure of Mormon women to rise up and throw off the chains of polygamy, joined with some supporters of woman suffrage who hated polygamy to stop women from voting in Utah in 1887. This, however, was only a , s See Casterline, " I m a g e s of the M o r m o n W o m a n . " p p . 83-94; Sherilyn C o x Bennion, " T h e Woman's Exponent: Forty-Two Years of Speaking for W o m e n , " Utah Historical Quarterly 44 (Summer 1976): 222-39; and Carol C o r n w a l l Madsen, " 'Remember the Women of Zion': A Study of the Editorial Content of the Woman's Exponent, A M o r m o n Woman's J o u r n a l " (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1977).

" A m o n g the articles on this topic are T h o m a s G . Alexander, " A n Experiment in Progressive Legislation: T h e G r a n t i n g of W o m a n Suffrage in Utah in 1870," Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (Winter 1970): 20-30; Beverly Beeton, " W o m a n Suffrage in Territorial U t a h . " Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Spring 1978): 100-120; J e a n Bickmore White, " W o m a n ' s Place is in the Constitution: T h e Struggle for E q u a l R i g h t s in U t a h in 1895," Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (Fall 1974): 344-69; and T . A. L a r s o n , " W o m a n S u f f r a g e in Western America," Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (Winter 1970): 7-19. " T h e mass meetings in s u p p o r t of polygamy received thorough coverage in the p a g e s of the Woman's Exponent. For e x a m p l e of the pamphlet accounts of such meetings, see "Mormon" Women's Protest: An Appeal for Freedom and Equal Rights ([Salt L a k e City:] Deseret N e w s Co.. [1886]), which reports on the protest meeting of 6 March 1886.

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temporary setback. As soon as Utah statehood was achieved in 1896 (after a strategic retreat from polygamy had partially mollified national public opinion), woman suffrage was once again introduced into the Utah constitution, nearly twenty-five years in advance of most of the rest of the country. Through their activities in local political life and through their advocacy of woman suffrage and other issues at the national level, Mormon women of the late nineteenth century gained a degree of experience in politics that matched or even exceeded that of women elsewhere in the country. In short, despite their negative public image in the late nineteenth century, Mormon women exercised a remarkable degTee of real power and influence in Utah society. The frontier, polygamy, women's organizations and publications, and the woman suffrage movement itself contributed in varied and sometimes contradictory ways to the creation of a considerable degTee of freedom and autonomy for women in Mormon society. II The contrast between the late nineteenth century Mormon efforts to encourage women to participate in almost all aspects of society and the presentday stress on domesticity as the only important role for women could hardly be more stark. A non-Mormon entering Utah society today often gets the strange sensation of having stumbled into another era, of having somehow stepped back into a picture from a mid-Victorian advice manual. Almost everywhere, from the visitor's center display lauding family home evening to the exhortation in the Church News section of the Oeseret News, the ideal that is held u p for women today conveys the gush and cloying sentimentality of a Hallmark gift card. Never, it seems, was the "cult of true womanhood" more pervasive. As in Victorian America, ideals and practice in present-day Mormon society seem in tension at many points. 18 Even as more than a third of married Mormon women work at least part time outside the home to help make ends meet, the church can put out a Relief Society lesson manual criticizing women who work and thereby neglect their families. 19 Rarely in Utah Mormonism today do effective "Recent studies of women in nineteenth-century America have increasingly stressed the conflicts between the ideals held u p to women and the demands placed upon them in everyday life. As examples, see Carroll Smith Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th-century America." Soctal Research 39 (Winter 1972): 652-78; and John S. Hallerand Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974). Anne Firor Scott. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 18)0-19)0 (Chicago: University of Chigago Press, 1970), similarly stresses the gap between the ideal and the reality for Southern planters' wives. English Victorianism is treated in Patricia Branca, "Image and Reality: The Myth of the Idle Victorian Woman," in Hartman and Banner, eds., Clio's Consciousness Raised, pp. 179-91. "The comments in question were printed in the Social Relations Lesson No. 7 for April 1978 in Relief Society Courses of Study, 1977-78 (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1977). Based on conversations with a number of Mormon women, some of whom are essentially conventional in their attitudes, I have concluded that a sense of resentment, deep hurt, and even outrage was produced by this specific lesson. The bluntest expression of the cuirent highly restrictive attitudes toward women's role is found in Rodney Turner, Woman and the Priesthood (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972). Although Turner's book disclaims any standing as an authoritative statement of Mormon policy, it was printed by the Deseret Book Company and is widely accepted by Mormon scholars as representing normative present-day Mormon attitudes.

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countervailing forces appear to be present to the prevailing ideology of domesticity as the only legitimate role for women. What accounts for this shift from the ideal of the sturdy pioneer woman to that of the neo-Victorian wife and mother? Certainly the transition has been a complex one. and both ideals continue, to some extent, to be present in Mormonism today. At least four factors, however, have been particularly influential in bringing about a shift in emphasis. First was the gradual end of frontier conditions in turn-of-the-century Utah, and the corresponding rise to prominence of Victorian notions of culture and refinement. As Edward Geary has suggested in a brilliant interpretive essay on the genteel tradition in Mormondom, Mormons, like other western Americans, often cherish the image of the pioneer wife and mother who triumphed over the adverse conditions of the frontier to transform a rough cabin or musty dugout into a "real home." 1 0 T h e symbols of civilization in the genteel tradition, so characteristically represented in the sentimental novels of the nineteenth century, have as their object not high culture, not great achievements of the mind or the arts, but rather the little decencies of life such as lacy curtains and vases of flowers. T h e appearance, not the substance, of culture is sought. Significantly, Brigham Young and other early Mormon leaders frequently inveighed against such tendencies within the church. Young's support of the functional Bloomer-style Deseret costume so unpopular among church women, his criticism of sentimentalized Victorian novels as trash, and his forthrightness in bluntly and directly dealing in public with family and sexual issues that polite Victorian society thought should be kept strictly private, if discussed at all, show his concern that the genteel ideal threatened even within Mormonism to divert attention from the austerities and sacrifices necessary for the building up of the kingdom. As conditions in Utah eased and such superhuman dedication was no longer required for simple survival, suppressed or unexpressed urges for culture and refinement became increasingly prominent among Mormon women. 21 Yet Mormons carried such concerns even farther than did other western Americans. What accounts for the peculiar intensity of the ideal of gentility among Mormons? "Edward A. Geary, " T h e Genteel Tradition in Mormondom: A Speculative Inquiry" (unpublished paper secured through the courtesy of the author). Geary skillfully delineates many of the forces encouraging (he development of the genteel tradition in Mormonism. He does not, however, offer an explanation for the question he raises of why that tradition should have been stronger in Mormon than in non-Mormon areas of the American West. This paragraph is based on Geary's paper. " A similar move away from a high degree of practical equality for women can be noted in many other historically marginal situations after a degree of order is restored. Colonial American life, for example, shows a greater degree of equality for women during the rougher frontier period than at the time of the Revolution when ideals of women's fashionable dress and a narrowing of women's role in many areas of life became obvious, at least among the elite. Linda Grant DePauw and Conover Hunt, "Remember the Ladies": Women in America, 1750-lili (New York: Viking Press, 1976). Likewise, women often play an unusually prominent role in new religious movements. As the new systems become institutionalized, however, there is a tendency to drift back toward more traditional, maledominated patterns. I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamantsm (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971). Interestingly, even in the Israeli kibbuu experiment, which was ideologically committed to equality of the sexes and to freeing women to participate more fully in all aspects of community life, a pronounced drift back toward more traditional roles has occurred. Lionel Tiger and Joseph Shepher, Women in thefCibbutz(Ncw York: Harcourt, Brace, jovanovich, 1976).

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In addition to the end of the frontier, the effort of Mormons at the tum-ofthe-century to transform and improve their relations with the larger American society served as a second factor which strengthened the ideal of gentility and contributed to a far-reaching constriction in the role of women. After persecution so intense that the very existence of the church was called into question, the Mormons in 1890 reluctantly began to put an end to polygamy, the major overt cause of conflict with the outer society. Concurrently, in an even more fundamental change, the church also began to withdraw from political life as a monolithic force and to allow greater pluralism within its areas of influence. This Americanization of Utah for statehood, as Gustive O. Larson has characterized it, is strikingly similar to the acculturation of other ethnic groups in this country." First generation Mormon leaders such as Brigham Young had tenaciously attempted to maintain distinctive ideals and practices which were in conflict with those acceptable in American society. By the t u m of the century, however, these original leaders were giving way to a second generation with different priorities. Like so many second generation immigrants, these new Mormon leaders broke with their cultural past at many points. Reacting against the ways of their fathers which had created so many problems for them, they gave up polygamy, overt political control, and other distinctive features of their background and attempted in many respects to become more American than the most American. By the 1930s, the harshest persecution of recalcitrant polygamists came from the Mormon church itself, and upper levels of the hierarchy could seriously consider giving u p other practices that set Mormons apart from mainstream Americans. During this period when so many Mormons were attempting to become "two hundred per cent Americans," Mormon society deeply internalized the dominant Victorian ideals of domesticity and women's role, even as the larger society began to give up such ideals. Today, the leaders of the church are men whose formative intellectual and emotional experiences occurred during this transitional pre-World War I era. Because of the strong authority structure of the Mormon church, these men are able to do much to preserve a style of life that many in the rest of America now view as a relic of a bygone age.25 "Surprisingly little has yet been done to understand the late-nineteenth-century Mormon movement toward acculturation. The most thorough overview of this entire process is found in Allen and Leonard. The Story of the Latter-day Saints, and in other works by James B. Allen. For polygamy, the best overall treatment is Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood. Still useful on the contemporary situation, even though somewhat dated at points, is the discussion in O'Dea, The Mormons, pp. 222-57. The work of Klaus Hansen, Robert Flanders, Jan Shipps, Marvin Hill, Michael Quinn, and others on Mormon political and cultural aspirations, especially as reflected in the political kingdom of Cod, raises perspectives on Mormon acculturation that demand further investigation. T o date no full and satisfactory study of the development of polygamy since the Manifesto of 1890 has been attempted from this perspective. " T h i s line of argument could be considerably elaborated to help explain the swing back toward more "conservative" positions among young Mormons since World War II. Third and fourth generation Mormons, like many individuals from immigrant groups, have attempted increasingly to recapture their roots and heritage. Ironically, the specific ideals which such Mormons try to recapture often have less in common with early Mormonism than with the Victorian ideals against which early Mormons reacted at so many points. See Harold T. Christensen and Kenneth L. Cannon, "The Fundamentalist Emphasis at Brigham Young University: 1935-1973," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 17 (1978): 53—57; and Marvin Rytting, "Struggling With the Paradoxes of Mormon Tradition " (unpublished paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society (or Values in Higher Education. South Bend, Indiana, August 1978; copy secured through the courtesy of the author).

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In addition to the end of the frontier and the efforts of Mormons to acculturate, a third factor contributing to the constriction of women's role in the Mormon church has been the effort to establish uniformity among, or correlate, all church programs. Although the effort to establish order and consistency in church programs and educational policies has been an ongoing one since the founding of the Mormon church, only since World War II, and especially since 1960, has correlation become an overriding concern among Mormons. The basic causes of this concern are simply stated: Since World War II, the church has experienced a phenomenal four-fold growth from a little over a million to more than four million members. Even for a group with an effective, centralized leadership and an unusually sophisticated grasp of organizational dynamics, coping with such a staggering increase in membership in little more than thirty years has posed complex new problems. In the process of cutting back on duplication of magazines, establishing a uniform educational curriculum, and reorganizing channels of authority, women's activities have been especially hard hit. Although the most knowledgeable scholars studying this process do not feel that correlation was deliberately intended to restrict women, the net effect of placing almost all women's activities in the church under closer male supervision has nevertheless been extremely constricting. Since 1960, the Relief Society has lost its independent funding and now is forced to justify its budget items to a male hierarchy which may sometimes be unsympathetic to certain programs that women feel are especially important. The Relief Society Magazine has been discontinued, much to the disappointment of many women, and its replacement by women's columns in the Ensign and a single Ensign issue each year devoted to women fails to provide a satisfactory substitute. And the manyfaceted involvement that Mormon women once had with organizations such as the Primary Children's Hospital has been lost now that such organizations have been placed under private professional management. While change is inevitable in any group, not all change is necessarily for the better. Some Mormon women, particularly at the upper levels of leadership, have privately expressed deep frustrations with the new policy developments and with women's loss of control over their church organizations and activities." A final factor contributing to increasing restrictions in the sphere of women in Mormonism has been the church's reaction to certain developments in recent American life, notably the efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA and the feminist movement as a whole are viewed by most Mormons as being potentially at variance with basic Mormon principles of hierarchy and the maintenance of strong sex role distinctions. Many Mormons, concerned with the family disorders of the larger society and with their own all-too-high divorce rate within the church, see the ERA as only the most obvious factor tending to further 2 T h e relative slowness with which some of these changes in the organization of church women's groups and activities have been made suggests the degree of internal resistance to such changes. Powerful former leaden of some of the major church women's organizations, speaking in candid private interviews, have expressed their dissatisfaction with some of the developments that have taken place. On the other hand, one should note that significant changes in any organization are likely to result in some opposition from old guard leaders who were used to doing things in their own way. Internal opposition to certain aspects of correlation within the Mormon church has always been expressed within a larger context in which loyalty to the church remains paramount.

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polarize the sexes and disrupt the family. In addition, the ERA, if passed, could pose the same sorts of legal challenges to twentieth century Mormon social practice that the antipolygamy crusade did for the church in the nineteenth century. Brigham Young University's recent skirmishes with the federal government on affirmative action suggest something of the type of problems that could be envisioned." Thus the ERA, unlike woman suffrage, has been vigorously and effectively opposed by the Mormon church. In 1976, the church went so far as to officially condemn the ERA as an inappropriate method of dealing with the legitimate aspirations of women. 26 T h e following year, in an operation that provoked intense controversy in Utah, figures in the church orchestrated the attendance of thousands of Mormon women in International Women's Year meetings throughout the state to block all feminist resolutions and send a "conservative" slate to the national meetings. 27 Today, only the most courageous or foolhardy Mormon women come out in direct support of feminism as such. The public front in Utah appears almost monolithic on this topic. Thus, during the past century the role of women in Mormonism appears to have become increasingly narrowly defined. T h e end of the frontier, the efforts at acculturation, the concern with correlation, and the opposition to the ERA have all combined to produce what may well be a more constricted role for women within the Mormon church than at any other time in its history. " T h e major controversies between the federal government and Brigham Young University have revolved around the interpretation of the Title IX regulations of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, which states that a university receiving federal funds may not practice discrimination on the basis of sex. On 160ctober 1975 BYU challenged certain regulations that had been put forward by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Title IX. The grounds of the challenge were that the regulations exceeded the authority of the department, infringed on religious freedom and other constitutional rights, and undercut efforts to encourage the teaching and practice of "high moral principles" in relations between the sexes. A quiet standoff eventually was reached in this case. A more recent controversy concerning housing discrimination was resolved with the Justice Department in an agreement on 8 June 1978. For the earlier controversy, see Utah newspapers from mid-1975 through early 1976; Brigham Young University press release of 16 October 1975, entitled "Notification of Brigham Young University Policy of Non-Discriminaiion on the Basis of Sex"; Karen J. Winkle, "Brigham Young University Challenges Part o( the Bias Law." Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 October 1975; and John Walsh, "Brigham Young University: Challenging the Federal Patron," Science 191 (16 January 1976): 160-63. The text of the compromise agreement between the Justice Department and Brigham Young University on the housing discrimination controversy was released, along with supporting BYU documentation, on 8 June 1978. Also see Elouise Bell, "The Implications of Feminism for BYU," Brigham Young University Studies 16 (Summer 1976): 527-40. 26 The statement of the First Presidency against the ERA was printed in the Church News section of the Deseret News on 30 October 1976, as well as in the Enstgn 6 (December 1976): 79. The statement makes it difficult, though not entirely impossible, for Mormon women publicly to support the ERA. A further statement in support of the church's position against the ERA is found in Boyd Κ Packer, "The Equal Rights Amendment," Ensign 7 (March 1977): 6-9. A discussion of the political role which the Mormon church apparently played in defeating the ERA in Nevada is presented in Lisa Cronin Wohl, "A Mormon Connection? The Defeat of the ERA in Nevada," Ms., July 1977, pp. 6885. " T h e Utah IWY meetings provoked intense and continuing debate. As a relatively balanced starting point, see Dixie Snow Huefner, "Church and Politics at the Utah IWY Conference," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Spring 1978): 58-75. Also see Linda Sillitoe, "Women Scorned: Inside the IWY Conference," Utah Holiday, August 1977, pp. 26-28, 63-69; and Linda Sillitoe, "A Foot in Both Camps: An Interview with Jan Tyler," Surutone 3 (January-February 1978): 11-14. Extensive coverage is found in the Utah newspapers both during and after the conference.

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III Where do Mormon women go from here? How can women within Mormonism gain the broadest ränge of options and the opportunities to develop and use their full talents? What are the future possibilities and prospects for women in the Mormon church? One preliminary point must be made if the future status of Mormon women is to be faced squarely and realistically. Feminism, with its stress on individualism and equality for women, is fundamentally antithetical to the hierarchical ideology underlying Mormonism. Neither now nor in the foreseeable future is ideological feminism likely to be a viable option within the Mormon church.2* For Mormons, order and hierarchy are fundamental values. All members of the church are viewed as part of a cooperative network of family and kinship ties in which the good of the whole community is always more important than the good of any of the component members in isolation. This does not mean that change in the status of women is impossible, but rather that such change, when it comes, will be part of the broader process of change within the entire organization. The Mormon church, like any successful social organism, is continually in a process of development, of periodic declension and revitalization as it attempts to deal more effectively with the challenges that it confronts. Change is often slow, and it must ultimately come from within the organization, but far-reaching change can and does occur. The way in which change may take place in the Mormon church is highlighted by one noteworthy recent development not directly connected with women, namely, elimination of the policy denying full participation in the church to blacks of African descent. This policy went back at least a century to the days of Brigham Young, and its elimination proved exceedingly difficult, despite the many compelling arguments that were raised against it in the years since World War II. Even the most concerned and hopeful Mormons had almost given u p hope that the policy would be changed in the near future. Yet in June 1978 that policy was, indeed, ended, much to the delight of members who had been distressed by the inconsistency between that policy and the Mormon church's universalistic ideals. Apparently the immediate reasons for that change were the spiritual sensitivity of the church's President Spencer W. Kimball and the pragmatic demands of the worldwide missionary program, particularly in Brazil, where limiting membership based on racial antecedents ultimately proved too complex to be practical. Long-range factors influencing the change may also have included the continuing external criticisms of the policy which " T h e lack of appeal of feminism per se in Mormonism today is dear even to writers such as Warenski, Patriarchs and Politics, who sought to find signs of a potentially viable feminist movement within Monnonism. Warenski concluded, based on sixty interviews and on her other observations, that the vast majority of Mormon women appear satisfied with their role in the home and that no effective organizational supports for more militant Mormon women exist. A similar conclusion was reached by Adele Brannon McCollum, who also interviewed numerous Mormon women, as well as some of their husbands. McCollum once proposed the following ideal case to a Mormon leader: If his wife were happier, the children had equal or better care, etc., would he then be willing for her to work outside the home. No, he said. In such a case, he would try to find an occupation for his wife that she could do while still remaining in the homel Conversation with Adele Brannon McCollum, Summer 1978. Also see Alison Craig, "Making Money at Home," Ensign 7 (March 1977): 51-56.

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contributed to a negative public image of the church in American society and the continuing distress which the policy provoked among thoughtful Mormons." In much the same way, despite a seemingly static and constricted role for women within the Mormon church today, a longer-range perspective suggests deep-running currents at work which ultimately may once again increase the range of options for women. Among the straws in the wind is the widespread interest in issues of the family and women's role in Utah today. Even though the general tone of discussions tends to be muted by comparison with more militant statements of the larger society, many of the same types of concerns are raised, and conferences on women such as the ones held at Brigham Young University are well-attended.50 Some Mormon sociologists and family counselors warn of the dangers of the heavy Mormon emphasis on early marriage and too-large families — factors which have contributed to a disturbingly high divorce rate among Mormons and to other family problems that at times approach in intensity those of the outer society.51 Faced with a sizeable number of young, single Mormon women, many of whom will not be able to find desirable husbands within the Mormon church, books are put out under church auspices pointing out that there are also rewarding opportunities for women outside marriage and that remaining single should not be considered the end of the world.52 And some bright young Mormon women have begun to point to research studies showing that married women who work at least part-time "For the b a t brief historical treatment of the changing Mormon policy on blacks in the church, see Lester Bush, "Mormonism's Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8 (Spring 1973): 11-68. An analysis of the recent change of policy, made public on 9 June 1978 by the First Presidency of the church, is found in the epilogue to Newell G. Bringhurst's book manuscript on Mormon policy toward blacks. (Read through the courtesy of the author.) "Present-day Mormon writings on women and their potential role outside the home often appear to be at the stage described in Betty Friedan's early writings. There is a vague sense that being simply a wife and mother may not be entirely fulfilling, but as yet there is no clearly articulated alternative that appears satisfactory within Mormon culture. Reflections on some of these issues are found in the special issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 (Summer 1971) on Mormon women, edited by Claudia Lauper Bushman and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich; articles, notes, and observations in Exponent II; and the often surprisingly frank discussions on the difficulties of the mother-homemaker role in the special women's issues of the Ensign for March 1976 and March 1977. Particularly noteworthy is Lavina Fielding, "Problems, Solutions: Being a Latter-day Saint Woman Today," Ensign 6 (March 1976): 16-22. "Discussions of some of these issues are presented in Phillip R. Kunz, ed.. The Mormon Family: Proceedings of the Annual Family Research Conference, Brigham Young University (Provo: BYU Family Research Center, 1975), and in the special issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 10 (Autumn 1976) on sexuality and Mormon culture, edited by Harold T . Christensen and Marvin V. Rytting. The Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists has published an insightful A.M.C.A.P. Journal since Fall 1975. A remarkable personal statement of the many-faceted possibilities and potentials of Mormonism is found in Rytting, "Struggling with the Paradoxes of Mormon Tradition." Also see some more critical non-Mormon scholarly writings, including Cantril Nielson, "Some Mormon Stress Points from a Psychiatric Perspective," Measuring Mormonism 3 (Fall 1976): 3-7; and Rodney W. Burgoyne and Robert H. Burgoyne, "Conflict Secondary to Overt Paradoxes in Belief Systems: The Mormon Woman Example," Journal of Operational Psychiatry 8 (1977): 39-45. "During the past five yean, Deseret Book Company, the church's publishing house, has put out at least four books directed at the woman who is temporarily or psroanently without a husband. One of the best of this genre is Wayne J. Anderson, Alone But Not Lonely: Thoughts for the Single, Widowed, or Divorced Woman (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1973). Articles in the Ensign also have discussed the role of single women in the church.

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outside the home generally have a better self-image and make more effective, rather than less effective, wives and mothers." Although such ideas are still outside the Mormon mainstream and are sharply criticized by some Mormon leaders, the church as a whole has generally crafted its policy statements skillfully so as to not totally cutoff any potentially fruitful options for its members. As one example, the official policy statement on birth control is a masterpiece of diplomacy. On its face, the statement appears to be a vigorous condemnation of the use of artificial means of birth control, and certainly this is the way in which most church members would read it. Yet the statement significantly does allow birth control in cases where the woman's health or feelings make it desirable." Similarly, another policy pronouncement sharply attacking abortion nevertheless does allow it in certain exceptional cases such as rape.55 Thus, church policy declarations that appear unequivocal to the casual reader are usually stated so that they can be open to various interpretations depending on an individual's circumstances and inclinations. Basic principles are clearly enunciated, but variation is allowed within those broad limits. Partly as a result of such flexibility, the Mormon church has been remarkably successful in adapting itself to changes in the outside world without losing touch with its underlying goals. The insights and concerns of the larger society are characteristically filtered through a unique Mormon perspective. Birth control, for example, is practiced by many Mormons, and the Mormon birth rate during this century has followed the general rises and dips of American society as a whole, though always at a somewhat higher level.5® Evidence from past policy development suggests that so long as Mormon women remain generally satisfied with a position that is essentially limited to the home, church policies toward their role are likely to remain restrictive; but as conditions in society change and as tensions develop within the Mormon home which clearly reflect the dysfunctional nature of certain church policies, those policies may well be gradually and significantly modified so that the organization may operate with maximum effectiveness.57 The decision at the October 1978 Conference to allow women to pray in Sacrament meetings, and the message of President Spencer W. Kimball at the October 1978 fireside inviting women to expand and "As one written example of such a positive approach to working mothers, see Francine Bennion, "LDS Working Mothers." Sunstone 2 (Spring 1977): 6-15. "The First Presidency statement on birth control, dated 14 April 1969, is quoted in its entirety in David H. Coombs, "The LDS Church: Birth Control and Family Planning" (research paper presented to the Educational Psychology Department at Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Doctor of Education. August 1974). Coombs's paper, brought to my attention courtesy of David J. Whittaker. provides a convenient source for most of the important documents put out by the church in this area. Numerous other articles on Mormon birth control attitudes and practices have been published. As a starting point, see Lester E. Bush, Jr., "Birth Control among the Mormons: Introduction to an Insistent Question," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 10 (Autumn 1976): 12-44. " T h e official church statement on abortion appeared in PriejtAootf Bulletin, June 1972. pp. 2-3, and was quoted in Coombs, "Birth Control and Family Planning," pp. 23-24. "For graphic representation of the relationship between Mormon and non-Mormon birth rates, see Lester E. Bush, Jr., "Birth Control among the Mormons," p. 23. "One example of such modifications was the decision to introduce optional Relief Society lessons to encourage participation of younger, unmarried women who had ceased active participation in the more traditional family-centered programs.

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improve and insisting that they should not be silent or limited partners in marriage suggests possibilities for further enlargement of women's range of options.5" In this complex process of helping the Mormon church adapt to changes in the larger society while remaining true to its underlying values, Mormon intellectuals play a vital, if often not-fully-appreciated role. Independent journals such as Dialogue, which are viewed with suspicion by much of the Mormon rank and file, have been especially important in helping the church to deal creatively with the complex new problems and challenges that it faces." For women, Exponent II has played a similarly pivotal role, reaffirming a commitment to a vision of women in Mormonism that is broader and more dynamic than that which is currently accepted by the mainstream of the church. Exponent II fills a real need, especially for the brightest and most intellectually acute women of the church who are struggling to maintain their loyalty to a faith in which they deeply believe at the same time that they are trying to change policies that they feel are excessively restrictive. By reprinting articles from the original Woman's Exponent and celebrating the achievements of their pioneer foremothers, Exponent II suggests additional appealing role models for women of the church today and helps keep open options that otherwise might tend to be closed off.40 The responsibilities of leadership in a highly centralized organization such as the Mormon church are awesome. On the one hand, effective new programs can be rapidly instituted within an entire organization; on the other hand, if the leadership makes a fundamental error in judgment, the negative effects can be similar) y far-reaching. The current policy of correlation within the church holds particularly ambiguous potential, both for women and for Mormonism as a whole. If the policy of correlation is to work well, women, as well as other elements in the church, need to be actively and effectively involved in every issue which directly affects them. Otherwise, blunders and policy mistakes are almost inevitable. It is not in the church's interest to make mistakes such as producing a Relief Society lesson manual sent to working women which criticizes them for "Linda Sillitoc, "Perceptions of the Plight: A Review-Response," Sunstone 4 (JanuaryFebruary 1979): 6-9, presents some reflections on present and future possibilities for women in the church related to these and other recent developments. "Insight into the vital role that Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought plays in the Mormon church is suggested in the letters to the editor of the journal, as well as in the many pathbreaking articles concerning difficult and controversial issues which must nevatheless be addressed if the church is to remain healthy in a complex and ever changing world. See also Leonard J. Arrington, "The Search for Truth and Meaning in Mormon History," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (Summer 1968): 56-65. Another, more recent journal which deals with similar issues is Sunstone. M A convenient introduction to the role of Exponent II in the Mormon church is Claudia Bushman, "A Wider Sisterhood." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Spring 1978): 96-99. One wonders if part of the appeal of this paper, started in 1974, may be due to the fact that with the ending of the Relief Society Magazine in 1970, women in the church no longer hadany forum of their own through which they could regularly express themselves and their concerns in writing. Among the other efforts to come to terms with some of these issues, see Emma Lou Thayne, "Ashtrays and Gumwrappers: Women in Utah Mormon Culture," Task Papers in LDS History No. 19 (Salt Lake City: Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1977), and Maureen Ursenbach Beech er, "Past and Present: Some Thoughts on Being a Mormon Woman," Sunstone 1 (Summer 1976): 64-73.

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working and creates a deep-seated sense of outrage. Likewise, it is not in the church's interest to underestimate or misconstrue the tensions that women face. Even if the Mormon church continues to keep its women in a position of ultimate subordination to men, not to involve half the church in creating the policies which affect them is not only ethically questionable but organizationally dysfunctional as well. On a broader note, if organizational health is to be maintained, not simply for Mormon women but also for the entire church, a balance must be maintained between order, on the one hand, and creativity, on the other. T o establish an organizational straightjacket, to cut back too severely on the room for individual variation within the church would be to threaten the possibility of the very universality to which Mormonism aspires.41 In conclusion, the need for continuing creativity and openness in dealing with the role of women within Mormonism is powerfully expressed by a woman who moved back to Utah after thirty-five years of living in Delaware. She stated: "I feel that what we're losing in the Church is diversity. There's such a push for uniformity and conformity that all the beautiful little nuances of differences axe being swept aside. That's really what God enjoys. Otherwise he wouldn't make every leaf and snowflake different. You should have the freedom to have some time to be yourself, and to have people appreciate that you're different. You should appreciate this in your children and not try to push them all into a prescribed mold. . . . I think that in an authoritarian church this is one of the d a n g e r s . . . . we have to let some pilot projects develop in individual lives too. Until we do that, how are we going to let a woman make the individual contribution which is particularly her own?" 4 The role of women within Mormonism is surely one of the continuing challenges with which the church will have to grapple seriously in the years ahead.

"Whether the Mormon church will indeed be able to make the radical transformation into a universal church or whether it will ultimately take the easier route and lapse back into narrow sectarian insularity remains to be seen. On this point, see Thomas F. O'Dra, "Mormonism and the Avoidance of Sectarian Stagnation: A Study of Church, Sect, and Incipient Nationality," American Journal of Sociology 40 (November 1954): 285-93. "Helen Candland Stark, Oral History, Interview by Jessie L. Embrey, 1977, in the James Moyle Oral History Program, Archives, Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah, p. 28.

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TECHNOLOGY AND WOMEN'S WORK: THE LIVES OF WORKING CLASS WOMEN IN PITTSBURGH, 1870-1900 * by SUSAN J. KLEINBERG

" I t is t h r o u g h the h o u s e h o l d s themselves that t h e industrial s i t u a t i o n impresses itself indelibly upon t h e life o f t h e p e o p l e "

1

Most examinations o f working class w o m e n focus on wage earning women in textile towns and in mixed industrial and commercial centers. 2 However, historians need t o expand their examination o f working class women to include those living in cities which had few e m p l o y m e n t opportunities for w o m e n such as Pittsburgh, and t o study w o m e n ' s unpaid work in the h o m e as well as paid labor outside i t . 3 T h e work w o m e n did in their own homes for their o w n families is as important and worthy o f historical analysis and as m u c h a contribution t o the e c o n o m y as was work done outside the h o m e for cash wages. This work done in the h o m e enabled families t o manage in an industrial, urban setting in which the * 1 am indebted to Professors Herbert Gutman, Anne Firor Scott, and David Montgomery for their comments on successive drafts of this paper ' Margaret Byington, Homestead, the Households of a Mi/ltown (New York, 1910). p. 179 This pioneering study of women's work in the home in an industrial town strongly influenced my thinking about women's work in a heavy industry environment. - Hannah Josephson, Golden Threads. New England's Mills Girts and Magnates: Ralph Scharnau, "Elizabeth Morgan. Crusader for Labor Reform" Labor History. X I V (Summer, 1 9 7 } ) ; James Kenneally. " W o m e n and Trade Unions, 1870-1920" Labor History X I V (Winter, 1973); Alice Kessler-Harris, "Between the Real and the Ideal. Studies of Working W o m e n in 19th and 20th Century America," paper read at the Organization of American Historians, 1974. ·' I am using the term working class synonymously with manual worker, no matter how skilled. In periods of industrial chaos there was a high rate of unemployment and even the most skilled workers suffered. In Pittsburgh, one-third of all working class men were unemployed for at least one month in the year preceding June. 1880. On the differences in the standard of living between unskilled and skilled workers see U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor. Report upon the Relations between Labor and Capital (Washington, 1885), v. 1, pp. 17-31, the testimony of Robert D Layton, Grand Secretary of the Knights of Labor of North America.

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benefits of industrialization and urbanization were distributed unequally. If we are to understand the fabric of working class life in Pittsburgh or any other mill or mining town during the decades which followed the Civil War, indeed, if we are to understand the lives of the working class at all, we must look at the lives of the women as well as those of the men, in the households as well as in the workplaces. A study of domestic and municipal technology, w h o benefitted from it, and who could not afford it illustrates the deprivation of the working class vis-a-vis other groups in the city and shows how urbanization and technological innovation affected working class lives. Such a study provides a microcosm of governmental attitudes toward the working class and shows the ways in which urban government could improve or ignore the quality of life of different socio-economic groups within the city. Given the underlying philosophy of government and private enterprise in Pittsburgh at the end of the nineteenth century, namely that those people who benefitted from services should pay for them, it followed that the distribution of municipal services and technological innovations proceeded along class lines and was influenced by political considerations. Those who could pay g o t , and those who could not did without. This was as true in the public sector as in the private, since property owners were expected to pay for the services provided to their property. A l t h o u g h operating and maintenance expenses were borne by the city treasury (i.e., the tax-payers as a whole), the actual cost of original street and sewer improvements was assessed against the property owners " a b u t t i n g and directly affected, to the extent benefitted. . . . " 4 Since people in some neighborhoods were unable to stand the cost of the improvements, they did without. Conditions were worst in working class neighborhoods where the majority of the residents were tenants rather than property owners. T h e general shortage of housing in Pittsburgh meant that landlords did not need to provide services to entice tenants. As a result, working class n e i g h b o r h o o d s - a g g r e g a t e s of tenantoccupied buildings and tenement a r e a s - h a d fewer amenities than did more established areas. They had fewer sewers, fewer paved streets, and less water. The lack of services in working class neighborhoods was all the more critical since these areas were precisely the ones which suffered most from the pollution of the mills and had the most traffic. 4

Pittsburgh Public Works Dept., The City of Pittsburgh and its Public Works (Pittsburgh, 1916). p. 19; Pittsburgh City Controller, Report (Pittsburgh. 1895), pp. 12-1}; Pittsburgh Board of Health, Annual Report, 187} (Pittsburgh. 1874). pp. 19-20

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Pittsburgh's geography effectively made working class neighborhoods dirtier, less pleasant places. T h e workers and their families lived in cramped housing on the hillsides above the mills strung out on the narrow flat lands along Pittsburgh's two rivers. T h e steep hills, the lack of paved roads, and the railroads which served the mills but not the people living on the hills all effectively isolated working class communities from the rest of the city. By contrast, the middle and upper classes moved to gently sloping suburban areas, served by street cars and commuter railroads, far from the din and dirt produced by the mills. 5 T h e continued maldistribution of municipal services reinforced the segregation and differences in life styles between the classes. T h e variations in street paving in two sections of the city, the wealthy suburban "East End" and the working class " P o i n t " district highlight the political nature of municipal services and show how political decisions reinforced existing social differences. In 1873, the Pittsburgh Board of Health characterized the Point as " w i t h o u t exception, the filthiest and most disagreeable locality within the limits of the city." T h e Board of Health asserted that paving the streets of the Point would enhance the general health of the city. T h e landlords, however, maintained that the tenants had to pay all the expenses of any improvements as a requirement of their leases. Since the tenants could not afford to do so, the Board of Health suggested that the city bear the cost. T h e City Council refused to act on the suggestion, and the streets remained unpaved into the next decade. 6 All improvements had to be paid for thirty days after completion of the work. T h e one exception to this rule occurred in the newly settled suburban East End, the commuter suburb to which the industrialists moved in the 1860s and 1870s. Since improvement costs were assessed on a per-frontage foot basis the large estates of Mellon, Frick, and other industrial magnates would have paid heavily for the roads which made their commuting possible. According to the City Controller, paying the costs within the specified time limit would have been "a serious burden on the owners of the property assessed for the improvements." In order to relieve this burden, "a prominent and public spirited citizen" of the East End proposed, and the City Council agreed, that the city should sell bonds to cover the costs of paving and curbing the streets. T h e costs would be 5

6

Joel Tarr, "Transportation Innovation and Changing Spatial Patterns: Pittsburgh, 18501910." Urban Mass Transportation Administration, April 1972, p. 14. Board of Health. 1873, pp. 19-20.

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recovered by assessing the property owners in ten equal annual installments, rather than the single payment required of inner-city lot owners. The act itself was deemed unconstitutional, and the city assumed the entire cost of paving the suburban roads. It did this during the same years that it refused to pave the streets down at the Point. 7 The increased mobility which paved streets (and the surface transportation which used them) provided were also distributed unequally. W o m e n who lived in the suburbs could take the street car into town. Those living in working class neighborhoods without paved roads and therefore without street cars could not. 8 Their access to stores was limited. Their mobility did not expand as the city grew. T h e taxes which their rent money paid paved the streets to the suburban sections. If their own streets were paved at all, the costs were assessed against their landlords, w h o passed them on by raising the rent. As the city became more densely populated, working class families suffered as a result of unsanitary conditions which, in turn, resulted from governmental decisions as well as from over-crowding. Unpaved roads, for example, could not be kept in good order. It was more difficult to sweep or clean them. Horse droppings and human refuse remained there longer, putrefying in warm weather. Morever, the installation of sewer and water pipes did not keep pace with urban expansion in working class neighborhoods. These were slighted while the pressure on the cesspools and inadequate water pipes increased. People living in working class neighborhoods were exposed to the disease these conditions fostered, epidemics struck them most heavily, and death rates rose dramatically in new industrial areas. 9 Indeed, probably the most striking and significant examples of unequal distribution of municipal services were the allocation of water and sewers. Working class neighborhoods had less water and they had it in a less convenient form. W h i l e middle class homes were serviced by large water mains and indoor water pipes, working class homes were served by smaller water pipes with pumps in the courtyard or down the street. The discrimination in pipe size resulted from a City Council W a t e r Commission decision made in 1872, to lay pipes in accordance with the amount of revenue each street could be expected to produce. T h e rationale for this unequal distribution was that it would not deprive " t h e paying portion of 7 8

9

Pittsburgh City Controller, p. 16. The street cars ran on the major paved roads which connected the new suburban areas to the Central Business District. See Tarr,paisim. Pittsburgh Board of Health, Annual Reports. 1873-1887.

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our city o f a sufficient water supply." T h i s cost conscious method o f allocation meant that some streets did without water, others had an insufficient supply, and a few could use water with impunity. Here the city's geography played a part. T h e city's equipment did not generate sufficient pressure to push water up the steep hills in the summer when the reservoir was low. T h i s meant that the poor l i v i n g in r e m o t e areas w h i c h are reached by small service pipes o n l v . are s u b j e c t in [ h o t ] w e a t h e r w h e n c o l d w a t e r is t h e i r g r e a t e s t b o o n , t o a c t u a l s u f f e r i n g for t h e q u a n t i t y for w h i c h they pay and w h i c h is essential t o h e a l t h , c l e a n l i n e s s , and comfort.10

T h e problem lay both with the smallness o f the pipe and with the great demand from the industrial users located on the flat lands below the working class neighborhoods. In warm weather, when the water supply was limited and the pressure lower, the mills and railroads diverted the water, leaving the hillsides dry above them. For example, the Pennsylvania Railroad supplied its locomotives with water from a pipe at the b o t t o m of a hill. In so doing it cut off the supply to the railroaders and mill workers living above the yards. D u r i n g the summer, many neighborhoods in the largest industrial section of the city (the South Side) had no water from seven in the morning until six at night while the mills operated. 1 1 T h e burden o f unequal water distribution fell most heavily on working class women. They had to take great precautionary measures to have enough water to last throughout the day. I f South Side women wanted water for their housework or to drink, they hauled it all early in the morning before the mills started up. O n e woman complained that in order to have water during the long summer days, she got up at five o'clock in the morning to fill her tubs. T h e uncertainty o f the water supply in working class neighborhoods made women's household chores harder and interrupted their routine. Even the daily newspapers recognized that there was " n o t h i n g more calculated to disturb the serenity o f the household than to have the water supply turned off on wash day."

12

N o t only did the working class have less water, but they had t o bring it indoors by hand. Although by 1890, the C h i e f o f the Department o f Public Safety claimed that it was the " c u s t o m to have even moderate priced houses fitted with hot and cold water, water closets, and bath r o o m , " such 1(1

11 12

Pittsburgh Public W o r k s Dept . p. 19: Pittsburgh Water Commission, Report. 18~*2 (Phila., 187}), ρ 5; Superintendent of Water W o r k s . Annual Report. liT^-WH (Pitts.. 18" 7 «). p. 5. Superintendent of Water Works, pp 3-4. Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette. J u n e 19, 1888 Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette. J u n e 19. 1888. July 18. 187T

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amenities were beyond the reach of the working class. They could not afford the rents in houses which had indoor water, they could not afford to install the plumbing, nor did they always live near the necessary sewer and water lines. Moreover, the water companies (one public and one private) charged more for fixed indoor plumbing than for a p u m p in the yard. An indoor toilet cost $2.50 more per assessment period, a fixed sink cost $2.00 more, and a fixed tub cost $4.00 more. The water companies also discriminated against smaller householders. They charged about twice as much per room for water in smaller dwellings as they did for the larger ones. Since there were no water meters, those with indoor water could afford to use it lavishly. A Department of Public Safety report declared in 1889 that "a walk through the wealthy or business portion of the city will show the small regard they have in the use of water or the welfare of others." Water was a necessity; having it indoors was a luxury the working class could not afford. 1 3 As a result, working class women carried indoors "every drop of water they would use." If they lived on the second or third floor they carried the water upstairs and back down, disposing of it in the sink in the yard, on the ground, or sometimes out the window, but always hauling water. Day after day and many times a day, a woman living in a mill tenement "carried water up and down that her home and her children might be kept decent and clean . . . Her shoulders and arms had to strain laboriously. . . . " This woman and all working class women had to carry water inside for cooking, for cleaning, and for washing dishes and clothes. N o matter what the chore, she needed water to do it. The political decision of the city to lay small pipes in poorer neighborhoods, the great demand from the mills and railroads, and the precarious economic situation of the working class which resulted in the location of water outside rather than inside the h o m e all made her housework more complicated. Her washing and cleaning chores, made difficult by Pittsburgh's heavy particle pollution and by the grime and sweat on her family's clothes, were made more arduous by the city's decision to provide decent services only to those w h o could pay for them. 1 4 In addition to the high cost, inconvenience, and scarcity of water, the working class residents of Pittsburgh's South Side (its largest industrial 13

14

Department of Public Safety. Report, 1889 (Pittsburgh, n.d ), p. 78; Superintendent of W a t e r Works, Annua/ Report, 1878-1879 (Pittsburgh, 1879), p. 5. William Henry Matthews, A Pamphlet Illustrative of Housing Conditions in Neighborhoods Popularly Known as the Tenement House Districts of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, 1907), p. V, Paul Kellogg (ed.). The Pittsburgh District (New York. 1914), p. 132.

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community and almost entirely working class in composition) suffered from the poor quality of the water itself. The South Side was served by a private water company, the Monongahela Water Company, originally established to provide water for the industrial establishments along the Monongahela River. According to the American Glass Review, the newspaper of the glass workers, the water was "drawn from the Monongahela River, just below where the large sewers discharge their filth into the river." The Monongahela was the catch basin for the refuse and sewage of the more than 60,000 people living along its banks. It also carried the refuse from mills, glass houses, and slaughterhouses which stood on both sides of the slow-moving river.15 The city periodically protested the poor quality of water provided by the Monongahela Water Company. The only action it took during this era, however, was to run water pipes to the South Side from the public water company to insure sufficient water in case of a fire. " . . . The babe, the mother, the robust young man, and all who quench their thirst from the supposed, and should be, pure beverage . . ." declared the American Glass Review, continued to drink sewage-contaminated water. And the mill workers' on-the-job drinking water came directly from the river with no pretense of filtration or purification, the pipes being located directly down-stream from the point at which the dump boats emptied sewage. The men who worked in the mills, some of whom drank as many as thirty or thirty-five glasses of water during a shift to prevent dehydration from the intense heat, consumed water freshly contaminated by sewage, refuse from other mills, and wastes from the slaughterhouses. 16 In the late nineteenth century, sanitary conditions in working class neighborhoods did not improve as they did in other areas of the city. Working class wards, for example, suffered from a relative lack of sewers in proportion to the density of their populations. In 1879, the most extensive sewer connections were in the fashionable parts of the city. The Central Business District and the heavily upper class Fourth Ward had excellent sewer connections. The Point had no sewers whatever, nor did large sections of the working class wards along the rivers and on the South Side.17 ls le

17

American Class Review. D e c e m b e r 12, 1887 A n n u a l R e p o r t of t h e Mayor of t h e City of P i t t s b u r g h to t h e Select C o u n c i l in Minutes of the Gty Council, 1884, pp. 127-28, Minutes of the City Council. 1885. pp. 85-87, 212, 235; American Glass Revieu·. D e c e m b e r 12, 1887; Every Saturday, March 18, 1871, p. 263. Board of Health, Annual Report, 1878-1879, pp. 20-23. T h e r e is a m a p of t h e sewer system of P i t t s b u r g h appended to this report.

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Ten years later, in 1889, although the C h i e f Sanitary Inspector described the city as generally well-sewered, parts o f the South Side still had n o access to sanitary waste disposal. Several hundred cesspools drained into abandoned coal mines, primarily on the hill tops above the mills and railroad yards. Since these areas were without paved streets, the expense o f transporting sewage to a proper dumping ground and the large outlay necessary to provide proper sewage "led many to resort to the very dangerous practice of drilling their privy wells and cesspools through the comparatively thin crust o f earth overlying these coal mines." Since many o f the mines had caved in, the sewage was trapped there, seeping into wells upon which some South Siders still relied for their water, and creating a particularly bad a r o m a . 1 8 All such conditions made life in working class neighborhoods decidedly less pleasant than in middle and upper class ones. They also resulted in more labor for working class women. T h e hard physical work

their

husbands and children did meant sweaty, dirty clothes which had to be washed by hand with a sporadic and inconvenient water supply. A l t h o u g h the women themselves tried to manage, it was an uphill struggle: W h e r e rhe yards are paved, w o m e n may be seen at any h o u r o f t h e day hard ar w o r k with their b r o o m s on an effort to keep the place clean. B u t in many cases t h e r e is n o such paving and the water and o t h e r fecal m a t t e r soaks i n t o t h e r o t t e n planks that have been spread a b o u t the courts by t h e w o m e n in an a t t e m p t t o keep t h e m u d from being tracked i n t o the h o u s e . 1 9

Beginning in the 1870s some American households were revolutionized by mechanical devices capable of doing housework (e.g., washing machines, central heating, toilets, and iceboxes), the replacement o f dirty fuel (coal and wood) by clean fuel (gas and electricity), the city's provision o f paved roads, sewers, and municipal water systems, and by new forms o f communication and transportation. W e l l i n t o the twentieth century, however, the benefits o f the new municipal and domestic technologies were limited to the middle classes and the very upper reaches o f the working class. T h e depressions which blighted these decades, in 1873-79, 1883-86, and 1893-97, kept most of the working class t o o poor to afford them. As a result, the domestic burdens o f working class women were n o t eased by the new domestic technology which made middle class h o m e s pleasanter and more comfortable. Instead, working class women continCrosby Gray, The Past, Present and Future Sanitation of Pittsburg Department of Public Safety, 1889, p. 44, 1890, p. 66. 1 9 Paul Kellogg (ed.), Pittsburgh District, p. 96.

18

(Pittsburgh, 1889), p. 69;

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ued to do housework in much the same manner as their mothers did, although the city became dirtier, less sanitary, and more crowded as a result of increased industrialization and urbanization. 2 0 In a working class society attached to industries which relied primarily on male labor, men worked outside the home and women worked within it. Each member of the family pulled her or his own weight by fulfilling the allotted roles; earning money, or managing the family economy and domestic production. 2 1 In such an environment, a woman's economic contributions differed fundamentally from a man's, but were still important to her family and city. T h e hard physical labor a woman did in her own home enabled the family to manage on the husband's (and sometimes children's) income. In times of economic duress, frequent during this era, it was the wife's responsibility to make ends meet on the reduced pay packet. She decided how the family would manage, cooking cheaper food, economizing in the household wherever possible. O n e form this economy took was the continued use of the housewife's own labor to perform chores which were taken over by machines or done by servants in middle class households. This was both an accommodation to the industrial system, with its frequent periods of unemployment and depressions, and an indirect support of the urban industrial structure which deprived the working class while providing for the middle and upper classes. T h e term support must be used advisedly, of course, for working class women no less than their husbands wanted fatter pay packets. 22 Since married working class women in Pittsburgh did not work for cash wages, they depended upon their husbands (and to some extent their children) for support. 2 3 They were managers rather than earners and without an independent say in the allocation of the family income. They received whatever portion of their husband's pay packet he chose to give. Implicitly, women did not have the right to know how much their husbands earned or how much he kept for himself. T h e author of one of 2υ

T h e best general histories of the diffusion of household technology are Elizabeth Bacon, " T h e G r o w t h of Household Conveniences in the U.S., 1865-1900" (unpublished P h D diss., Radcliffe College, 1942) and Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, A Contribution to Anonymous History (London, 1948). 21 T h e conclusions about women's labor force participation arc based upon a ten-percent sample of the manuscript census, Pittsburgh, 1880. Less than one percent of all married women worked outside the home. Those who did so came from the working class and had such jobs as laundress or seamstress. O n e way in which women did contribute to the family income was to take in boarders. For a fuller explanation of the work involved in boarding see my diss., Technology's Step-daughters: The Impact of Industrialization upon Working Gass Women, Pittsburgh, 1865-1900 (University of Pittsburgh, 197}). 22 Byington, pp. }8,60.

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the first standard o f living studies among working class families noted that the small e x p e n d i t u r e for t o b a c c o and liquor in these b u d g e t s is t o b e a c c o u n t e d for, at least in part, by the fact that m e n did n o t tell at h o m e w h a t they had purchased. T h e w o m e n usually hesitated to ask the man a b o u t his s p e n d i n g m o n e y , and as in the days o f slack work they did n o t k n o w just w h a t he e a r n e d . 2 4

It was a woman's job to manage on whatever money her husband gave her, regardless of the amount taken before he turned over his pay packet to her. W o r k i n g class women's domestic labor and ability to work under crowded home conditions made bearable their husbands' low wages and bore the brunt o f whatever drinking, smoking or spending habits he might have. This is not to say that all or even most working class men had such habits, but that where they existed it was the wife w h o had t o c o m p e n s a t e — feeding, clothing, and housing the family, regardless. T h e wife may have been the chief spending agent, but she spent within the constraints set by the low wages and her husband's taking his spending money first. If the findings o f sociologists are adequate evidence, another result o f married women's exclusion from the labor force was a lack o f power within the family. Studies done in the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s indicate that when women worked they had more influence over "really important decisions" than women who did not work outside the home. W o r k inside the home was not regarded as an e c o n o m i c contribution to the family, and therefore, housewives " h a d little basis for demanding a large voice in major economic decisions."

25

In that way, although their

work at home sustained the family and made possible its g e t t i n g by in the face of reduced income and inadequate municipal services, the work itself was unvalued or undervalued by the working class family. There were two factors which kept working class women tied to the older, more laborious methods of doing housework at a time when other women substituted machine power for human power. T h e first and most significant was the scarcity and irregularity o f working class employment and the low wages received. T h e new household technology required a larger capital investment than most working class families felt they could afford. Even " t h e decision to buy a new piece o f furniture is often a matter for grave consideration." In a period o f economic unrest, when working class families kept expenditures to a m i n i m u m , they could not afford such 23

24 25

Children, in fact, were the ancillary breadwinners in Pittsburgh, Bvington, p. 41, and Kleinberg, ch. 5. Bvington. p. 82. William Chafe, The American Woman, Her Changing Social, Economic and Political RoU, 1920-1970 (New York, 1972), pp. 220-224.

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expensive items. Moreover, while they eased the women's work load and enhanced their self-esteem, they were not necessary for family survival, as were food, housing, clothing, and accident insurance. Although "housework may be materially lightened by the use of gas instead o f coal," it was too expensive for working class families. 2 6 T h e second factor which kept working class women from obtaining consumer durables was that husbands did not appreciate the amount of work done by their wives. In one woman's words, " t h e only time 'the mister' notices anything about the house is when I wash the curtains." Men considered it natural for women to labor at home. They did not, therefore, see the need t o replace their wives' physical labor with machine power. A contemporary observer noted that " m e n seldom appreciate the worth o f a devoted wife and look upon her many kind acts as a matter of duty." Because men were away from home when their wives did most o f the housework, and came h o m e tired from their own work, and because society took women's work in the home for granted, it followed that when money was scarce, working class women would continue to do their housework in the old way. Replacing their labor with machines did not have a high priority in the family budget. 2 7 T h e economically deprived working class women still brought water in from the pump in buckets t o heat on a coal or wood stove. T h e stoves themselves needed tending; lamps had to be kept trim and clean. Ammonia, cleanser, soap and water, rags, dusters and the all-important elbow grease were the only tools working class women had to combat the grit, dust, and dirt from the mills. Middle class women increasingly the medium through which their husbands displayed affluence, had indoor hot and cold running water, gas stoves, lighting and heating, washing machines, telephones, and, o f course, servants to do the heaviest w o r k . 2 8 W h a t the new household appliances did, obviously, was to substitute mechanical energy for human energy. T h a t meant housework became less physically arduous and that housewives gained some measure of free time. For example, the forced hot air furnace, which provided even, dirt-free heat to the entire house, was a great advance over the fireplace, which needed 27 28

Byington, pp. 85-86 Ibid., p. 108. This argument is drawn from Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class, An Economic Study of Institutions. Although outside the focus of this paper, it should be noted that middle class women were becoming cultural and political forces in American Society. The General Federation of W o m e n ' s Clubs. Women's Christian Temperance Union, suffrage and reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were middle class movements with few, if any, working class participants. See also Bacon, ρ 48.

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frequent tending and did not heat a whole room, and the closed stove, which did heat a room but still needed to be fired up, fed, and cleaned. A furnace cost anywhere from $75 to $300, while closed stoves cost $10 or $11. Most working class homes were heated by closed stoves, although some in the tenement districts still relied upon fireplaces. The cost of owning and operating even one such stove was high enough so that most working class homes had heat in only the kitchen. Photographs of working class homes taken during this period show a single chimney in the rear of the house. Middle class homes, on the other hand, had chimneys front and back and on both sides. These homes were heated with clean gas rather than the coal and wood common to working class homes. 2 9 As with heat, gas was substituted for the dirtier forms of energy in the cooking and lighting of middle class homes. The gas stove was cleaner, cooked more evenly, and, most marvelous of all, did not heat the entire kitchen to insufferable temperature during the summer. Cooking became easier and the kitchen a more pleasant room in which to work. The pleasantness of the kitchen is important, since it was the room in which a working class woman spent most of her time. She cooked, washed clothes and ironed there. Meal preparation itself continued to take a large portion of the working class woman's day. Marketing had to be done almost daily. T h e cost of an icebox and ice were high. (Ice alone cost forty-two cents per week for the minimum amount.) The low wages of the working class, especially laborers, prevented the purchase of items in the larger economical quantities. This was a severe problem in Pittsburgh, which had very high food prices. For example, a barrel of flour which would last the average family for six weeks, cost six dollars, a large amount to save for families living on seven to ten dollars a week. The irregular work schedules of her husband, children, and possibly boarders, meant that the working class woman was cooking constantly. Some men complained bitterly if their meals were not ready when they came home and physically abused their wives for this 29

Bacon pp. 25, 28-29. 219-220, 98-103. For pictures of these homes see Pittsburgh District, T h e Civic Frontage W o r k i n g class homes built during these years sometimes had a hole cut in the ceiling to allow heat to rise to the upper floor This arrangement was typical of the homes along the railroad tracks in Skunk Hollow near Boundary Way. Some are still used as homes with space heaters and plumbing added. T h e mansions of the era had central heating a n d / o r individual room gas fireplaces known as Taylor Burners. T h e fancier gas stoves had "water backs," hot water heaters which provided hot running water. Such stoves were expensive and required costlv indoor plumbing. Having a supply of hot water always on hand, however, made housework much easier. While gas lighting was f o u n d in most middle class homes, kerosene was used in the "vast majority of dwellings a m o n g the c o m m o n people " (Bacon, p. 104).

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outrage. Others demanded that their wives serve them no matter what the circumstance: whether they came home late or if their wives were sick. The demands of meal preparation coupled with other household chores put ceaseless pressure on working class women. That these women had more work than they could readily manage was made clear by one woman, who felt that a good husband was one who was careful of his clothes, didn't drink, and would "eat a cold dinner on washday without grumbling." 3 0 Washing clothes was certainly the most arduous and least pleasant of household chores. Virtually all working class women did their own laundry. The steam laundries which appeared in Pittsburgh in the mid-1880s catered to the affluent and to single men. W o r k i n g class families sent their laundry out only if the wife was sick and no daughter or other relative could do the wash for her. Washing machines cost $15, a week's salary for skilled workers and two weeks salary for laborers. Even after the turn of the century, washing machines were limited to working class families with "larger incomes," the aristocracy of the iron, glass, and steel trades. 31 Working class women did their laundry in the old-fashioned way. They brought water in from the pump, heated it on a coal or wood stove, emptied it into a washtub, and scrubbed the clothes while bent over the "back-breaking washboard." Soapy water was carried outside and emptied, clean water brought in from the pump once more, heated on the stove, and used for rinsing the clothes. Especially sweaty and dirty clothes, those worn by the men in the mills or children's play clothes and soiled infantwear, might well be soaped and rinsed again, then wrung out and hung to dry. In winter, washing was done in the kitchen. During the warm weather it might be done on the back porch if the family had one, in the courtyard or alley, or in the overheated kitchen. Ironing was also done in the kitchen, near the stove on which the iron was heated. Washing and ironing were hard, hot work, done under cramped conditions 3 2 30

31

32

P i t t s b u r g h Post, April 20. 1881; Price list for t h e C h a u t a u q u a Ice C o m p a n y . U.S. D e p a r t m e n t of Labor, Bulletin,July 1907. pp. P V J 2 8 . B y i n g t o n , pp. 66. "M-79; P i t t s b u r g h Poll, J u l y 2 , 1 8 6 8 , J a n u a r y 24. 1870; W e s t e r n Pennsylvania H u m a n e Society, Casework Records ( M a n u s c r i p t in possession of W .P H .S .. P i t t s b u r g h ) . J a n u a r y 9 . 1889; People's Monthly. J u n e 1, 1872, ρ 3. T h e o w n e r s h i p of t h e first forty w a s h i n g m a c h i n e s in P i t t s b u r g h was traced. All b u t f o u r were d e a r l v m i d d l e class. T h e s e f o u r w e r e t h e wives of a c a r p e n t e r a n d an a l d e r m a n a n d t w o w o m e n w h o kept b o a r d i n g h o u s e s P i t t s b u r g h Gazette. J a n u a r y 14, 1870. T h e D e x t e r W a s h i n g M a c h i n e a d v e r t i s e m e n t c l a i m e d t h a t t h e m a c h i n e was " c h e a p , s i m p l e , d u r a b l e , e f f e c t i v e " and did t h e " o r d i n a r y w a s h i n g " of a family in only o n e or t w o h o u r s . It saved s o a p a n d required n o b o i l i n g of c l o t h e s B y i n g t o n , ρ 8 7 , I a m g r a t e f u l t o Mrs. W e i r of W r i g h t Street, S o u t h Side, P i t t s b u r g h for her description of w a s h i n g c l o t h e s w h e n she was a child. She m a d e t h e process graphically u n d e r s t a n d a b l e t o a person b r o u g h t u p in t h e age of t h e electric w a s h i n g m a c h i n e .

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While the washing machine was only one o f many labor-saving devices available during this era, the limits of its diffusion were indicative o f the dispersion of technological advances. Both public and private technology were distributed according to the ability to pay. The notion that what happened in the working class neighborhoods affected the rest of the city had not yet taken hold in Pittsburgh. 3 3 T h e purchase of domestic technology was the purchase of leisure time for the women of the household. This technology-for-hire system had the effect of concentrating working class women's roles in comparison with the expansion of middle class women's roles during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. It also brought into sharp relief the distinctions between middle class and working class households. Where the working class woman had worked in a middle class home and had been exposed to the marvels of flush toilets and washing machines, the contrast must have been great. As Margaret Byington pointed out in her pioneering study of steelworkers' households: W e are all imitators, and t h e inability t o have w h a t o t h e r s have, even w h e n t h e absence o f the t h i n g is n o t in itself a privation, reacts on t h e individual life by lessening the sense o f self-respect and social s t a n d i n g . 3 4

It was not only that conditions did not improve in the working class households, but that they improved so dramatically in middle class ones. 3 5 At the time when increased traffic, crowding, and industrial pollution made cleaning difficult for working class women, middle class families moved away from Pittsburgh into paved, sewered, suburban neighborhoods and obtained the appliances which made housework easier. The economic structure of the city prevented working class women from making the cash contributions to their families which might have increased their power and broadened their role within the family. In effect, their labors in the home and their exclusion from the labor force permitted and reinforced the traditional role segregation of women and men. At the same time, the unequal spread of municipal and domestic technology meant that these women continued to spend long hours in the home. T h e long term effect of the government and private enterprise pay-as-you-go philosophy was to heighten class and sex role differentiations. In Pittsburgh, where women could not work outside the home, it also made J J

34

35

This notion paved the wav for municipal garbage collection and the extension of the water sewage and road systems. It gained currency among urban reformers during epidemics but did not become widespread until the Progressive era. See Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Yean (Chicago. 1962). Byington, p. 85. Ibid., p. 79.

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women into indirect participants in the industrial system, for it was their labor and ingenuity which sustained the working class family throughout this period. Indeed, their unpaid labor helped sustain the entire urban industrial system.

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Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915 Lizabeth A. Cohen The material life of American urban workers from 1885 to 1915, as revealed in patterns of home furnishings and organizations of domestic space, provides a new way of understanding the historical development of working-class culture. While in recent years historians have pursued the often elusive lives of working people, they have almost totally ignored domestic settings, and the material culture within them, as sources. Instead, historical investigation h a s focused on the workplace and local community. Only a few sociologists have examined home environments for evidence of the values and social identities of workers. 1 Historians have examined working-class homes primarily in the context of the Progressive Era housing reform movement. The keen interest that these early twentieth-century social reformers displayed in workers' home environment, however, should alert us to the significance of the home, the most private and independent world of the worker, in expressing the working-class family's social identity and interaction with middle-class culture. Studies of the material culture of the working-class home have much to contribute to our understanding of workers' experience beyond the outlines sketched by social historians who have quantified occupations and family events such as births, marriages and deaths. Although workers were often constrained in their household activities and consumption by low incomes and scarcity in housing options, they still made revealing choices in the process of ordering their personal environments. This essay explores developments in the consumption preferences of urban working-class families from 1885 to 1915 and interprets how these choices reflected and affected worker social identity. My investigation of working-class homes places them in the context of the material standards of the larger society in which the workers lived. Only a comparison between working-class and middle-class homes can elucidate the degree to which working-class material culture was distinctive or part of a larger cultural system. During the period 1885-1915 new people joined the ranks of the American working class as industry expanded. 2 Foreign-bom and native American workers commonly shared the experience of having recently left rural, small town settings for the urban industrial workplace. This study

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examines the homes both immigrant and native American workers made within the city environment. I will first trace the development of interior styles a m o n g the middle class during this period, probing particularly how esthetic trends reflected middle-class social attitudes. While the middle class was by no means a clear-cut group with uniform tastes, still its trend setters and reflectors, such a s popular magazines and home decoration advice books, articulated a consistent set of standards. Second, I will examine efforts by reformers and institutions to influence the tastes of workers toward these middle-class norms. Finally, I will analyze working-class homes in the light of workers' experiences and values and in relation to middle-class society. Herbert Gutman urged at the close of his seminal essay on the intergration of pre-industrial peoples into nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury America t h a t "much remains to be learned about the transition of native and foreign-bom American men and women to industrial society, and how t h a t transition affected such persons and the society in which they entered." 1 The study of the material life of American working people as expressed in consumption patterns and the arrangement of domestic interiors m a y offer some new insights toward t h a t goal. Workers who left no private written records may speak to us through the artifacts of their homes. The Changing Look of the Middle-Class Home American homes from the 1840s through the 1880s mirrored the nation's transformation from a n agricultural to an industrial society. J u s t as industrialization affected people and places in the country in different ways and at various rates, so too homes reflected a n individual's or family's degree of integration into the industrial economy. Location, occupation a n d financial status all affected the quantity and quality of consumption. The middle classes, with a status and income often attributable to an expanded economy and the mechanized means of production, were the most enthusiastic purchasers of mass-produced objects for their homes." Meanwhile, technologically-advanced products were less a b u n d a n t in the houses of those who lived more self-sufficient economic lives. The home served a s an accurate indicator of one's relationship to the industrial economy not by accident but as a result of the Victorians' contradictory attitude toward economic and technological change. Enthusiasm for, as well as anxiety toward, industrialization provoked both an appetite for new products and a need to incorporate them carefully into private life. At the same time t h a t new kinds of objects transformed the home, the Victorians loudly proclaimed the sanctity of the family refuge in a menacing, changing world. As J o h n Ruskin wrote: This is the true nature of home—it is the place of peace; the shelter, not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be a home.''

The home embodied a contradiction as both the arena for and refuge from technological penetration. I n s o f a r a s people could tolerate t h i s contradictory domestic environment, the home provided a setting for

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gradual adaptation to a technological and commercial world. The parlor best represented this accommodation to industrial life. As the room reserved for greeting and entertaining those beyond the family circle, the parlor permitted controlled interaction with the outside world. Similarly, a typical parlor overflowed with store-bought mass-produced objects, carefully arranged by family members: wall-to-wall carpeting enclosed by papered and bordered walls and ceilings; upholstered furniture topped with antimacassars; shawl-draped center tables displaying carefully arranged souvenir albums and alabaster scuptures; shelves and small stands overloaded with bric-a-brac and purchased mementos. Technology made much of this decor possible: carpeting, wallpaper, and textiles were ever cheaper and more elaborate, and the invention of the spiral spring encouraged the mass distribution of upholstered furniture. Artificial covering of surfaces and structural frames thus replaced the painted walls and floors and the hard wood furniture of an earlier era.6 After about 1885, popular magazines, home decoration manuals and architectural journals revealed a gradual but dramatic rejection of the cluttered spaces of the Victorian home in favor of two stylistic trends unified around a common concern for traditional American symbols. The Colonial Revival and the Arts and Crafts Movement both sought an American esthetic to replace European-inspired and technologically sophisticated styles. In the early twentieth century, an up-to-date middleclass family almost anywhere in America most likely lived in a Colonial Revival house, perhaps along newly extended trolley lines, or in a craftsman-style bungalow, often in a recently developed housing tract. 7 The Colonial Revival had its debut at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 amid the salute to American technological progress; the style reached full maturity in the 1920s with the opening of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the restoration of Williamsburg. 8 Middle-class Americans encountered the Colonial Revival style more intimately, however, not at these public sites, but within their own homes and neighborhoods. Just as house construction had dominated colonial American building, the domestic setting most engaged the attention of the revival style. While for some people Colonial Revival meant "accurately" recreating early American interiors replete with spinning wheels and antique furniture, for most middle-class Americans, adoption entailed purchasing new, usually mass-produced items in the colonial style, such as a house or parlor set. The Arts and Crafts Movement, also referred to at the time as the "craftsman" or "mission" style, evolved concurrently with the Colonial Revival. Exteriors and interiors boasted natural materials such as wood, shingle and greenery, exposed structural elements and surfaces, and open, flexible spaces. Elbert Hubbard's Roycraft Industries, Henry L. Wilson's Bungalow House Plan business, and similar firms popularized on a mass level the unique work of such artists as fumiture-maker Gustav Stickley and architects Greene and Greene. This craftsman style, justified in contradictory terms, met varied pressures of the day. On the one hand, the style depended on technological innovations in heating, lighting and windowglass and was merchandised

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as a solution to the household problems of dust, germs a n d inefficiency. 9 On the other h a n d , the Arts and C r a f t s Movement invoked a n d sought to replicate such traditional American symbols a s the farmhouse and its furnishings. In the H i n g h a m , Massachusetts Arts and C r a f t s Society, as elsewhere in the country, bite of old needlework and embroidery were brought down from dusty attics for admiration and imitation. Chairs and tables, of exquisite design and honest purpose, took the place of flimsy and overdecorated furniture.'"

Middle-class people's attraction to the Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts Movement corresponded to prevailing social attitudes, particularly toward workers and immigrants. Nativism, anti-industrialism, and a propensity toward environmental solutions for social problems were values incorporated into the new esthetic. Patriotic organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the National Society of Colonial Dames, both formed in the early 1890s, frequently encouraged the preservation of colonial artifacts and buildings. 11 Architects and client congregations found in the Colonial Revival a n appropriate architecture for Protestant churches to replace the Catholic-associated Gothic style. 12 Founders of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities blamed immigrant residents for the destruction of historical areas like Boston's North End. 1 1 Outspoken xenophobes like Henry Ford, Abbott Lawrence Lowell and Henry Cabot Lodge were important patrons of the preservation and Colonial Revival movements. 14 The Arts and C r a f t s style satisfied the anti-industrial instincts of m a n y middle-class Americans. Montgomery Schuyler, organizer of a n arts and crafts production studio outside Philadelphia, argued t h a t this new style was not only wholesome, but it revived the accomplishment of the colonial craftsman, " a n educated and thinking being" who loved his work without demanding a wage or labor union membership. 1 5 Instruction manuals for making mission furniture at home encouraged the de-mechanization of f u r n i t u r e - m a k i n g . Earlier, middle-class V i c t o r i a n s h a d handled ambivalence toward industrialism by monitoring, while increasing, their interaction with industrial products within the home. Now, the next generation was employing technological advances to restrain and deny the extent to which industrialism affected private life. Supporters of the c r a f t s m a n and Colonial Revival styles had confidence in the moral effect of this new physical environment. Stickley's Craftsman Magazine declared in a 1903 issue: Luxurious surroundings . . . suggest and induce idleness. Complex forms and costly materials have an influence upon life which tells a sad story in history. On the other hand, chasteness and restraint in form, simple, but artistic materials are equally expressive of the character of the people who use them. 16

The new domestic ideal represented a search for a truly American environment, in Stickley's words, "American homes exclusively for American needs." 17

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Spreading the Middle-Class Message Progressive Era reformers seized upon this new American domestic esthetic, contributing to its popularity and using it to assist in their campaigns to "uplift," "modernize" and "Americanize." Though social reform efforts in this period were broad in scope, a surprising range of reformers made use of the new styles as they sought to transform people's home environments in order to promote social improvement and cultural homogeneity. Often behind their pleas for cleaner, simpler, more sanitary homes for working people lay a desire to encourage more middle-class American environments. In a twist t h a t would have shocked a n y colonial farmer, the "early American look" became linked with a dust-, germ-, and disease-free scientific ideal. Reformers and associated organizations made efforts to influence workers in their homes, their neighborhoods, and their workplaces through promulgating domestic models; elsewhere, workers encountered these new middle-class style s t a n d a r d s more indirectly.* Both public institutions and privately-funded organizations conveyed the new esthetic to working-class girls within model classrooms created for housekeeping instruction. By the 1890s, particularly in urban areas, domestic science classes in public schools promoted ideal domestic environments. Similarly, settlement houses in workers' neighborhoods fostered middle-class home s t a n d a r d s through "Housekeeping Centers." In a guide to planning Housekeeping Centers, Housekeeping Notes: How To Furnish and Keep House in a Tenement Flat: A Series of Lessons Prepared for Use in the Association of Practical Housekeeping Centers of New York, reformer Mabel Kittredge perfectly stated the new esthetic. The section "Suitable Furnishing for a Model Housekeeping Flat or Home for Five People" recommended wood-stained and uncluttered furniture surfaces, iron beds with mattresses, and un-upholstered chairs. Walls must be painted, not papered; floors should be oak stained; window seats must be built in for storage; shelves should replace bulky sideboards ("the latter being too large for an ordinary tenement room; cheap sideboards are also very ugly"); screens provide privacy in bedrooms; a few good pictures should grace the walls, but only in the living room. 18 One settlement worker who gave domestic science instruction observed, "The purpose in our work is to help those in our classes to learn w h a t is the true American home ideal, and then do what we can to make it possible for them to realize it for themselves." 1 9 (Fig. 1) Settlement workers further promoted middle-class styles through the appearance of the house itself. Furnishing the settlement house interior became a self-conscious process for its residents. In a letter to her sister, a young J a n e Adams exclaimed, Madame Mason gave us an elegant old oak side-board... and we indulged in a set of heavy leather covered chairs and a 16" cut oak table. Our antique oak book case and my writing desk completes it.™ •Editor's Note: See: Robert J. Schurk, ' T h e American Arts and Crafts Movement and Progressiviem: Reform on Two Fronts," unpublished Masters thesis a t Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. This paper explores the shared themes of the Progressive movement in politics and the Arts & Crafts movement in objects: morality and honesty, antimaterialism, efficiency and economy, nature and conservation, health and strength, and education.

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Fig. 1 Illustrations to " H o m e m a k i n g in a Model F l a t " by Mabel Kittredge, Charities Communs. 4 November, 1905, 176.

and

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Edith Barrows, a settlement worker in Boston's South End House, recorded in her diary, "The pretty green sitting-room with its crackling fire and gay rugs and simple early American furniture is a good setting for all that transpires. I find that it h a s a spiritual and, I think, almost a physical reaction in the neighborhood." 21 Settlement workers hoped thatcomm unity patrons would incorporate the styles observed at the house into the furnishing of their own homes (Fig. 2). Industries were also involved in the business of setting standards for workers' homes through company housing, welfare programs and the creation of domestic-like spaces in the factory. Companies sought to communicate middle-class values through housing provided for workers. Frequently, individual entrances, even in multiple or attached dwellings, sought to reinforce nuclear family privacy. 22 Interiors promoted the specialization of rooms in an effort to discourage the taking in of boarders and to enforce a middle-class pattern of living revolving around parlor, kitchen, dining room and bedrooms. Some companies offered employees welfare programs which also affirmed middle-class domestic standards. Amoskeag Mills' employee benefits, for example, included a Textile Club (established to compete with ethnic organizations), a Textile School, a Cooking School, and a Home Nursing Service. 23 Within the factory, workers were frequently treated to domestic-like environments deliberately planned along middle-class esthetic lines. Employee lounges and lunchrooms were an innovation in the early twentieth century and frequently provided models for light, airy rooms with hardwood floors and simple furniture (Fig. 3). Thus, McCormick Harvesting Machine Company hired a social worker to survey factories nationwide and recommend proper recreation, education, luncheon and lounge facilities, which they proceeded to install. 24 In the minds of the reformers, simple, mission-style furniture and colonial objects, associated with the agrarian world of the pre-industrial c r a f t s m a n , seemed the obvious—and most appropriate—material arrangement for all Americans, particularly for industrial workers newly arrived from rural areas. And they tried with a vengeance to impose it. Despite the missionary zeal of middle-class reformers, however, they did not succeed very well in communicating new standards for domestic interiors to workers. In part, they were responsible for their own failure through ineffective organizational techniques and flawed programs. 25 Yet these shortcomings notwithstanding, workers seem to have actively rejected the means and messages of the reformers. Although working-class people patronized settlement houses, employee lounges and other model environments, many did so on their own terms, partaking of the recreational facilities and resources without taking the social message to heart. 2 6 Some working-class people did make objections known directly to the reformers. Miss J a n e E. Robbin, M.D., reported that during her first year at the College Settlement another resident encountered a patient on a home visit who said " t h a t she had had her breakfast, t h a t she did not want anything, and t h a t she did not like strange people poking around in her

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bureau drawer anyway." 27 Others used more tact in rejecting the attentions of reformers. A Boston settlement worker recalled her neighbors' response to a circulating collection of photographs of famous paintings: South End House had a loan collection of photographs of paintings which were given to the House to use in acquainting our friends with great works of art. These were sent from tenement to tenement to stay for a period of time and then removed while others took their place. The "Holy Pictures," as all of the Madonnas were called, were always mildly welcomed, but the lack of color made them unattractive, and the "unholy" pictures were usually tucked away to await the visitor's return. Some of our earliest calls became very informal... when the visitor joined the whole family in a hunt, often ending by finding us all on our knees when the missing photographs were drawn from beneath the bed or bureau. 2 "

More than working-class rejection of middle-class tastes, however, separated the worlds of the worker and the reformer. Workers' homes themselves hold the key to the nature and sources of their material preferences, apparently at odds with those held by the middle class. This conflict of value systems was powerfully perceived by a young participant in settlement house programs when she was faced with furnishing her own home at marriage. We had many opportunities to talk quite naturally of some of the problems of home-making and house-furnishing [wrote settlement worker Esther Barrows] The lack of plush and stuffed furniture [in our house] was a surprise to many, whose first thought would have been just that. One of our club girls who was about to be married eat down to discuss the matter in relation to her own new home. She seemed convinced by all the arguments brought forward to prove its undesirability from the point of view of hygiene and cleanliness. Months afterward she invited us to her home, much later than would have seemed natural, and as she greeted us rather fearfully she said, "Here it is, but you must remember you have had your plush days." Her small livingroom was overfilled by the inevitable "parlor set," while plush curtains hung at the windows and on either side of the door. The leeson learned by us from this incident was never to be forgotten. 29

A commitment to a classless America, achievable through educational and environmental solutions to social problems, blinded settlement workers like Esther Barrows to the strength of workers' own culture. Reformers had little conception of how deeply rooted these material values were in workingclass life.30 The Working Class Becomes 'At Home' in Urban America A lack of opportunities in both housing and neighborhood selection marked the living conditions of workers in this period. Whether home was an urban slum or a model tenement block, a milltown shack settlement or company housing, families frequently lived in substandard housing far below the quality that middle-class residents enjoyed, and had few alternative options. Furthermore, workers found themselves forced into low-rent districts separated from middle-class residential neighborhoods. Proximity to other working-class people of similar job and income status typified workers' experience more than the ethnic isolation we commonly associate with working-class life. Often, ethnic enclaves were no more than islands of a few blocks within a working-class community. 31 Limitations of housing choices, however, may have encouraged workers to value interior spaces even more.

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Within these working-class neighborhoods and homes, workers expressed a distinctive set of material values. An examination of attitudes toward home ownership; space allocation within the house or flat; the covering of the structural shell—floors, walls and windows; furniture selection; and decorative details illuminates the meanings workers attached to the artifacts of their homes. The view that workers should own their homes provided a rare convergence of opinion between reformers and working people, though each group advocated home ownership for different reasons. Some reformers felt that a home-owning working class would be more dependable and less revolutionary, and thus America would be "preserved" as a classless society. Others hoped that meeting mortgage payments in America might discourage immigrants from sending money home, and hence stem the tide of further immigration. '2 In short, reformers saw home ownership as a strategy for directing worker ambition along acceptable middle-class lines. Workers, on the other hand, sought to purchase homes for reasons more consistent with their previous cultural experience than with American middle-class values. 33 In Russia, even poor Jews often had owned the rooms in which they lived.14 Jews in many cases left Eastern Europe in response to Tsarist regulations prohibiting their ownership of property and interfering in their livelihoods as artisans, merchants and businessmen. 35 Emigration to America was a way of resisting "peasantizing" forces for these people. Recent work on Italian immigrants has shown that they likewise came to America hoping to preserve their traditional society and to resist efforts at making them laborers. 36 They viewed a sojourn in the States as a way of subsidizing the purchase of a home upon return to Italy. 37 Many Italians both in Europe and America sacrificed in order to leave their children a legacy of land, which supports David Riesman's theory that pre-industrial families trained and encouraged their children to "succeed them" rather than to "succeed" by rising in the social system. 38 In America, owning a home allowed Italians to uphold traditional community ties by renting apartments to their relatives or paesani, and in lees urban areas, to grow the fresh vegetables necessary to maintain a traditional diet.39 Furthermore, Slavic immigrants, property-less peasants in the old country, eagerly sought homes in America to satisfy long-standing ambitions. 40 Native American workers, moreover, descended from a tradition that equated private property ownership with full citizenship and promised all deserving, hard-working persons a piece of land. Thus, working-class people of many backgrounds sent mother and children to work, took in boarders, made the home a workshop, and sacrificed proper diet in order to save and buy a house, compromises too severe to substantiate some historians' claims that workers were merely pursuing upward social mobility toward middle-class goale.41 Once workers occupied purchased homes or rented flats their attitudes toward the utilization of interior space diverged markedly from those of the middle class. Reformers advocated a careful allocation of domestic space to create sharp divisions between public and family interactions and to separate family members from one another within the house. Reformers often blamed working-class people for contributing to unnecessary

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overcrowding and violations of privacy by huddling in the kitchen, for example, while other rooms were left vacant. 42 While the middle classes were better equipped with, and could more easily afford, housewide heating and lighting than the working classes, a difference of attitudes toward home living was more at issue. Many people from rural backgrounds were used to sharing a bedroom—and sometimes even a bed—with other family members.43 And for those working people whose homes were also their workplaces, the middle-class ethos of the home as an environment detached from the economic world was particularly inappropriate. Jewish, Irish, Italian and Slavic women frequently took in boarders and laundry, did homework, and assisted in family stores often adjoining their living quarters. For former farmers and self-employed artisans and merchants, this integration of home and work seemed normal.44 Among Southern Italian women, doing tenement homework in groups sustained "cortile" (shared housekeeping) relationships endangered in the American environment of more isolated homes.45

The reformer ideal of the kitchen as an efficient laboratory servicing other parts of the house found little acceptance among workers. Even when workers had a parlor, they often preferred to socialize in their kitchens. Mary Antin fondly recalled frequent visits in her married sister's kitchen in East Boston where after dinner dishes were washed, Frieda took out her sewing, and I took a book; and the lamp was between us, shining on the table, on the large brown roses on the wall, on the green and brown diamonds of the oil cloth on the floor . . . on the shining stove in the comer. It was such a pleasant kitchen—such a cosy, friendly room—that when Frieda and I were left alone I was perfectly happy just to sit there. Frieda had a beautiful parlor, with plush chairs and a velvet carpet and gilt picture frames; but we preferred the homely, homelike kitchen."

When investigators surveyed working-class people for their housing preferences in 1920, most still rejected small kitchens or kitchenettes in favor of ones large enough for dining.47 Workers kept their old-world hearths burning bright in their new American homes.48 Reformers applauded all attempts by workers to create parlors in their homes. They viewed such spaces as evidence of civilization, self-respect and assumption of middle-class standards. 49 A home with a parlor was more likely, they felt, to instill the middle-class image of the family as an emotional, sentimental unit. Margaret Byington's investigation of Homestead workers' homes reflected this bias: It has been said that the first evidence of the growth of the social instinct in any family is the desire to have a parlor. In Homestead this ambition has in many cases been attained. Not every family, it is true, can afford one, yet among my English-speaking acquaintances even the six families each of whom lived in three rooms attempted to have at least the semblance of a room devoted to sociability.50

Worker interest in creating parlor space at home varied,though often it correlated with occupational status. People who did little income-producing work at home, such as Jews and native Americans, most often established sitting rooms. Among Italians and Slavs, where men frequently had low

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status jobs and women brought work into the home, the combination living room/kitchen, so similar to their European homes, survived the longest When George Kracha left the Homestead steel mills and established his own butcher business, his home soon reflected his change in status in a way that his neighbors all recognized: They still lived in Cherry Alley and much as they had always lived, though Elena no longer kept boarders.... Kracha had bought new furniture and the room adjoining the kitchen, where the girls had slept, was now a parlor Its chief glories were a tasseled couch, a matching chair with an ingenious footreet that slid out like a drawer from inside the chair itself, and an immense oil lamp suspended from the ceiling by gilt chains. The lampshade was made of pieces of colored glass leaded together like a church window; it seemed to fill the room and was one of the most impressive objects Cherry Lane had ever seen. On the walls were colored lithographs in elaborate gilt frames of the Holy Family and of the Virgin with a dagger through her exposed heart. Drying ribbons of Easter palm were stuck behind them. On the floor was flowered oilcloth.111

Kracha'a adoption of a parlor, however, did not entail acceptance of middleclass modes of furnishing. Rather, his parlor presented a n elaborate collage of traditional and technological symbols. Nevertheless, reformers were not mistaken in recognizing a relationship between the presence of a parlor and some acculturation to middle-class ways. The expression of sentiment toward family and community through consumption involved in "parlorization" could indicate a favorable nod to middle-class values. For m a n y workers, though, their usage of kitchen and parlor still respected long-eetablished patterns of sociability. As Mary An tin's comment indicated, people with parlors did not necessarily abandon a preference for the kitchen. Likewise, workers' parlors frequently doubled as sleeping rooms at night. 5 2 Often when workers accommodated middle-class concepts of space in their homes, they imbued them with different social expectations. For example, Byington noted t h a t even when a native American worker in Homestead had a dining room, "it did not live up to its name." In five-room houses we find an anomaly known as the "dining room." Though a full set of dining room furniture, sideboard, table and dining chairs, are usually in evidence, they are rarely used at meals. The family sewing is frequently done there, the machine standing in the corner by the window; and sometimes, too, the ironing, to escape the heat of the kitchen; but rarely is the room ueed for breakfast, dinner or supper. The kitchen is the important room of the house."

Whereas the middle-class home provided a setting for a wide range of complex interactions related to work, family and community, and therefore required distinctions between private and public space, workers conceived of home as a private realm distinct from the public world. Because workers only invited close friends and family inside, the kitchen provided an appropriate setting for most exchange. Relationships with more distant acquaintances took place in the neighborhood—on the street or within shops, saloons or churches. The transference of these traditional patterns of socializing from an intimate pre-industrial community to the city had the impact of increasing the isolation of the working-class home. It is not surprising, therefore, that historians have noted t h a t among many immigrant groups, the American home became a h a v e n a s it h a d never been in the old world. 54

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When addressing working-class people, reformers justified the new esthetic primarily in terms of cleanliness; specifically they promoted a simple house shell free of "dust-collecting" carpets, drapes and wallpaper. For most working-class people, however, these decorative treatments were signs of taste and status that they hated to forsake. In almost all European rural societies, as in comparable places in America, only upper-class people had carpets and curtains.1·5 Workers embraced the accessibility of these products in urban America with delight. 56 In her autobiography, Mary Antin significantly remarked, "we had achieved a carpet since Chelsea days." 57 Given alien and institutional-looking housing facades, curtained windows were often a family's only way to make a personal statement to the world passing by. 58 Wallpaper—the worst demon of all to reformers—was for workers a privilege possible with prosperity and a relief from otherwise dull home walls. The behavior of one family occupying company housing which prohibited wallpaper near U.S. Steel's Gary, Indiana plant spoke for many others: "If you'll give us the colors we want, Sophie will do the painting herself." This broken up into foreign-sounding English, ended the parley with the company decorator And in the "box" occupied by her family she had her way. Outside it remained like all the rest in the row, but indoors, with stencil designs, such as she had learned to make at school, she painted the walls with borders at the top and panels running down to the floor.*19

This young girl replicated in paint the borders and backgrounds of wallpaper design; though learned in school, this long-standing form of rural folk art satisfied the esthetic tastes and status needs of her family (Fig. 4). Workers' selection of furniture perhaps best demonstrates their struggle to satisfy both traditional and new expectations with products available on the mass market. The middle-class preference for colonialinspired, natural wood furniture, built-ins and antiseptic iron bedsteads satisfied neither of these needs. As indicated earlier by Mabel Kittredge's despair in her Housekeeping Notes at "cheap" and "ugly" sideboards, workers valued case pieces like bureaus, chiffoniers and buffets. This preference evolved out of a long tradition of dowry chests and precious wardrobes, often the only substantial furniture in rural homes. Workers, however, did not necessarily consider their acquisition of such furnishings in urban America a conscious perpetuation of traditional material values. An uncomprehending settlement worker noted that There were the Dipskis, who displayed a buffet among other new possessions, and on the top of it rested a large cut-glass punch bowl. Mrs. Dipski said proudly, "And so I become American," a s she waved her hand toward the huge piece of furniture, which took an inordinately large place in her small room.6"

While reformers counseled against unhealthy wood bed frames as vermin-infested and expensive, feather bedding for causing overheating of the body, and fancy linens as unsanitary, working-class people sought to bring all three items into their homes.61 Byington found a "high puffy bed with one feather tick to sleep on and another to cover" typical of native American homes in Homestead. 62 An observer in Lawrence, Massachusetts

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in 1912 described the interior of an Italian mill-worker's home as boasting "pleasant vistas of spotless beds rising high to enormous heights and crowned with crotchet-edged pillows" 61 (Fig. 5). Immigrants carried feather bedding with them on the long trek to America more frequently than any other single item.64 Antin recalled her Russian neighbor's warnings before the family departed for the United States. "In America they sleep on hard mattresses, even in winter. Haveh Mirel, Yachne the dressmaker's daughter, who emigrated to New York two years ago, wrote her mother that she got up from childbed with sore sides, because she had no featherbed." 6S

Jews, Italians, Slavs and most other groups shared a native experience which prized feather bedding and viewed "the bed"—unveiled at marriage—as an emotional symbol of future family happiness. 66 The bed was the dominant feature of most peasant homes, often overpowering all other furniture, which usually was very minimal. Elizabeth Hasonovitz nostalgically remembered her mother in Russia, "bending over a boxful of goose feather, separating the down, preparing pillows for her daughters' future homes." 67 Italian marriage rituals prescribed that the bride's trousseau would provide hand-sewn, heavily embroidered linens along with the marital bed. Pride often produced beds so high that a stool was needed to climb into them. 68 At least for Italians, the bed played a part in the rituals of death as well. While in Italian villages an elaborate funeral bed commonly was carried into the public square, in America, Italian families laid out their dead ceremoniously at home.69 The embellished bed, then, was an important family symbol of birth, marriage and death, not an object to abandon easily. We have seen throughout this essay that workers' homes were crowded with plush, upholstered furniture, a taste which may have emerged out of valuing fluffy, elaborately decorated beds. As the parlor appeared on the home scene, workers brought traditional bed-associated standards to their newly acquired and prized possessions. Well aware of this working-class market for Victorian style furniture, Grand Rapids furniture factories produced their cheapest lines in styles no longer fashionable among middleclass consumers. 70 Since domestic reformers were promoting a simpler esthetic at the turn of the century, they denounced workers' taste for ornamentation. Photographs of working-class homes nevertheless reveal the persistence of abundant images on the walls (if only cheap prints, tom-out magazine illustrations and free merchant calendars), objects on tabletops, and layering in fabric and fancy paper of surface areas such as mantels, furniture and cabinet shelves. The fabric valance which appears in almost every photograph of a working-class interior demonstrates how a traditional symbol took on new applications in the American environment of industrial textile manufacture (Fig. 6). In cultures such as the Italian, for example, where people treasured the elaborate bed, they adorned it with as much decorative detailing as possible. In fact, it was often the only object warranting such

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art and expense in the home. A visitor to Sicily in 1905 shared with his travelogue readers a peek into a typical home where you are greeted by a bed, good e n o u g h for a person with a t h o u s a n d a year, of full double width with ends of h a n d s o m e l y carved w a l n u t wood or m a s s i v e b r a s s . T h e c o u n t e r p a n e which sweeps down to the floor is either h a n d - k n i t t e d , of e n o r m o u s weight, or m a d e of stripe of linen joined together with v a l u a b l e lace, over which is t h r o w n t h e yellow quilt so h a n d y for decoration. The show pillows are even finer, being smaller. 7 1

Under this spread, women fastened a piece of embroidered linen in a deep frill to cover any part of the bed's frame which might show. Even when families could afford attractive, wood frame bedsteads, they still used this "turnialettu," or valance, its original purpose forgotten. 72 In America, where fabric was cheap, the valance of gathered fabric found even more applications, adorning every possible surface and exposed area; in the 1930s Phyllis Williams even discovered valences over washing machines in second-generation Italian-American homes. 73 Fabric was draped and decoratively placed in a multitude of other ways as well. A FrenchCanadian woman who ran a boarding house for shoe factory workers in Lynn thus adorned the inexpensive crafteman-style Morris Chairs in her cluttered parlor with "inappropriate" antimacassars, an affront to any Arts and Crafts devotee (Fig. 7). While workers brought distinctive cultural heritages to bear on the furnishing of their urban-American homes, much less variety in material preferences resulted than one might have expected. Common pre-industrial small town experience, limits to the preferred and affordable merchandise available for purchase, and mixed ethnic worker communities seem to have encouraged a surprisingly consistent American working-class material ethos that was distinct from that of the middle class. The speed with which a particular working-class family forged a material transition to industrial life depended on numerous factors, among them the intent and length of the family's stay in urban America, prior economic and social experience, and financial resources. Once workers achieved a certain basic level of economic stability, their homes began to reflect this distinctive material ethos. While working-class people at the time may not have viewed their choices in reified terms, their set of preferences seems not arbitrary but a recurrent, symbolic pattern; not a simple emulation of middle-class Victorian standards with a time lag due to delayed prosperity, but rather a creative compromise forged in making a transition between two very different social and economic worlds. This working-class ethos of material values, inspired by rural values and reinforced within the urban neighborhood, departed in almost every way from esthetics favored by the middle class and promoted by the domestic reformers. Ironically, while middle-class people viewed the appearance of working-class homes as unsanitary, tasteless and un-American, workers in fact felt that their new material world represented acculturation to American urban ways. Through the purchase of mass-produced objects, they struggled to come to terms with this industrial society. Material acculturation occurred as an individual or family made peace between traditional and new world needs. While many workers must have

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realized their home decor differed from the styles promoted by the middle class, they still felt they had adapted to their new environment and had advanced far beyond their former conditions. While the middle-class person and reformer could not see it, the working-class homes steeped in comfort and covers stood as a symbol of being at home in industrial America. At the turn of the century, the homes of both the middle class and the working class reflected the transitions in their respective social experience. On the one hand, middle-class people rejected Victorian decor for a simpler more "American" esthetic, which they tried to impose on workers. On the other hand, the working class found in the ornate Victorian furnishing style an appropriate transition to industrial life. The "Victorian solution" was not an inevitable stage working people had to pass through, but a circumstance of need finding available product. Furniture in the Victorian style persisted even as the Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts dominated middle-class tastes. The old style well suited workers' rural based material values, while satisfying their desire to a d a p t to m a s s produced goods, just as it had for the middle class several generations earlier. The contrast in middle-class and working-class tastes in this period suggests t h a t workingclass culture indeed had an integrity of its own. Further historical research may explain the recent findings of sociologists studying contemporary working-class material life. Lee Rainwater and David Coplovitz, for example, have discovered distinctive patterns in working-class domestic values: a preference for plush and new furnishings over used ones; a taste for modern products such as appliances; the valuing of the interior over the exterior appearance of the house; and a common conception of home a s a private haven for the working-class family. 74 While these sociologists do not attempt to explain the historical development of material choices, connections to workers' homes in the 18851915 period are striking and w a r r a n t investigation. The decades discussed in this essay, when waves of new workers were integrated into an expanding industrial society, m a y have served as the formative stage for the development of a working-class culture. We have seen how the transitional interior created by workers during this period, as they adjusted to twentieth-century American life, satisfied some ambivalence toward the urban, industrial world. Within this material compromise, traditional cultural values and new consumer benefits could coexist. If workers' homes throughout the twentieth century continued to reflect the attributes of this initial transition, as Rainwater's and Coplovitz's studies tentatively suggest, we may have evidence that contradictions still lie at the core of the American working-class identity. Workers may have reified and passed down this transitional style, or a contradictory attitude toward industrial society may continue to inform their domestic selections. In either case, working-class material values have emerged through both resistance and adaptation to the social environment and have remained distinct from those of the middle class. The chief legacy of this contradiction may be a worker population which on the one hand boasts a unique and discernible material culture a n d on the other hand does not identify itself forthrightly as a working class.

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Notes I would like to thank Kenneth Ames for hie initial encouragement of this project and Laurence Levine for hie invaluable criticism. 'See Lee Rainwater, Workingman's Wife: Her Personality, World and Life Style (New York: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1959), Lee Rainwater, "Fear and the House as Haven in the Lower Class," Journal of the American Institute of Planners 32 (January 1966), 23-31; Dennis Chapman, The Home and Social Status (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Gross Press, 1955); Marc Fried, The World of the Urban Working Class (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973); Michael Young and Peter Willmott, The Symmetrical Family: A Study of Work and Leisure in the London Region (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973; London: Penguin Books, 1975). 'All historians who study "the working class" struggle with how to define it. While I am convinced the experience of class is complex, I will adopt a simple definition for the purposes of this essay and use "working class" to refer to skilled and unskilled workers. This essay will explore the extent to which people in the manual trades developed a distinctive material culture. 'Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 3-78. 'Siegfried Gideon, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Norton Library, 1969), 365. Mohn Ruskin, "Of Queen's Gardens," Sesame and Lilies (London: 1864; New York: Metropolitan Pub. Co., 1871), quoted in Gwendolyn Wright, "Making the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913." Diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1978, p. 21. 'Gideon, Mechanization, 384. 7See Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962); photographs of newly-developed areas in almost every town or city in America during this period. "John Rhoads, The Colonial Revival (New York: Garland Publishing. Inc., 1977). ^Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, "The Manufacture of Housework," Socialist Revolution 26 (Oct.-Dec., 1975), 5-40. '°C. Chester Lane, "Hingham Arts and Crafts" in Rhoads, Colonial Revival, p. 367. Even though American Arts and Crafts designers like Stickley were inspired by William Morris's English Arts and Crafts Movement, their debt to this source did not receive much attention in America. Stickley conveniently equated the American colonial experience with the medieval heritage being revived by the British. "Rhoads, Colonial Revival, 416. 12Rhoads, 207. ' 'Rhoads, 517. MRhoads, 524; see also Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press, 1956). '5Rhoads, Colonial Revival, 390. **The Craftsman Magazine (July 1903) in Rhoads, Colonial Revival, 285; also 412, 834. l7Gustav Stickly, "Als Ik Kan: 'Made in America' " in Rhoads, Colonial Revival, 488. '"Mabel Kittredge, Housekeeping Notes (Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows, 1911), 1-13. ''College Settlements Association, Annual Report 1902 (New York: 1902), 37. 20 Jane Addams, Letter to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, 13 Sept., 1889. Courtesy of Jane Addams Papers Project, Hull House, Chicago, Illinois. 21 Esther Barrows, Neighbors All: A Settlement Notebook (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 37. Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890 1917 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 163. 2:, Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 2, Gerd Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants and Americanization (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 88. 25See Maxine Seller, 'The Education of the Immigrant Woman, 1900 to 1935," Journal of Urban History (May 1978); John Daniels, Americanization via the Neighborhood (New York: Harper & Bros., 1920); Sophonisba Breckinridge, New Homes for Old (New York: Harper & Bros., 1921). »Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York: The Free Press, 1962), 152-153. 27 Jane E. Robbins, M.D., "The First Year at the College Settlement," The Survey 27 (24 Feb.,

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1912). 1801. " B a r r o w s , Neighbors, 7-8. -'"Barrows, 4-41. '"Here a n d elsewhere in t h e paper, "material v a l u e s " r e f e r s to p r e f e r e n c e s in t h e selection and a r r a n g e m e n t of objects of m a t e r i a l culture. " S e e S t e p h e n T h e r n s t r o m a n d Peter R. K n i g h t s , " M e n in M o t i o n , " Journal of Interdisciplinary History ( A u t u m n 1970), 7-35; Η u m b e r t S. Nelli, Italians in Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York: O x f o r d U n i v Press, 1970); M a d e l o n P o w e r s . " F a c e s a l o n g t h e Bar: T h e Saioon in W o r k i n g - C l a s s l i f e . 1890-1920," U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a , Berkeley, C a l i f o r n i a , 1979. Madelon P o w e r s h a s f o u n d t h a t " n e i g h b o r h o o d s a l o o n s " d r e w t o g e t h e r mixed e t h n i c g r o u p s living in the same residential areas. '•'Rhoads, Colonial Revival, 716; Lubove, Progressives, 23-24. " J a m e s H e n r e t t a , " T h e Study of Social Mobility," Labor History 18 ( S p r i n g 1977), 165-178. '«Philip Cowen, Memories of an American Jew (New York: I n t e r n a t i o n a l P r e s s , 1932), 231. ''•See Moses Rischin, The Promised City ( C a m b r i d g e : H a r v a r d U n i v . P r e s s , 1962), 22; Eli G i n z b e r g a n d H y m a n B e r m a n , eds., The American Worker in the Twentieth Century: A History through Autobiographies (New York: T h e Free Press, 1963), 12. ' " J o h n Briggs, An Italian Passage: Italians in Three American Cities, 1890 1930 (New H a v e n : Yale U n i v . Press, 1978). ,7 P a s c a l D ' A n g e l o , S o n of Italy (New York: M a c m i l l a n , 1924), 50. " D a v i d R i e s m a n , The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New H a v e n : Yale U n i v . Press, 1950), 40,17-18 in J a m e s H e n r e t t a , " F a m i l i e s a n d F a r m s : M e n t a l i t e i n P r e - I n d u a t r i a l A m e r i c a , " William and Mary Quarterly 35 ( J a n . , 1978), 30. " P h y l l i s Williams, South Italian Folkways in Europe and America (New H a v e n : Yale Univ. P r e s s , 1938), 50. ' " P e t e r Roberts, The Anthracite Coal Communities (New York: M a c m i l l a n , 1904), 43. " S e e S t e p h e n T h e m s t r o m , Poverty and Progress (New York: A t h e n e u m , 1971); J o h n Modell, " P a t t e r n s of C o n s u m p t i o n , A c c u l t u r a t i o n , a n d F a m i l y I n c o m e S t r a t e g i e s in L a t e Nineteenth C e n t u r y A m e r i c a , " in H a r e v e n a n d V i n o v s k i s , Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America ( P r i n c e t o n : P r i n c e t o n U n i v . Press, 1978), 206-240; V i r g i n i a Y a n s - M c L a u g h l i n , Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo 1880-1930(Ithaca: Cornell U n i v . P r e s s , 1977), for s a c r i f i c e s m a d e t o w a r d b u y i n g a house. " E d i t h A b b o t t a n d S o p h o n i s b a B r e c k i n r i d g e , The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 ( C h i c a g o : U n i v . of C h i c a g o Press, 1936), 2 6 3 « 4 . " D ' A n g e l o . Son, 5. " S e e Sydelle K r a m e r a n d J e n n y M a s u r , eds., Jewish Grandmothers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976); M a r y A n t i n , Promised Land (Boston: H o u g h t o n Mifflin, 1912; S e n t r y E d i t i o n , 1969). " D o n n a G a b a c c i a , " H o u s i n g a n d H o u s e h o l d Work in Sicily a n d N e w York, 1890-1910," Univ. of M i c h i g a n , A n n Arbor, 18. «6 A n t i n , Promised Land, 337. «'Morris Knowles, Industrial Housing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1920), 295. «"Donald Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 ( C h a p e l Hill: Univ. of N o r t h C a r o l i n a Press, 1963), 107. «'Robert Woods, The City WildernesslBoston: H o u g h t o n Mifflin, 1898; New York: A m o Press, 1970), 102. ^ M a r g a r e t B y i n g t o n , Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Russell Sage F o u n d a t i o n , 1910), 55. M T h o m a s Bell, Out of This Furnace (Boston: Little, B r o w n , 1941), 62. " S e e Rose C o h e n , Out of the Shadow (New York, 1918), 196-97 in J u d i t h S m i t h , " O u r Own K i n d , " Radical History Review 17 ( S p r i n g 1978), 113; William E l s i n g , "Life in New York T e n e m e n t H o u s e s , " in Robert Woods, Poor in Great Cities (New York: S c r i b n e r ' s S o n s , 1895), 50. " B y i n g t o n , Homestead, 56. h < Williams, Folkways, 17; Y a n s - M c L a u g h l i n , Buffalo Italians, 223; Nelli, Chicago Italians, 6. • " I n v e n t o r y R e s e a r c h a t Old S t u r b r i d g e Village on Western M a s s a c h u s e t t s h o m e s , 1790-1840, revealed a s i m i l a r p a t t e r n ; c a r p e t s a n d c u r t a i n s were r a r e a n d precious. « C a r l o B i a n c o , The Two Rosetos (Bloomington: I n d i a n a U n i v . P r e s s , 1974), 14; Williams, Folkways, 43. 57 A n t i n , Promised Land, 274 ( e m p h a s i s is mine). 58 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (London: P e n g u i n , 1971), 33. « G r a h a m T a y l o r , Satellite Cities (New York: D. A p p l e t o n , 1915; N e w York: A m o Press, 1970), 194.

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" Barrows, Neighbors, 70. -'Reports of the President 's Homes Commission

(Washington: Govt. Printing Office, 1909),

117. "-'Byington, Homestead, in Ginzberg, American Worker, 46. "'Cole, Laurence. 107. "'See Thomas Wheeler, ed.. The Immigrant Experience (New York: Dial Press, 1971; l»ndon: Penguin, 1977), 20, 155; Cowen, Memories. 233. "••Antin, Promised Land, 164. ""Williams, Folkways, 86. " 7 Elizabeth Hasonovitz, One of Them (Boston. Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 6 ""Williams, Folkways. 42. ""Bianco, Two Rosetos, 124. •"Kenneth Ames, "Grand Rapids Furniture at the Time of the Centennial," Winterthur Portfolio 10. 42. 7 'Douglas Sladen and Norma Latimer, Queer Things about Sicily (London: Anthony Treherne, 1905), 85. 7 -'Williams, Folkways. 42-43. 7 'Williams, 47. 7 , Rainwater, Workingman's Wife·. Rainwater, "House as Haven"; David Coplovitz, "The Problem of the Blue-Collar Consumer," in Arthur Shostak and William Gomberg, eds.. Blue Collar World: Studies of the Americdn Worker (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964).

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The "Industrial Revolution ' in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century RUTH

SCHWARTZ

C C) W A N

When we think about the interaction between technology and society, we tend to think in fairlv grandiose terms: massive computers invading the workplace, railroad tracks cutting through vast wildernesses, armies of woman and children toiling in the mills. These grand visions have blinded us to an important and rather peculiar technological revolution which has been going on right under our noses: the technological revolution in the home. This revolution has transformed the conduct of our daily lives, but in somewhat unexpected ways. T h e industrialization of the home was a process very different from the industrialization of other means of production, and the impact of that process was neither what we have been led to believe it was nor what students of the other industrial revolutions would have been led to predict. *

*

*

Some years ago sociologists of the functionalist school formulated an explanation of the impact of industrial technology on the modern family. Although that explanation was not empirically verified, it has become almost universally accepted.' Despite some differences in emphasis, the basic tenets of the traditional interpretation can be roughly summarized as follows: Before industrialization the family was the basic social unit. Most families were rural, large, and self-sustaining; they produced and processed almost everything that was needed for their own support and for trading in the marketplace, while at the same time performD R . C O W A N , associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is currently engaged in further research on the development of household technology and its impact upon women. This paper is based upon a presentation by Dr. Cowan at S H O T s 1973 annual meeting in San Francisco. 'For some classic statements of the standard view, see W. F. Ogburn and M. F. Nimkoff, Technology and the Changing Family (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); Robert F. Winch, The Modern Family (New York, 1952); and William J. Goode, The Family (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964).

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ing a host of other functions ranging from mutual protection to entertainment. In these preindustrial families women (adult women, that is) had a lot to do, and their time was almost entirely absorbed by household tasks. Under industrialization the family is much less important. T h e household is no longer the focus of production; production for the marketplace and production for sustenance have been removed to other locations. Families are smaller and they are urban rather than rural. T h e n u m b e r of social functions they p e r f o r m is much reduced, until almost all that remains is consumption, socialization of small children, and tension management. As their functions diminished, families became atomized: the social bonds that had held them together were loosened. In these postindustrial families women have very little to do, and the tasks with which they fill their time have lost the social utility that they once possessed. Modern women are in trouble, the analysis goes, because modern families are in trouble; and modern families are in trouble because industrial technology has either eliminated or eased almost all their f o r m e r functions, but modern ideologies have not kept pace with the change. T h e results of this time lag are several: some women suffer f r o m role anxiety, others land in the divorce courts, some enter the labor market, and others take to burning their brassieres and d e m a n d i n g liberation. This sociological analysis is a cultural artifact of vast importance. Many Americans believe that it is true and act upon that belief in various wavs: some hope to reestablish family solidarity by relearning lost productive crafts—baking bread, tending a vegetable garden —others dismiss the women's liberation movement as "simply a bunch of affluent housewives who have nothing better to do with their time." As disparate as they may seem, these reactions have a common ideological source—the standard sociological analysis of the impact of technological change on family life. As a theory this functionalist approach has much to recommend it, but at present we have very little evidence to back it up. Family history is an infant discipline, and what evidence it has produced in recent years does not lend credence to the standard view.2 Phillippe Aries has shown, for example, that in France the ideal of the small nuclear family predates industrialization by more than a century. 3 Historical demographers working on data f r o m English and French families have been surprised to find that most families were quite small and 'This point is made by Peter Laslett in "The Comparative History of Household and Family," in The American Family in Social Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York, 1973), pp. 28-29. 'Phillippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1960).

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that several generations did not ordinarily reside together; the extended family, which is supposed to have been the rule in preindustrial societies, did not occur in colonial New England either. 4 Rural English families routinely employed domestic servants, and even very small English villages had their butchers and bakers and candlestick makers; all these persons must have eased some of the chores that would otherwise have been the housewife's burden. 5 Preindustrial housewives no doubt had much with which to occupy their time, but we may have reason to wonder whether there was quite as much pressure on them as sociological orthodoxy has led us to suppose. The large rural family that was sufficient unto itself back there on the prairies may have been limited to the prairies—or it may never have existed at all (except, that is, in the reveries of sociologists). Even if all the empirical evidence were to mesh with the functionalist theory, the theory would still have problems, because its logical structure is rather weak. Comparing the average farm family in 1750 (assuming that you knew what that family was like) with the average urban family in 1950 in order to discover the significant social changes that had occurred is an exercise rather like comparing apples with oranges; the differences between the fruits may have nothing to do with the differences in their evolution. Transferring the analogy to the case at hand, what we really need to know is the difference, say, between an urban laboring family of 1750 and an urban laboring family 100 and then 200 years later, or the difference between the rural nonfarm middle classes in all three centuries, or the difference between the urban rich yesterday.and today. Surely in each of these cases the analyses will look very different from what we have been led to expect. As a guess we might find that for the urban laboring families the changes have been precisely the opposite of what the model predicted; that is, that their family structure is much firmer today than it was in centuries past. Similarly, for the rural nonfarm middle class the results might be equally surprising; we might find that married women of that class rarely did any housework at all in 1890 because they had farm girls as servants, whereas in 1950 they bore the full brunt of the work themselves. I could go on, but the point is, I hope, clear: in order to verify or falsify the functionalist theory, it will be necessary to know more than we presently do about the impact of industrialization on families of similar classes and geographical locations. •

*

*

'See Laslett, pp. 20-24; and Philip J. Greven, "Family Structure in Seventeenth Century Andover, Massachusetts," William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966): 234-56. 'Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), passim.

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With this problem in mind I have, for the purposes of this initial study, deliberately limited myself to one kind of technological change affecting one aspect of family life in only one of the many social classes of families that might have been considered. What happened, I asked, to middle-class American women when the implements with which they did their everyday household work changed? Did the technological change in household appliances have any effect upon the structure of American households, or upon the ideologies that governed the behavior of American women, or upon the functions that families needed to perform? Middle-class American women were defined as actual or potential readers of the better-quality women's magazines, such as the Ladies' Home Journal, American Home, Parents' Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and McCall's* Nonfictional material (articles and advertisements) in those magazines was used as a partial indicator of some of the technological and social changes that were occurring. The Ladies' Home Journal has been in continuous publication since 1886. A casual survey of the nonfiction in the Journal yields the immediate impression that that decade between the end of World War I and the beginning of the depression witnessed the most drastic changes in patterns of household work. Statistical data bear out this impression. Before 1918, for example, illustrations of homes lit by gaslight could still be found in the Journal; by 1928 gaslight had disappeared. In 1917 only one-quarter (24.3 percent) of the dwellings in the United States had been electrified, but by 1920 this figure had doubled (47.4 percent—for rural nonfarm and urban dwellings), and by 1930 it had risen to four-fifths percent). 7 If electrification had meant simply the change from gas or oil lamps to electric lights, the changes in the housewife's routines might not have been very great (except for eliminating the chore of cleaning and filling oil lamps); •For purposes of historical inquiry, this definition of middle-class status corresponds to a sociological reality, although it is not, admittedly, very rigorous. Our contemporary experience confirms that there are class differences reflected in magazines, and this situation seems to have existed in the past as well. On this issue see Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletoum: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York, 1929), pp. 240-44, where the marked difference in magazines subscribed to by the businessclass wives as opposed to the working-class wives is discussed; Salme Steinberg, "Reformer in the Marketplace: E. W. Bok and The Ladies Home JournaT' (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1973), where the conscious attempt of the publisher to attract a middle-class audience is discussed; and Lee Rainwater et al., Workmgman's Wife (New York, 1959), which was commissioned by the publisher of working-class women's magazines in an attempt to understand the attitudinal differences betweeen workingclass and middle-class women. 7 Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. 510.

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but c h a n g e s in lighting were the least of t h e changes that electrification implied. Small electric appliances followed quickly on the heels of the electric light, and some of those augured much more profound changes in the housewife's routine. Ironing, for example, had traditionally been one of the most dreadful household chores, especially in warm weather when the kitchen stove had to be kept hot for the better part of the day; irons were heavy and they had to be returned to the stove frequendy to be reheated. Electric irons eased a good part of this burden. 8 They were relatively inexpensive and very quickly replaced their predecessors; advertisements for electric irons first began to appear in the ladies' magazines after the war, and by the end of the decade the old flatiron had disappeared; by 1929 a survey of 100 Ford employees revealed that ninety-eight of them had the new electric irons in their homes. 9 Data on the diffusion of electric washing machines are somewhat harder to come by; but it is clear from the advertisements in the magazines, particularly advertisements for laundry soap, that by the middle of the 1920s those machines could be found in a significant number of homes. The washing machine is depicted just about as frequently as the laundry tub by the middle of the 1920s; in 1929, forty-nine out of those 100 Ford workers had the machines in their homes. T h e washing machines did not drastically reduce the time that had to be spent on household laundry, as they did not go through their cycles automatically and did not spin dry; the housewife had to stand guard, stopping and starting the machine at appropriate times, adding soap, sometimes attaching the drain pipes, and putting the clothes through the wringer manually. T h e machines did, however, reduce a good part of the drudgery that once had been associated with washday, and this was a matter of no small consequence. 10 Soap powders appeared on the market in the early 1920s, thus eliminating the need to scrape and boil bars of laundry soap. 11 By the end of the 'The gas iron, which was available to women whose homes were supplied with natural gas, was an earlier improvement on the old-fashioned flatiron, but this kind of iron is so rarely mentioned in the sources that I used for this survey that I am unable to determine the extent of its diffusion. •Hazel Kyrk, Economic Problems of the Family (New York, 1933), p. 368, reporting a study in Monthly Labor Review 30 (1930): 1209-52. "Although this point seems intuitively obvious, there is some evidence that it may not be true. Studies of energy expenditure during housework have indicated that by far the greatest effort is expended in hauling and lifting the wet wash, tasks which were not eliminated by the introduction of washing machines. In addition, if the introduction of the machines served to increase the total amount of wash that was done by the housewife, this would tend to cancel the energy-saving effects of the machines themselves. "Rinso was the first granulated soap; it came on the market in 1918. Lux Flakes had been available since 1906: however it was not intended to be a general laundry product

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1920s Blue Monday must have been considerably less blue for some housewives—and probably considerably less "Monday," for with an electric iron, a washing machine, and a hot water heater, there was no reason to limit the washing to just one day of the week. Like the routines of washing the laundry, the routines of personal hygiene must have been transformed for many households during the 1920s—the years of the bathroom mania. 1 * More and more bathrooms were built in older homes, and new homes began to include them as a matter of course. Before the war most bathroom fixtures (tubs, sinks, and toilets) were made out of porcelain by hand; each bathroom was custom-made for the house in which it was installed. After the war industrialization descended upon the bathroom industry; cast iron enamelware went into mass production and fittings were standardized. In 1921 the dollar value of the production of enameled sanitary fixtures was $2.4 million, the same as it had been in 1915. By 1923, just two years later, that figure had doubled to $4.8 million; it rose again, to $5.1 million, in 1925.13 T h e first recessed, double-shell cast iron enameled bathtub was put on the market in the early 1920s. A decade later the standard American bathroom had achieved its standard American form: the recessed tub, plus tiled floors and walls, brass plumbing, a single-unit toilet, an enameled sink, and a medicine chest, all set into a small room which was very often 5 feet square. 14 The bathroom evolved more quickly than any other room of the house; its standardized form was accomplished in just over a decade. Along with bathrooms came modernized systems for heating hot water: 61 percent of the homes in Zanesville, Ohio, had indoor plumbing with centrally heated water by 1926, and 83 percent of the homes valued over $2,000 in Muncie, Indiana, had hot and cold running but rather one for laundering delicate fabrics. "Lever Brothers,"Fortune 2 6 (November 1940): 95. " I take this account, and the term, from Lynd a n d Lynd, p. 97. Obviously, there were many American homes that had bathrooms before t h e 1920s, particularly u r b a n row houses, a n d I have f o u n d no way of determining w h e t h e r t h e increases of the 1920s were m o r e marked than in previous decades. T h e rural situation was quite different f r o m the u r b a n ; the President's C o n f e r e n c e o n H o m e Building a n d H o m e Ownership reported that in the late 1920s, 71 percent of t h e u r b a n families surveyed had bathrooms, but onlv 3 3 percent of the rural families did ( J o h n M. Cries a n d J a m e s Ford, eds.. Homemaking, Home Furnishing and Information Services, President's C o n f e r ence on H o m e Building a n d H o m e Ownership, vol. 10 [Washington, D.C., 1932], p. 13). " T h e data above come f r o m Siegfried Giedion, Mecluuuzation Takes Command (New York, 1948), pp. 685-703. " F o r a description of the standard bathroom see Helen Sprackling, " T h e M o d e r n Bathroom," Parents' Magazine 8 (February 1933): 25.

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water by 1935. 15 T h e s e figures may not be typical of small American cities (or even large American cities) at those times, but they do jibe with the impression that one gets from the magazines: after 1918 references to hot water heated on the kitchen range, either for laundering or for bathing, become increasingly difficult to find. Similarly, d u r i n g the 1920s many homes were outfitted with central heating; in Muncie most of the homes of the business class had basement heating in 1924; by 1935 Federal Emergency Relief Administration data for the city indicated that only 22.4 percent of the dwellings valued over $2,000 were still heated by a kitchen stove. 16 What all these changes meant in terms of new habits for the average housewife is somewhat hard to calculate; changes there must have been, but it is difficult to know whether those changes produced an overall saving of labor and/or time. Some chores were eliminated—hauling water, heating water on the stove, maintaining the kitchen fire—but other chores were added—most notably the chore of keeping yet another room scrupulously clean. It is not, however, difficult to be certain about the changing habits that were associated with the new American kitchen—a kitchen f r o m which the coal stove had disappeared. In Muncie in 1924, cooking with gas was done in two out of three homes; in 1935 only 5 percent of the homes valued over 52,000 still had coal or wood stoves for cooking. 17 After 1918 advertisements for coal and wood stoves disappeared from the Ladies' Home Journal; stove manufacturers purveyed onlv their gas, oil, o r electric models. Articles giving advice to homemakers on how to deal with the trials and tribulations of starting, stoking, and maintaining a coal or a wood fire also disappeared. Thus it seems a safe assumption that most middle-class homes had switched to the new method of cooking by the time the depression began. T h e change in routine that was predicated on the change from coal or wood to gas or oil was p r o f o u n d ; aside f r o m the elimination of such chores as loading the fuel and removing the ashes, the new stoves were much easier to light, maintain, and regulate (even when they did not have thermostats, as the earliest models did not). 18 Kitchens were, in addition, much easier to clean when they did not have coal dust regularly tracked through them; one writer in the Ladies' 11

Zanrsville, Ohio and Thirty-six Other American Cities (New York, 1927), p. 65. Also see Roben S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown m Transition (New York, 1936), p. 537. Middletown is Muncie, Indiana. "Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, p. 96, and Middletown in Transition, p. 539. "Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, p. 98, and Middletown in Transition, p. 562. " O n the advantages of the new stoves, see Boston Cooking School Cookbook (Boston, 1916), pp. 15-20; and Russell Lynes, The Domesticated Americans (New York, 1957), pp. 119-20.

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Home Journal estimated that kitchen cleaning was reduced by one-half when coal stoves were eliminated. 19 Along with new stoves came new foodstuffs and new dietary habits. Canned foods had been on the market since the middle of the 19th century, but they did not become an appreciable part of the standard middle-class diet until the 1920s—if the recipes given in cookbooks and in women's magazines are a reliable guide. By 1918 the variety of foods available in cans had been considerably expanded from the peas, corn, and succotash of the 19th century; an American housewife with sufficient means could have purchased almost any fruit or vegetable and quite a surprising array of ready-made meals in a can —from Heinz's spaghetti in meat sauce to Purity Cross's lobster ä la Newburg. By the middle of the 1920s home canning was becoming a lost art. Canning recipes were relegated to the back pages of the women's magazines; the business-class wives of Muncie reported that, while their mothers had once spent the better part of the summer and fall canning, they themselves rarely put up anything, except an occasional jelly or batch of tomatoes. 20 In part this was also due to changes in the technology of marketing food; increased use of refrigerated railroad cars during this period meant that fresh fruits and vegetables were in the markets all year round at reasonable prices. 21 By the early 1920s convenience foods were also appearing on American tables: cold breakfast cereals, pancake mixes, bouillon cubes, and packaged desserts could be found. Wartime shortages accustomed Americans to eating much lighter meals than they had previously been wont to do; and as fewer family members were taking all their meals at home (businessmen started to eat lunch in restaurants downtown, and factories and schools began installing cafeterias), there was simply less cooking to be done, and what there was of it was easier to do. 22 *

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Many of the changes just described—from hand power to electric power, from coal and wood to gas and oil as fuels for cooking, from one-room heating to central heating, from pumping water to running water—are enormous technological changes. Changes of a similar dimension, either in the fundamental technology of an industry, in the diffusion of that technology, or in the routines of workers, would have long since been labeled an "industrial revolution." T h e change from the laundry tub to the washing machine is no less profound than '»"How to Save Coal While Cooking," Ladies Home Journal 25 (JanuaTy 1908): 44. " L y n d and Lynd, Middletrmm, p. 156. " I b i d . ; see also "Safeway Stores," Fortune 26 (October 1940): 60. " L y n d and Lynd, Middletown, pp. 134-35 and 153-54.

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the change from the hand loom to the power loom; the change from pumping water to turning on a water faucet is no less destructive of traditional habits than the change from manual to electric calculating. It seems odd to speak of an "industrial revolution" connected with housework, odd because we are talking about the technology of such homely things, and odd because we are not accustomed to thinking of housewives as a labor force or of housework as an economic commodity—but despite this oddity, I think the term is altogether appropriate. In this case other questions come immediately to mind, questions that we do not hesitate to ask, say, about textile workers in Britain in the early 19th century, but we have never thought to ask about housewives in America in the 20th century. What happened to this particular work force when the technology of its work was revolutionized? Did structural changes occur? Were new jobs created for which new skills were required? Can we discern new ideologies that influenced the behavior of the workers? The answer to all of these questions, surprisingly enough, seems to be yes. T h e r e were marked structural changes in the work force, changes that increased the work load and the j o b description of the workers that remained. New jobs were created for which new skills were required; these jobs were not physically burdensome, but they may have taken u p as much time as the jobs they had replaced. New ideologies were also created, ideologies which reinforced new behavioral patterns, patterns that we might not have been led to expect if we had followed the sociologists' model to the letter. Middle-class housewives, the women who must have first felt the impact of the new household technology, were not flocking into the divorce courts o r the labor market o r the forums of political protest in the years immediately after the revolution in their work. What they were doing was sterilizing baby bottles, shepherding their children to dancing classes and music lessons, planning nutritious meals, shopping f o r new clothes, studying child psychology, and hand stitching colorcoordinated curtains—all of which chores (and others like them) the standard sociological model has apparently not provided for. T h e significant change in the structure of the household labor force was the d i s a p p e a r a n c e of paid and u n p a i d servants ( u n m a r r i e d daughters, maiden aunts, and grandparents fall in the latter category) as household workers—and the imposition of the entire j o b on the housewife herself. Leaving aside for a moment the question of which was cause and which effect (did the disappearance of the servant create a d e m a n d for the new technology, or did the new technology make the servant obsolete?), the phenomenon itself is relatively easy

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to document. Before World War I, when illustrators in the women's magazines depicted women doing housework, the women were very often servants. When the lady of the house was drawn, she was often the person being served, or she was supervising the serving, or she was adding an elegant finishing touch to the work. Nursemaids diapered babies, seamstresses pinned up hems, waitresses served meals, laundresses did the wash, and cooks did the cooking. By the end of the 1920s the servants had disappeared from those illustrations; all those jobs were being done by housewives—elegantly manicured and coiffed, to be sure, but housewives nonetheless (compare figs. 1 and 2).

If we are tempted to suppose that illustrations in advertisements are not a reliable indicator of structural changes of this sort, we can corroborate the changes in other ways. Apparently, the illustrators reallv did know whereof thev drew. Statistically the n u m b e r of persons throughout the countrv employed in household service dropped from 1.851.000 in 1910 to 1,411,000 in 1920, while the n u m b e r of households enumerated in the census rose from 20.3 million to 24.4 million. 23 In Indiana the ratio of households to servants increased from 13.5/1 in 1890 to 30.5/1 in 1920, and in the country as a whole the number of paid domestic servants per 1,000 population d r o p p e d from 98.9 in 1900 to 58.0 in 1920. 24 T h e business-class housewives of Niuncie reported that they employed approximately one-half as many woman-hours of domestic service as their mothers had done. 2 5 In case we are tempted to doubt these statistics (and indeed statistics about household labor are particularly unreliable, as the labor L often transient, part-time, or simply unreported), we can turn to articles on the servant problem, the disappearance of unpaid family workers, the design of kitchens, or to architectural drawings for houses. All of this evidence reiterates the same point: qualified servants were difficult to find; their wages had risen and their n u m b e r s fallen; houses were being designed without maid's rooms; daughters and unmarried aunts were finding jobs downtown; kitchens were being designed for housewives, not for servants.2® T h e first h o m e with a "Historical Statistics, p p . 16 a n d 77. " F o r I n d i a n a data, see L v n d a n d L y n d . Middle town, p. 169. F o r n a t i o n a l d a t a , see D. L. Kaplan a n d M. Claire Casey. Occupational Trends in the United States, 1900-1950, U.S. B u r e a u of t h e C e n s u s W o r k i n g P a p e r n o . 5 ( W a s h i n g t o n , D.C., 1958), t a b l e 6. T h e e x t r e m e d r o p in n u m b e r s o f s e r v a n t s b e t w e e n 1910 a n d 1920 also l e n d s c r e d e n c e to t h e notion that this d e m o g r a p h i c f a c t o r s t i m u l a t e d t h e i n d u s t r i a l revolution in h o u s e w o r k . " L v n d a n d L y n d , Middletown, p. 169. " O n t h e d i s a p p e a r a n c e of m a i d e n a u n t s , u n m a r r i e d d a u g h t e r s , a n d g r a n d p a r e n t s , see Lynd a n d L y n d , Middletown, p p . 25, 99. a n d 110; E d w a r d Bok, " E d i t o r i a l , " American Home 1 (October 1928): 15; " H o w t o Buy Life I n s u r a n c e , " Ladies' Home Journal 4 5

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Fic. 1.—The housewife as manager. (Ladies' Home Journal, April 1918. Courtesy of Lever Brothers Co.)

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Fic. 2.—The housewife as laundress. (Ladies' Home Journal, August 1928. Courtesy of Colgate-Palmolive-Peet.)

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kitchen that was not an entirely separate room was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1934.27 In 1937 Emily Post invented a new character for her etiquette books: Mrs. Three-in-One, the woman who is her own cook, waitress, and hostess.28 There must have been many new Mrs. Three-in-Ones abroad in the land during the 1920s. As the number of household assistants declined, the number of household tasks increased. The middle-class housewife was expected to demonstrate competence at several tasks that previously had not been in her purview or had not existed at all. Child care is the most obvious example. The average housewife had fewer children than her mother had had, but she was expected to do things for her children that her mother would never have dreamed of doing: to prepare their special infant formulas, sterilize their bottles, weigh them every day, see to it that they ate nutritionally balanced meals, keep them isolated and confined when they had even the slightest illness, consult with their teachers frequentlv, and c h a u f f e u r them to dancing lessons, music lessons, and evening parties. 29 There was very little Freudianism in this new attitude toward child care: mothers were not spending more time and effort on their children because they feared the psychological trauma of separation, but because competent nursemaids could not be found, and the new theories of child care required constant attention from well-informed persons—persons who were willing and able to read about the latest discoveries in nutrition, in the control of contagious diseases, or in the techniques of behavioral psychology. These persons simply had to be their mothers. Consumption of economic goods provides another example of the housewife's expanded job description; like child care, the new tasks associated with consumption were not necessarily physically burdensome, but they were time consuming, and they required the acquisi(March 1928): 35. T h e house plans appeared every month in American Home, which began publication in 1928. On kitchen design, see Giedion, pp. 605-21; "Editorial," Ladies' Home Journal 45 (April 1928): 36; advertisement for Hoosier kitchen cabinets. Ladies Home Journal 45 (April 1928): 117. Articles on servant problems include " T h e Vanishing Servant Girl," Ladies Home Journal 35 (May 1918): 48; "Housework, T h e n and Now," American Home 8 ( J u n e 1932): 128; "The Servant Problem." Fortune 24 (March 1938): 80-84; and Report of the YWCA Commission on Domestie Service (Los Angeles, 1915). "Giedion, p. 619. Wright's new kitchen was installed in the Malcolm Willey House, Minneapolis. "Emily Post, Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, 5th ed. rev. (New York, 1937), p. 823. "This analysis is based upon various child-care articles that appeared during the period in the Ladies' Home Journal, American Home, and Parents' Magazine. See also Lynd and Lynd, Middletoum, chap. 11.

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tion of new skills.30 Home economists and the editors of women's magazines tried to teach housewives to spend their money wisely. T h e present generation of housewives, it was argued, had been reared by mothers who did not ordinarily shop for things like clothing, bed linens, or towels; consequently modern housewives did not know how to shop and would have to be taught. Furthermore, their mothers had not been accustomed to the wide variety of goods that were now available in the modern marketplace; the new housewives had to be taught nui just to be consumers, but to be informed consumers. 31 Several contemporary observers believed that shopping and shopping wisely were occupying increasing amounts of housewives' time. 32 Several of these contemporary observers also believed that standards of household care changed during the decade of the 1920s. 33 The discovery of the "household germ" led to almost fetishistic concern about the cleanliness of the home. T h e amount and frequency of laundering probably increased, as bed linen and underwear were changed more often, children's clothes were made increasingly out of washable fabrics, and men's shirts no longer had replaceable collars and cuffs. 34 Unfortunately all these changes in standards are difficult to document, being changes in the things that people regard as so insignificant as to be unworthy of comment; the improvement in standards seems a likely possibility, but not something that can be proved. In any event we do have various time studies which demonstrate somewhat surprisingly that housewives with conveniences were spending just as much time on household duties as were housewives without them—or, to put it another way, housework, like so many " J o h n Kenneth Galbraith has remarked upon the advent of woman as consumer in Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston, 1973), pp. 29-37. " T h e r e was a sharp reduction in the number of patterns for home sewing offered by the women's magazines during the 1920s; the patterns were replaced by articles on "what is available in the shops this season." On consumer education see, for example, "How to Buy Towels," Ladies Home Journal 45 (February 1928): 134; "Buying Table Linen," Ladies' Home Journal 45 (March 1928): 43; and "When the Bride Goes Shopping," American Home 1 (January 1928): 370. "See, for example, Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, pp. 176 and 196; and Margaret G. Reid, Economics of Household Production (New York, 1934), chap. 13. " S e e Reid, pp. 64-68; and Kyrk, p. 98. " S e e advertisement for Cleanliness Institute—"Self-respect ..ives on soap and water," Ladies' Home Journal 45 (February 1928): 107. On changing bed linen, see "When the Bride Goes Shopping," American Home 1 (January 1928): 370. On laundering children's clothes, see, "Making a Layette," Ladies' HomeJournal 45 ( J a n u a r y 1928): 20; and Josephine Baker, "The Youngest Generation," Ladies' Home Journal 45 (March 1928): 185.

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other types of work, expands to fill the time available. 35 A study comparing the time spent per week in housework by 288 f a r m families and 154 town families in O r e g o n in 1928 revealed 61 hours spent by farm wives and 63.4 h o u r s by town wives; in 1929 a U.S. Department of Agriculture study of families in various states produced almost identical results. 39 Surely if the standard sociological model were valid, housewives in towns, w h e r e p r e s u m a b l y t h e benefits of specialization and electrification were most likely to be available, should have been s p e n d i n g f a r less time at their work than their rural sisters. However, just a f t e r World War II economists at Brvn Mawr College reported the same p h e n o m e n o n : 60.55 hours spent by farm housewives, 78.35 hours by women in small cities, 80.57 hours by women in large ones—precisely the reverse of the results that were expected. 3 7 A recent survey of time studies conducted between 1920 and 1970 concludes that the time spent on housework by n o n e m p l o y e d housewives has r e m a i n e d r e m a r k a b l y c o n s t a n t throughout the period. 3 8 All these results point in the same direction: mechanization of the household m e a n t that time e x p e n d e d on some jobs decreased, but also that new jobs were substituted, a n d in some cases—notably laundering—time e x p e n d i t u r e s for old jobs increased because of higher standards. T h e advantages of mechanization may be somewhat more dubious than they seem at first glance. »

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As the job of the housewife changed, the connected ideologies also changed; there was a clearly perceptible difference in the attitudes that women brought to housework b e f o r e and a f t e r World War I. 39 "This point is also discussed at length in my paper "What Did Labor-saving Devices Reallv Save?" (unpublished). "As reported in Lyrk, p. 51. "Brvn Mawr College Department of Social Economy, Women During the War and After (Philadelphia. 1945); and Ethel Goldwater, "Woman's Place," Commentary 4 (December 1947): 578-85. " J o A n n Vanek, "Keeping Busy: T i m e Spent in Housework, United States, 1920-1970" (Ph.D. diss.. University of Michigan, 1973). Vanek reports an average of 53 hours per week over the whole period. This figure is significantly lower than the figures reported above, because each time study of housework has been done on a different basis, including different activities under the aegis of housework, and using different methods of reporting time expenditures: the Bryn Mawr and Oregon studies are useful for the comparative figures that they report internally, but they cannot easily be compared with each other. "This analysis is based upon my reading of the middle-class women's magazines between 1918 and 1930. For detailed documentation see my paper "Two Washes in the Moming and a Bridge Party at Night: T h e American Housewife between the Wars," Women's Studies (in press). It is quite possible that the appearance of guilt as a strong

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Before the war the trials of doing housework in a servantless home were discussed and they were regarded as just that—trials, necessary chores that had to be got through until a qualified servant could be found. After the war, housework changed: it was no longer a trial and a chore, but something quite different—an emotional "trip." Laundering was not just laundering, but an expression of love; the housewife who truly loved her family would protect them from the embarrassment of tattletale gray. Feeding the family was not just feeding the family, but a way to express the housewife's artistic inclinations and a way to encourage feelings of family loyalty and affection. Diapering the baby was not just diapering, but a time to build the baby's sense of security and love for the mother. Cleaning the bathroom sink was not just cleaning, but an exercise of protective maternal instincts, providing a way for the housewife to keep her family safe from disease. Tasks of this emotional magnitude could not possibly be delegated to servants, even assuming that qualified servants could be found. Women who failed at these new household tasks were bound to feel guilt about their failure. If I had to choose one word to characterize the temper of the women's magazines during the 1920s, it would be "guilt." Readers of the better-quality women's magazines are portrayed as feeling guilty a good lot of the time, and when they are not guilty they are embarrassed: guilty if their infants have not gained enough weight, embarrassed if their drains are clogged, guilty if their children go to school in soiled clothes, guilty if all the germs behind the bathroom sink are not eradicated, guilty if they fail to notice the first signs of an oncoming cold, embarrassed if accused of having body odor, guilty if their sons go to school without good breakfasts, guilty if their daughters are unpopular because of old-fashioned, or unironed, or—heaven forbid—dirty dresses (see figs. 3 and 4). In earlier times women were made to feel guilty if they abandoned their children or were too free with their affections. In the years after World War I, American women were made to feel guilty about sending their children to school in scuffed shoes. Between the two kinds of guilt there is a world of difference. #

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Let us return for a moment to the sociological model with which this essay began. T h e model predicts that changing patterns of element in advertising is more the result of new techniques developed by the advertising industry than the result of attitudinal changes in the audience—a possibility that I had not considered when doing the initial research for this paper. See A. Michael McMahon, "An American Courtship: Psychologists and Advertising Theory in the Progressive Era," American Studies 13 (1972): 5-18.

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LADIES HOME JOURNAL

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Fic. 3.—Sources of housewifely guilt: the good mother smells sweet. {Ladies' Home Journal, August 1928. Courtesy of Warner-Lambert, Inc.)

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES LADIi-yf HOME JOl'RN'AL

Fic. 4.—Sources of housewifely guilt: the good mother must be beautifuL (JLadies' Home Journal, July 1928. Courtesy of Colgate-Palmolive-PeeL)

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household work will be correlated with at least two striking indicators of social change: the divorce rate and the rate of married women's labor force participation. T h a t correlation may indeed exist, but it certainly is not reflected in the women's magazines of the 1920s and 1930s: divorce and full-time paid e m p l o y m e n t were not part of the life-style or the life pattern of the middle-class housewife as she was idealized in her magazines. T h e r e were social changes a t t e n d a n t u p o n the introduction of modern technology into the home, but they were not the changes that the traditional functionalist model predicts; on this point a close analysis of the statistical data corroborates the impression conveyed in the magazines. T h e divorce rate was indeed rising d u r i n g the years between the wars, but it was not rising nearly so fast for the middle and u p p e r classes (who had, presumably, easier access to the new technology ) as it was for the lower classes. By almost every gauge of s o c i o e c o n o m i c s t a t u s — i n c o m e , p r e s t i g e of h u s b a n d ' s w o r k , education—the divorce rate is h i g h e r f o r persons lower on the socioeconomic scale—and this is a p h e n o m e n o n that has been constant over time. 40 T h e supposed connection between improved household technology and married women's labor force participation seems just as dubious, and on the same grounds. T h e single socioeconomic factor which correlates most strongly (in cross-sectional studies) with married women's employment is husband's income, and the correlation is strongly negative: the higher his income, the less likely it will be that she is working. 4 ' Women's labor force participation increased d u r i n g the 1920s but this increase was d u e to the influx of single women into the force. Married women's participation increased slightly d u r i n g those years, but that increase was largely in factory labor —precisely the kind of work that middle-class w o m e n (who were, again, m u c h more likely to have labor-saving devices at home) were least likely to do. 42 If t h e r e were a necessary connection between the improvement of household technology and either of these two social indicators, we would expect the data to be precisely the reverse of what in fact has occurred: women in the higher social classes should have fewer f u n c " F o r a s u m m a r y of the literature on d i f f e r e n t i a l divorce rates, see Winch, p. 706; and William J . G o o d e , After Divorce (New York, 1956) p. 44. T h e earliest p a p e r s d e m o n strating this d i f f e r e n t i a l rate a p p e a r e d in 1927, 1935, a n d 1939. " F o r a s u m m a r y of t h e literature o n m a r r i e d w o m e n ' s labor f o r c e participation, see J u a n i t a K r e p s . Sex in the Marketplace: American Women at Work (Baltimore, 1971), p p . 19-24. " V a l e r i e K i n c a i d O p p e n h e i m e r , The Female Labor Force in the United States, Population M o n o g r a p h Series, no. 5 (Berkeley, 1970), p p . 1 - 1 5 ; a n d Lynd a n d L y n d , Middletown, p p . 124-27.

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tions at home and should therefore be more (rather than less) likely to seek paid employment or divorce. Thus for middle-class American housewives between the wars, the social changes that we can document are not the social changes that the functionalist model predicts; rather than changes in divorce or patterns of paid employment, we find changes in the structure of the work force, in its skills, and in its ideology. These social changes were concomitant with a series of technological changes in the equipment that was used to do the work. What is the relationship between these two series of phenomena? Is it possible to demonstrate causality or the direction of that causality? Was the decline in the number of households employing servants a cause or an effect of the mechanization of those households? Both are, after all, equally possible. The declining supply of household servants, as well as their rising wages, may have stimulated a demand for new appliances at the same time that the acquisition of new appliances may have made householders less inclined to employ the laborers who were on the market. Are there any techniques available to the historian to help us answer these questions? *

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In order to establish causality, we need to find a connecting link between the two sets of phenomena, a mechanism that, in real life, could have made the causality work. In this case a connecting link, an intervening agent between the social and the technological changes, comes immediately to mind: the advertiser—by which term I mean a combination of the manufacturer of the new goods, the advertising agent who promoted the goods, and the periodical that published the promotion. All the new devices and new foodstuffs that were being offered to American households were being manufactured and marketed by large companies which had considerable amounts of capital invested in their production: General Electric, Procter Sc Gamble, General Foods, Lever Brothers, Frigidaire, Campbell's, Del Monte, American Can, Atlantic & Pacific Tea—these were all well-established firms by the time the household revolution began, and they were all in a position to pay for national advertising campaigns to promote their new products and services. And pay they did; one reason for the expanding size and number of women's magazines in the 1920s was, no doubt, the expansion in revenues from available advertisers.4® Those national advertising campaigns were likely to have been powerful stimulators of the social changes that occurred in the " O n the expanding size, number, and influence of women's magazines during the 1920s, see Lvnd and Lynd, MiddleUmm, pp. 150 and 240-44.

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household labor force; the advertisers probably did not initiate the changes, but they certainly encouraged them. Most of the advertising campaigns manifestly worked, so they must have touched upon areas of real concern for American housewives. Appliance ads specifically suggested that the acquisition of one gadget or another would make it possible to fire the maid, spend more time with the children, or have the afternoon free for shopping. 44 Similarly, many advertisements played upon the embarrassment and guilt which were now associated with household work. Ralston, Cream of Wheat, and Ovaltine were not themselves responsible for the compulsive practice of weighing infants and children repeatedly (after every meal for newborns, every day in infancy, every week later on), but the manufacturers certainly did not stint on capitalizing upon the guilt that women apparently felt if their offspring did not gain the required amounts of weight.4* And yet again, many of the earliest attempts to spread "wise" consumer practices were undertaken by large corporations and the magazines that desired their advertising: mail-order shopping guides, "producttesting" services, pseudoinformative pamphlets, and other such promotional devices were all techniques for urging the housewife to buy new things under the guise of training her in her role as skilled consumer. 46 Thus the advertisers could well be called the "ideologues" of the 1920s, e n c o u r a g i n g certain very specific social changes—as ideologues are wont to do. Not surprisingly, the changes that occurred were precisely the ones that would gladden the hearts and fatten the purses of the advertisers; fewer household servants meant a greater demand for labor and timesaving devices; more household tasks for women meant more and more specialized products that they would need to buy; more guilt and embarrassment about their failure to succeed at their work meant a greater likelihood that they would buy the products that were intended to minimize that failure. Happy, "See, for example, the advertising campaigns of General Electric and Hotpoint from 1918 through the rest of the decade of the 1920s; both campaigns stressed the likelihood that electric appliances would become a thrifty replacement for domestic servants. " T h e practice of carefully observing children's weight was initiated by medical authorities, national and local governments, and social welfare agencies, as part of the campaign to improve child health which began about the time of World War I. "These practices were ubiquitous, American Home, for example, which was published by Doubleday, assisted its advertisers by publishing a list of informative pamphlets that readers could obtain; devoting half a page to an index of its advertisers; specifically naming manufacturer's and list prices in articles about products and services; allotting almost one-quarter of the magazine to a mail-order shopping guide which was not (at least ostensibly) paid advertisement; and as part of its editorial policy, urging its readers to buy new goods.

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full-time housewives in intact families spend a lot of money to maintain their households; divorced women and working women do not. T h e advertisers may not have created the image of the ideal American housewife that dominated the 1920s—the woman who cheerfully and skillfully set about making everyone in her family perfectly happy and perfectly healthy—but they certainly helped to perpetuate it. T h e role of the advertiser as connecting link between social change and technological change is at this juncture simply a hypothesis, with nothing much more to recommend it than an argument from plausibility. Further research may serve to test the hypothesis, but testing it may not settle the question of which was cause and which effect—if that question can ever be settled definitively in historical work. What seems most likely in this case, as in so many others, is that cause and effect are not separable, that there is a dynamic interaction between the social changes that married women were experiencing and the technological changes that were occurring in their homes. Viewed this way, the disappearance of competent servants becomes one of the factors that stimulated the mechanization of homes, and this mechanization of homes becomes a factor (though by no means the only one) in the disappearance of servants. Similarly, the emotionalization of housework becomes both cause and effect of the mechanization of that work; and the expansion of time spent on new tasks becomes both cause and effect of the introduction of time-saving devices. For example the social pressure to spend more time in child care may have led to a decision to purchase the devices; once purchased. the devices could indeed have been used to save time— although often they were not. *

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If one holds the question of causality in abeyance, the example of household work still has some useful lessons to teach about the general problem of technology and social change. T h e standard sociological model for the impact of modem technology on family life clearly needs some revision: at least for middle-class nonrural American families in the 20th century, the social changes were not the ones that the standard model predicts. In these families the functions of at least one member, the housewife, have increased rather than decreased; and the dissolution of family life has not in fact occurred. Our standard notions about what happens to a work force under the pressure of technological change may also need revision. When industries become mechanized and rationalized, we expect certain general changes in the work force to occur: its structure becomes m o r e highly differentiated, individual workers become m o r e

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specialized, managerial functions increase, and the emotional context of the work disappears. On all four counts our expectations are reversed with regard to household work. The work force became less rather than more differentiated as domestic servants, unmarried daughters, maiden aunts, and grandparents left the household and as chores which had once been performed by commercial agencies (laundries, delivery services, milkmen) were delegated to the housewife. The individual workers also became less specialized; the new housewife was now responsible for every aspect of life in her household, from scrubbing the bathroom floor to keeping abreast of the latest literature in child psychology. The housewife is just about the only unspecialized worker left in America—a veritable jane-of-all-trades at a time when the jacks-ofall-trades have disappeared. As her work became generalized the housewife was also proletarianized: formerly she was ideally the manager of several other subordinate workers; now she was idealized as the manager and the worker combined. Her managerial functions have not entirely disappeared, but they have certainly diminished and have been replaced by simple manual labor; the middle-class, fairly well educated housewife ceased to be a personnel manager and became, instead, a chauffeur, charwoman, and "short-order cook. T h e implications of this phenomenon, the proletarianization of a work force that had previously seen itself as predominantly managerial, deserve to be explored at greater length than is possible here, because I suspect that they will explain certain aspects of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s which have previously eluded explanation: why, for example, the movement's greatest strength lies in social and economic groups who seem, on the surface at least, to need it least—women who are white, well-educated, and middle-class. Finally, instead of desensitizing the emotions that were connected with household work, the industrial revolution in the home seems to have heightened the emotional context of the work, until a woman's sense of self-worth became a function of her success at arranging bits of fruit to form a clown's face in a gelatin salad. That pervasive social illness, which Betty Friedan characterized as Mthe problem that has no name," arose not among workers who found that their labor brought no emotional satisfaction, but among workers who found that their work was invested with emotional weight far out of proportion to its own inherent value: "How long," a friend of mine is fond of asking, "can we continue to believe that we will have orgasms while waxing the kitchen floor?"

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES THE

MANUFACTURE OF

HOUSEWORK Barbara

Ehrenrcicb

and Deirdre

English

This article is a chapter from a forthcoming, still untitled, book by Ebrcnreicb and English, which examines the rise of medical and quasi-medical professions and of the cultural hegemony of seientism in twentieth-century North America. Λ major section of the book is about the "scientific" reformulation of women's domestic work in the period of industrial capitalism. This chapter deals with the reinterpretation of housework as a full-time professional activity; the following chapter will examine changing ideologies of childraising in the twentieth century. The general historical perspective is this: Capitalist industrialization and urbanization produced a violent uphetival in social life. The family ceased to be a productive unit; patriarchy was seriously undermined. What occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century was no less than the creation of a new culture — the culture of monopoly capitalism. The creation of this new culture — hence the rationalization of social life — was the task of a rising urban professional and managerial group of physicians, scientists, educators, and social reformers of various types. The reformulation of women's domestic labor was part of a general effort to reconstruct the family, which had been seriously weakened as an agency of social reproduction in the nineteenth century.

is ι Ν ν ι s ι II L κ work. No one notices it until it isn't done — we notice the unmade bed, not the scrubbed and polished floor. Housework is maintenance and restoration: the daily restocking of the shelves and return of each cleaned and repaired object to its starting point in the family game of disorder. A f t e r a d a y ' s w o r k , no matter how tiring, the housewife has produced no tangible object — e x c e p t , perhaps, dinner; and that will disappear in less than half the time it took to preIIOUSKWUKK

IVf iviiiihl like to ackiumlcdge the help of Hctb ίΛιgaii, l.iz liweu, Amte liirmr. Verm· Moberg, ami Harbara Waterman, vibo patiently read and commented on early drafts uf this article. — The Authors.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK pare. She is not supposed to m a k e a n y t h i n g , b u t to buy, and t h e n to prepare or conserve what has been b o u g h t , dispelling dirt and depreciation as they creep up. A n d each housewife works alone. No c o m p a n i o n workers, n o o t h e r housewives, not even o t h e r m e m b e r s of her family (unless they are pre-school age) are a r o u n d during her w o r k d a y . H o u s e w o r k has been politically invisible t o o . Unpaid, unorganized " w o m e n ' s work," it has been dismissed and ignored, as if h o u s e w o r k were sonicthing as biologically d e t e r m i n e d as c h i l d b i r t h , an ancient and changeless f o r m of female labor. T o most people, the history of h o u s e w o r k is merely the story of its elimination. In t h e p o p u l a r view, urbanization and the mass m a r k e t i n g of "labor-saving" devices greatly lessened t h e burden of w o r k in the h o m e . Yet recent studies by Heidi l l a r t m a n n and J o a n n Vanek s h o w that actually, neither ol these factors has led t o a decrease in t h e time spent by the fulltime h o u s e w i f e o n h o u s e w o r k . 1 Their findings are largely based on their i n d e p e n d e n t examinations of a series of time-budget studies of housewives carried out in t h e nineteen-twenties and thirties, s p o n s o r e d by t h e Bureau of H o m e E c o n o m i c s of t h e D e p a r t m e n t of Agriculture. The studies c o m p a r e d rural and u r b a n w o m e n , tabulating which tasks they did, h o w m u c h t i m e t h e y spent o n t h e m , a n d whether they used "labor-saving devices." H a r t m a n n writes: " T h e studies were u n a n i m o u s in finding little or n o timesaving with t h e new e q u i p m e n t a n d utilities." S h e p o i n t s o u t that a Michigan Survey Research C e n t e r s t u d y d o n e in t h e early nineteen-sixties also f o u n d t h a t t h e availability of " l a b o r saving devices" saved n o time on h o u s e w o r k . J o a n n Vanek points o u t t h a t " t h e time d e v o t e d t o l a u n d r y has actually increased over t h e past f i f t y y e a r s " — e v e n with t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n of the washer, t h e d r y e r , and wash-and-wear c l o t h i n g — " a p p a r ently because p e o p l e have m o r e c l o t h e s and wash t h e m m o r e often"2 Vanek, c o m p a r i n g t h e early studies with o t h e r s f r o m t h e forties, fifties, and sixties, c o n c l u d e s that t o d a y ' s full-time ( n o n e m p l o y e d ) h o u s e w i f e p u t s in as m a n y h o u r s of h o u s e w o r k as her f o r e m o t h e r s did. H a r t m a n n c o m e s to t h e same conclusion, pointing t o rising s t a n d a r d s , decreasing use of servants, and increased use of the n e w e q u i p m e n t and p r o d u c t s as s o m e of the factors that have k e p t t h e length of the w o r k - w e e k t h e same. As Vanek and H a r t m a n n agree, t h e c o n s t a n t length of t h e work-week has n o t m e a n t t h a t w o m e n have been d o i n g t h e same things in t h e h o m e . O n t h e c o n t r a r y , t h e w o r k t h a t a

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES woman d o c s in h e r h o m e t o d a y — a n d her h o m e i t s e l f — i s worlds apart f r o m her g r a n d m o t h e r ' s . T h e r e has b e e n a drastic rise in standards of h o u s e c l e a n i n g and a f u n d a m e n t a l substitution of m a i n t e n a n c e , c o n s u m e r i s t , and managerial tasks f o r the more p r o d u c t i v e tasks t h a t o n c e o c c u p i e d h o m c m a k e r s . Housework as a whole was n o t r e d u c e d by technological a n d social change: it was t r a n s f o r m e d . But h o w ? A writer in t h e May 1 9 3 0 Ladies' Home Journal explained it this way: Because we h o u s e w i v e s of t o d a y have t h e t o o l s t o reach it, we dig every d a y a f t e r t h e dust t h a t g r a n d m o t h e r left to a spring c a t a c l y s m . If f e w of us have nine children for a weekly b a t h , w e have t w o or t h r e e f o r a daily immersion. It o u r c o n s c i e n c e s d o n ' t prick us over vacant pie shelves or e m p t y c o o k i e jars, they d o over meals in which a vitamin m a y be o m i t t e d o r a calorie lacking. 3 What h a p p e n e d t o prick t h e conscience of t h e " m o d e r n housew i f e " and convince her t h a t t h e cleaning, washing, and polishing her g r a n d m o t h e r ignored in order t o m a k e pies (and probably shirts and preserves) n o w required daily fulfillment? And why, o n c e she was f r e e d f r o m t h e r o o t cellar and t h e yearly preservation of f r u i t s a n d vegetables, did she e n d up spending m a n y more h o u r s cleaning, s h o p p i n g , and managing the home? Is it that h o u s e w o r k , as B e t t y Friedan has p u t it, simply expands t o fill t h e t i m e a l l o t t e d ? 4 U n d o u b t e d l y this is part of t h e e x p l a n a t i o n f o r t h e c o n s t a n c y of time s p e n t in housework over t h e decades: t r a p a w o m a n in t h e h o m e and she will find s o m e t h i n g to d o — iron t h e sheets, bake bread, or rearrange t h e f u r n i t u r e . But w o m e n w e r e n o t merely finding things to do in the h o m e because t h e y were there. T o a certain extent, they were t h e r e b e c a u s e t h e r e were, or appeared to be, so m a n y things to d o in t h e h o m e . Most of all, it w a s w o m a n ' s role as child-reaicr t h a t kept her h o m e , and industrial m e t h o d s never s h o r t e n e d t h e n u m b e r of h o u r s in a child's day. F e w p e o p l e d o u b t e d t h a t it was woman's j o b t o raise t h e c h i l d r e n , o r t h a t children should be raised at h o m e . So if large n u m b e r s of w o m e n stayed h o m e throughout t h e industrial e r a , it w a s because t h a t was w h e r e their children were.* In f a c t , t h e early t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y saw a new consciousness of t h e value of c h i l d h o o d and of t h e importance of early c h i l d h o o d socialization. * Of c o u r s e , m a n y f a c t o r s h e l p e d t o k e e p w o m e n in t h e h o m e . F o r exa m p l e , d i s c r i m i n a t i o n in e d u c a t i o n a n d in hiring o p e r a t e d t o k e e p women o u t of t h e j o b m a r k e t , h e l p i n g t u r n t h e m i n t o a " r e s e r v e l a b o r a r m y " : on t a p f o r s u d d e n e x p a n s i o n s of p r o d u c t i o n , as in w a r s , b u t o t h e r w i s e safely " s t o r e d " in t h e h o m e .

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK At this t i m e , t w o m o v e m e n t s arose w h i c h , while organizationally separate, h a d a c o m m o n goal. B o t h sought to replace the disappearing p r o d u c t i v e f u n c t i o n s of t h e h o m e with new w o r k that would challenge t h e abilities a n d elevate the status of t h e h o m e m a k e r . Both were c o n c e r n e d above all with the preservation of " t h e h o m e . " O n e — t h e m o v e m e n t for scientific m o t h e r h o o d — was c o n c e r n e d with t h e reinterpretation ot child socialization as a full-time " p r o f e s s i o n a l " occupation for mothers. T h e o t h e r , the d o m e s t i c science m o v e m e n t , saw its mission as defining "right living" — a p a t t e r n of life turned inward on domesticity, passionately c o n c e r n e d with order and privacy, and centered on t h e full-time h o m e m a k e r . In this chapter we e x a m i n e the ideology of t h e d o m e s t i c science movement and its public e f f o r t t o r e d e f i n e t h e tasks w o m e n were to p e r f o r m and the s t a n d a r d s t h e y w e r e to m e e t , and to proselytize and " s e l l " the new h o u s e w o r k . The Domestic

Void

R E V O L U T I O N , w o m e n were tied to the h o m e by t h e e c o n o m i c necessity of p r o d u c i n g f o r their families' survival. Eighteenth and early n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y rural w o m e n (and m o s t w o m e n were rural) w e r e n ' t j u s t making apple pies and American flags; t h e y m a d e bread, b u t t e r , cloth, clothing, soap, candles and medicines. A N e w England f a r m e r wrote in 1787 t h a t he had e a r n e d $1 5 0 f r o m t h e sale of farm produce in o n e year, b u t : BKPORI-; Ί Ί Ι Ι : I N D U S T R I A L

I never spent m o r e t h a n ten dollars a y e a r which was f o r salt, nails, and t h e like. N o t h i n g t o eat, d r i n k , o r wear was b o u g h t , as m y farm provided all. 5 The pre-industrial, rural h o m e was a t i n y m a n u f a c t u r i n g center, demanding of its female w o r k e r s a w i d e variety of skills a n d an endless capacity for hard w o r k . In fact, the pressures of h o m e p r o d u c t i o n left very little time for t h e tasks that we w o u l d r e c o g n i z e t o d a y as housework. By all accounts, p r e - i n d u s t r i a l r e v o l u t i o n w o m e n were sloppy h o u s e k e e p e r s by t o d a y ' s s t a n d a r d s . Instead of t h e daily cleaning or the weekly cleaning, t h e r e w a s t h e spring cleaning. Meals were simple and repetitive; c l o t h e s w e r e changed infrequently; and " t h e household wash was allowed to a c c u m u l a t e , and the washing d o n e once a m o n t h , or in some h o u s e h o l d s once in three m o n t h s . " 6 A n d of c o u r s e , since each wash required the carting and heating of m a n y b u c k e t s of w a t e r , higher standards of cleanliness were easily d i s c o u r a g e d .

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Then, beginning in the early nineteenth century, came industrialization and the growth of the market economy. Wage labor and "business" gradually began to replace agriculture as the American way of life. Young women, adult men, and even children were drawn to the towns to produce for cash, rather than for their families' immediate needs. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, through the cataclysms of urbanization, industrialization, war, more than ninety-five per cent of married women remained, like their mothers before them, at home, seemingly untouched by the industrial and social revolution sweeping through American life. But the content of their work was transformed. The traditional home crafts were vanishing into the factories. Home textile manufacture, which Alexander Hamilton had hailed as central to the economy of the early republic, 7 practically disappeared between 1825 and 1 855." Cloth, and soon candles, soap, and butter joined buttons and needles as things that most women bought, rather than made. By the end of the century, hardly anyone made their own starch or boiled their laundry in a kettle. In the cities, women bought their bread and at least their underwear ready-made, sent their children out to school and probably some clothcs out to be laundered, and were debating the merits of canned foods. In middle-class homes the ice box was well-established and easy-to-clean linoleum had made its appearance. "The flow of industry had passed on and had left idle the loom in the attic, the soap kettle in the shed." 9 With less and less to make in the home, it seemed as if there would soon be nothing to do in the home. Near the turn of the century, educators, popular writers, and social commentators began to worry about the growing void in the home. For many working-class women, of course, there was no problem: they followed their old "women's w o r k " in the factory system, making the textiles, clothing, and soap which had once been made in the home. But in the rising urban middle class, as well as in the capitalist class, the domestic void was an urgent problem, tied to the great debate over "the woman question." The women in these classes were the wives of businessmen, bankers, and professional men. If their mothers had been content with a few "accomplishments" such as fancy needlework and sketching, these women were increasingly demanding—and getting — a full-scale college education. Education only heightened the sense of a domestic void. Some women were resentful that male industrialists had pre-empted the productive

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK functions that had once given dignity and p u r p o s e to w o m a n hood. When E d w a r d Bok, the influential editor of t h e Ladies' Home Journal, advised w o m e n t o k e e p o u t of politics and stick to their o w n sphere, a writer in Woman's Journal ( t h e national suffrage n e w s p a p e r ) lashed back: T h e baker, the l a u n d r y - m a n , the m a n u f a c t u r e r of u n d e r wear and r e a d y - m a d e g a r m e n t s , the caterer, the tailor, t h e man-milliner, and m a n y m o r e w o u l d have to go, f o r if w o m a n is n o t t o e n c r o a c h 011 m a n ' s cspecial d o m a i n , then he must keep his o w n side of the fence and not int r u d e on h e r s . l u Ellen Richards, the f o u n d e r of t h e d o m e s t i c science m o v e m e n t , told a g r o u p of m e n : 1 m u s t reiterate [that h o m e life] has been r o b b e d by t h e removal ot creative w o r k . . . . T h e care of children occupies only five or ten years of the seventy. What are w o m e n t o d o with t h e rest? . . . You c a n n o t p u t t h e m w h e r e their g r a n d m o t h e r s were, while y o u t a k e t o yourselves t h e spinning, t h e weaving, t h e soap-making. The time was w h e n t h e r e was always s o m e t h i n g to Jo in t h e h o m e . N o w t h e r e is only s o m e t h i n g to be Jone.11 But o t h e r s viewed t h a t very " r o b b e r y " as w o m a n ' s greatest o p p o r t u n i t y . In a b o o k begun in 1888, feminist Olive Schreiner agreed t h a t t h e industrial revolution had greatly e n r i c h e d " m a n ' s field of r e m u n e r a t i v e t o i l " b u t had t e n d e d to " r o b w o m e n , n o t merely in part b u t almost wholly, of t h e valuable part of h e r ancient d o m a i n of p r o d u c t i v e and social labor." But instead of looking nostalgically at t h e past, she believed t h e time h a d c o m e f o r w o m e n t o seize t h e c h a n c e t o leave domestic labor behind t h e m forever a n d join t h e " n e w w o r l d . " "Give us labor and t h e training which fits us f o r l a b o r ! " she cried, and p u t her faith in t h e y o u n g w o m a n w h o she said was even then k n o c k i n g on every d o o r t h a t s h u t off a new field of labor, mental o r physical, a n x i o u s t o fulfill " s h e k n o w s n o t w h a t duties, in t h e years t o c o m e ! " 12 And t h e r e was reason t o believe t h a t liberation was imminent. In the n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y , f e m i n i s t s had seen the small productive w o r k s h o p s — t h e c o b b l e r , t h e b l a c k s m i t h , t h e p o t ter, t h e milliner — m a d e o b s o l e t e by t h e f a c t o r y system. N o w cities h a d grown, t h e physical size of t h e middle-class h o m e

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES had diminished, and family size had declined. Surely, they thought, only a few more steps needed to be taken to industrialize domestic work completely, and free women from the domestic trap. Home Sweet

Home

BUT AS IT TU κ Ν κι) OUT, the home was not just another anachronism that would be tossed aside with other reminders of the past. For every women like Schreiner who was ready to sweep domesticity into the dustbin of history, hundreds more believed that the only answer to the "woman question" lay in the home itself. They favored an expanded role for women, but gloried in the thought that that role would always spring from woman's strong sense of "home values." To understand their commitment to the home — which was to find its most systematic expression in the domestic science movement — we must consider the position the home had come to occupy in late nineteenth and early twentieth century bourgeois ideology. The central ideas — upheld by the clergy, the popular magazines, and even the White House—were, first, that the home was the cornerstone of the social order and, second, that it was in imminent danger of dissolution. The 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children declared that " h o m e life is the highest and finest product of civilization." 13 The converse idea, that civilization was the product of decent home life, was held to be axiomatic. At the time of the Spanish-American War, Demolins' widely quoted book AngloSaxon Superiority traced the imperial success of the AngloSaxon "race" to an inherent Anglo-Saxon love of home. 1 4 But at the same time the home seemed to be coming apart. After surveying the last few decades — the rising divorce rates, the apparent indifference of young couples to a settled family life — the social historian Arthur Calhoun concluded in 1919 that the future of the home was "problematical." 15 Looking back on the pre-industrial farm home, which grew more alluring with distance, end-of-century social observers could find nothing solid on which to base the modern home. Shared work no longer held the family together; the sources of subsistence lay outside the home in a factory system that

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK valued neither Home, nor Motherhood, nor for that matter childhood — only the labor power of individuals. Even the well-to-do home, with all but the father unemployed, was torn by centrifugal forces. The father poured himself into his career and relaxed in clubs; the mother shopped and visited; the children went out to school. Life magazine commented sarcastically: The school as a civic center having become overcrowded, it occurred to some bright mind to advocate the use of the home as a civic center. The home is vacant so large a part of the day that it would seem that the highest efficiency would put it to some use other than as a possible place to sleep in after midnight. 1 6 But few observers were so cavalier. Historian Calhoun's chapter on "The Precarious H o m e " quotes dozens of books, articles, special reports anxiously examining the health of the home, "the neglect of the Home," " t h e subtle danger to the Home," and so forth. 1 7 It is clear that the issue of the home had come to mean a great deal more than mere housing. In fact, by the turn of the century, the old values of restlessness and adventure—which had been essential to the conquest of the West—were no longer appropriate. The frontier had closed. Railroads and ranchers had carved up the West and left little room for pioneering individuals. And the economic frontier was closing rapidly too. Monopolization was setting in, blocking the upward trajectories of would-be Horatio Algers, or confining them to the status of corporate employees. Class lines were being drawn, and in the new industrial order, the reckless values of the frontier could only mean turmoil and instability. Most people would have to withdraw their aspirations from the wider world and re-center them in the tiny sphere of the home. In contrast to the "outside" world of industrial capitalism, the home and private life had begun to exercise a pull that was stronger than mere sentiment. Men who had grown up on farms were confronting a work world in which a man could no longer control the process of production, or the conditions of his employment. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, depressions repeatedly obliterated jobs and wiped out family

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES savings, liven the n e i g h b o r h o o d o f f e r e d little security in the m u s h r o o m i n g cities, w h e r e t h e c t h n i c c o m p o s i t i o n , and even t h e street signs, were likely to change every few years. The h o m e , t h e n , a p p e a r e d t o be t h e o n l y r e m a i n i n g sphere of a u t o n o m y and security. In his s t u d y of a working- and lowcrmiddle-class Chicago n e i g h b o r h o o d in the eightecn-seventics, R i c h a r d S e n n c t t d o c u m e n t s t h e retreat into t h e privacy of the family. Men w e n t o u t t o bars o r clubs less o f t e n ; families did less visiting. I K liven t h e t r a d e u n i o n m o v e m e n t , which again and again d r e w t h o u s a n d s of people t o g e t h e r in collectivc struggle, was c o m m i t t e d to goals that a s s u m e d the ultimate p r i m a c y of private life: a "living w a g e , " m e a n i n g a wage large e n o u g h to s u p p o r t an u n e m p l o y e d w i f e and children, and shorter working hours. C o r p o r a t e leaders w e r e vigorous in advancing t h e virtues of d o m e s t i c i t y . M a n y were explicit a b o u t the i m p o r t a n c e of " h o m e v a l u e s " in creating a docilc and stable w o r k force — especially w h e n t h o s e w o r k e r s ' h o m e s were being paid for on t h e i n s t a l l m e n t plan. Right a f t e r t h e great strike of 1892, Carnegie Steel w e n t i n t o t h e business of subsidizing h o m e ownership f o r its H o m e s t e a d w o r k e r s . In t h e d e c a d e s t h a t followed, s c o r e s of c o m p a n i e s built m o d e l villages and o f f e r e d home loans t o their w o r k e r s . As the w e l f a r e d i r e c t o r of an (unidentif i e d ) large c o m p a n y e x p l a i n e d t o early t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y housing r e f o r m e r Charles W h i t a k e r : G e t t h e m t o invest their savings in their h o m e s and own t h e m . Then t h e y w o n ' t leave and t h e y w o n ' t strike. It ties t h e m d o w n so t h e y have a stake in o u r p r o s p e r i t y . 1 9 But social c o n t r o l was an i n v e s t m e n t t h a t only t h e largest and m o s t far-sighted c o r p o r a t i o n s could a f f o r d . Most employers c o u l d n o t have cared less h o w their w o r k e r s lived, and all, of c o u r s c , viciously o p p o s e d the w o r k e r s ' o w n a t t e m p t s to raise their s t a n d a r d of living. E f f o r t s t o p r o m o t e h o m e values among t h e w o r k e r s w e r e usually c o n f i n e d to t h e m o s t inexpensive, and trivial, m e a s u r e s . F o r e x a m p l e , t h e Palmer M a n u f a c t u r i n g C o . p r o v i d e d basins and towels f o r its e m p l o y e e s so t h a t they c o u l d r e t u r n h o m e l o o k i n g like " g e n t l e m e n , " and t h u s gain a higher respect f o r h o m e l i f e . 2 0 N o t until t h e nineteen-twenties w h e n business c a m e t o see t h e h o m e as a market would the

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK nation's corporate leadership make a concerted material e f f o r t to promote working-class domesticity. Caught in between the intermittently warring working and capitalist classes was a third group — the rising urban middle class. This group expressed the fullest consciousness o f the functions o f the home and the need to " s a v e " it. In the h o m e they saw an ideal which could unite the worker and the corporate mogul: Didn't the workers really want nothing m o r e than a secure and c o z y home? Didn't the capitalists know that nothing would be better for " l a b o r p e a c e " than a domesticated work force? Far from making the h o m e obsolete, industrial capitalism had made it more necessary as a refuge from the brutality o f the industrial world. At the same time it could be an essential training place in the industrial " v i r t u e s " : The industrial world should see that its fundamental needs o f industry, efficiency, fidelity to tasks, and loyalty to all demands o f the situation require q u a l i f i c a t i o n s ' o f mind and character that depend very largely on the h o m e behind the workman, and behind the employer o f labor. 2 1 Beyond that, the home was an ideal " c o n t a i n e r " for aspirations that could not be met in an increasingly stratified socie t y — a wholesome target for working-class a m b i t i o n s and a safe focus f o r the enerties o f middle-class w o m e n .

The Domestic Science

Movement

OF THE R E F O H M E F F O R T S o f this period aimed, directly or indirectly, at the defense o f the h o m e . T h e bestpublicized causes were those that addressed themselves t o the external dangers that threatened the h o m e — drink, prostitution, poor housing, unregulated female and child labor. T h e domestic science movement received far less a t t e n t i o n . It had no lurid abuses to expose and made no claims on the collective conscience o f industrialists and politicians. But only the domestic science movement addressed itself to the danger within — the home's eroded core, the D o m e s t i c V o i d . T h e initial priority o f its adherents was necessarily their own middle-class homes, where the void was m o s t palpable and threatening to them. Besides, if middle-class women were to set an example of domesticity, they would first have to set their own houses MANY

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES in order. What this m e a n t was, above all, a r e f o r m u l a t i o n of w o m e n ' s domestic w o r k . Hetter housing, b e t t e r wages, and legislation to restrict female e m p l o y m e n t could not save the h o m e if w o m e n were not p u r p o s e f u l l y e m p l o y e d within it. As t h e l.tiJics' Home Jouriui! said, social stability required that t h e void be filled: As a m a t t e r of f a c t , what a certain t y p e of w o m a n needs t o d a y m o r e than a n y t h i n g else is some task that "would tie her d o w n . " Our whole social fabric would be the b e t t e r for it. T o o m a n y w o m e n arc dangerously idle. 22 C o m p a r e d to o t h e r causes that rallied middlc-class women in t h e late n i n e t e e n t h and early t w e n t i e t h centuries, domestic science never a t t r a c t e d a m o v e m e n t w o r t h y of the name. It inspired no mass organizations, no m a r c h e s , no picketing or petitioning. Strictly speaking, d o m e s t i c science was not a causebut ail academic s u b j e c t , which had been a r o u n d in one form or a n o t h e r for several decades. As early as t h e ciglueen-fortics, Catherine Needier had campaigned for a serious intellectual approach to h o u s e h o l d chores, and by t h e late cighteenh u n d r e d s n u m e r o u s land-grant colleges o f f e r e d domestic ins t r u c t i o n t o f u t u r e farm wives. What distinguished the new, t u r n - o f - t h e - c c n t u r y , d o m e s t i c science f r o m earlier incarnations of the subject was the crusading zeal of its advocates. T o them d o m e s t i c science was m u c h m o r e than a c o m p i l a t i o n of recipes and household hints, m o r e t h a n a mere subject which could be confined within a curriculum·, it was a total "science of right living." Their consciousness of being a " m o v e m e n t " can be d a t e d f r o m t h e first Lake Placid C o n f e r e n c e in 1899, where chemist Kllen R i c h a r d s gathered a small g r o u p of charity organization representatives, e d u c a t o r s , and d o m e s t i c science writers " t o s t u d y the e c o n o m i c and social p r o b l e m s of the h o m e and t h e p r o b l e m s of right living."2* T h e t o p d o m e s t i c science cadre, t h e f e w d o z e n w o m e n and men w h o gathered each year at Lake Placid to assess t h e movem e n t ' s progress and t o strategize, were explicit a b o u t the need to fill the D o m e s t i c Void and thus preserve t h e h o m e . Ellen Richards, t h e m o v e m e n t ' s chief ideologist, o f t e n stated her belief that " t h e family g r o u p is in the process of disintegrat i o n . " 24 Mrs. Alice P. N o r t o n , a h o m e e c o n o m i c s teacher from

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK the University of Chicago and a frequent speaker at the Lake Placid conferences, told her fellow conferees in 1904: Many of us arc afraid for the future of the home. So many centrifugal forces are working against it, life outside the home is becoming so attractive, that there is danger of the center of social interest losing its normal position in the home. The study of the household arts, if taught in the right spirit, must inevitably tend to make the home a more interesting place. 25 These sentiments found support in high places. In 1899, the American Medical Association joined the campaign for domestic science education on the grounds that it would lead to reduced "infant mortality, contagious diseases, intemperance (in eating and drinking), divorce, insanity, pauperism, competition of labor between the sexes, men's and women's clubs, etc." 2 6 To make homemaking a vocation, a career of deep and abiding interest, required more than exhortations on the sanctity of the home. The appeals to piety and pronouncements on the nature of "true womanhood," which had helped to keep an earlier generation of middle-class women in the home, would no longer do. In this new age of technological progress, everything had to be justified in the name of science. As one advocate of domestic science education had said in 1897: When the grand meaning and hidden power of her ordained sphere dawn upon her in their full force thru [sic] scientific study, then she [woman] will not sigh because Nature has. assigned her special duties which man has deemed safe to be trusted to her instincts, yet in reality need for their performance the highest scientific knowledge. 27 The Crusade against Germs HU·:

DOM ι·:STU: S C I K N T I S T S hoped to forge a direct pipeline between the scientific laboratory and the average home. They seized upon any science, any discipline, any discovery, that could conceivably be used to "upgrade" a familiar task. Biochemistry could transform cooking into a precise laboratory exercise, economics could revolutionize budgeting and

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES shopping, and so f o r t h . As tor cleaning, t h e r e was now a firm scicntific f o u n d a t i o n to build u p o n — t h e germ t h e o r y of disease. In the eightcen-scventies t h e E u r o p e a n scientists Pasteur and Koch had first advanced t h e h y p o t h e s i s t h a t specific diseases were caused by specific micro-organisms. Within t w o decades the microbes responsible for t y p h o i d , leprosy, tuberculosis, cholera, d i p h t h e r i a , and t e t a n u s had been identified, and the hypothesis b e c a m e an established theory. The theory, as it was popularized in this c o u n t r y in t h e eighteen-nineties, meant simply t h a t y o u could n o longer blame diseases on " b a d air" or unbalanced " h u m o r s . " Diseases were caused and transmitted by actual material agents. T h e t h e o r y greatly e n h a n c e d the prestige of the medical profession, and set o f f a wave of public anxiety a b o u t c o n t a g i o n . Every agent of h u m a n c o m m e r c e — public t e l e p h o n e s , store-bought clothes, even library books — was suspect. In t h e facc of this m e n a c e , w h o was t o be responsible for t h e public's health? T h e answer, according t o t h e medical profession, was w o m e n . In a speech o f t e n q u o t e d by American w o m e n , t h e president of t h e British Medical Association declared that " i t is the w o m a n on w h o m full sanitary light requires to fall." He c o n f i d e d that whenever he m a d e a house call he c h e c k e d o u t " t h e a p p o i n t m e n t s a n d arrangements and m a n a g e m e n t of t h e h o u s e , " since the c h a n c e s t h a t the disease w o u l d spread d e p e n d e d " o n t h e character of t h e presiding genius of t h e h o m e , or t h e w o m a n w h o rules over t h a t small d o m a i n . " 28 For t h e leaders of t h e d o m e s t i c science m o v e m e n t , the germ t h e o r y of disease p o i n t e d t h e way t o their first victory: the t r a n s f o r m a t i o n of cleaning f r o m dilettantish dusting t o a sanitary crusade against " d a n g e r o u s enemies w i t h i n . " Here at last was a challenge suited t o t h e energy a n d abilities of educated w o m e n . In Household Economics, Helen C a m p b e l l described h o w t h e old d o m e s t i c c r a f t s had gradually been t a k e n over by m e n , but cleaning " c a n never p a s s " f r o m w o m e n ' s hands. "To k e e p t h e world clean," she e x u l t e d , " t h i s is o n e great task for w o m e n . " 29 In t h e light of germ theory, cleaning b e c a m e a moral responsibility. Mrs. Η. M. P l u n k e t t , o n e of t h e early popularizers

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK of germ t h e o r y in relation to h o u s e h o l d m a t t e r s , w r o t e in 1885: There is n o t h i n g in hygiene she c a n n o t c o m p r e h e n d , and t o o o f t e n d o e s she realize this and begin to s t u d y it w h e n , t o o late, she s t a n d s beside the still f o r m of some previous o n e , slain by one of t h e preventible diseases t h a t , in the coming sanitary millenium, will be r e c k o n e d akin to murder.30 This warning was e c h o e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e g r o w t h of t h e domestic science m o v e m e n t : ncglect of housecleaning is t a n t a m o u n t to child abuse. M a n u f a c t u r e r s of soap and cleansing agents developed advertising that played directly to m a t e r n a l fears and guilt. Stuart liwen r e p o r t s on ads in t h e twenties: Hygeia baby bottles were " s a f e " and would n o t " c a r r y germs to y o u r b a b y . " H y - t o x bug killer was presented as t h e o n e line of d e f e n s e for an o t h e r w i s e " d e f e n s e l e s s " child. . . . W o m e n were told t o follow t h e d i c t a t e s of " h e a l t h a u t h o r i t i e s " w h o "tell us t h a t disease germs are e v e r y w h e r e . " Lysol divided t h e h o u s e into an assemblage of minutely d e f i n e d dangers, so m o t h e r s were told t h a t they should be aware t h a t "even t h e d o o r - k n o b s t h r e a t e n [children] . . . with disease." J 1 At a time w h e n i n f a n t m o r t a l i t y ( d u e largely to i n f e c t i o u s diseases) ran five times as high as it d o e s t o d a y , m o t h e r s were likely t o listen. W o m e n were eager to learn h o w t h e y could protect their families by scientific housecleaning. U n f o r t u n a t e l y , t h e scientific c o n t e n t of " s c i e n t i f i c c l e a n i n g " was e x t r e m e l y thin. T h e d o m e s t i c scientists were right a b o u t the existence of germs, b u t n e i t h e r t h e y n o r t h e actual scientists k n e w m u c h a b o u t t h e transmission and d e s t r u c t i o n of germs — which are of course t h e m a j o r issues in d o m e s t i c disease prevention. For e x a m p l e , t h e d o m e s t i c scientists believed that t h e m a j o r h o u s e h o l d germ carrier was d u s t , which has since been shown t o be q u i t e i n n o c e n t . T h e y a t t r i b u t e d germkilling qualities to t h e " d a m p d u s t e r " which was actually a perfectly c o m f o r t a b l e h a b i t a t f o r microbes. (Even t o d a y , a f t e r decades of progress in bacteriology and epidemiology, we k n o w very little of any practical use t o t h e h o u s e w i f e d e b a t i n g w h a t to clean and h o w t o clean it. N o r , to o u r k n o w l e d g e , are there

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES any studies showing that, other things being equal, fastidious housekeepers have healthier families than slovenly housekeepers.) The Manufacture

of New Tasks

ι in; D O M i i s n c S C I E N T I S T S did not claim to have the last word on scientific cleaning, cooking, or any other task. If they did, housekeeping could be reduced to a mindless routine. On the contrary, Ellen Richards wrote, science transformed housekeeping into an endless adventure, a quest for new knowledge: It is not a p r o f o u n d knowledge o f any one or a dozen sciences which women need, so much as an attitude of mind which leads them to a suspension of j u d g m e n t on new subjects, and to that interest in the present progress of science which causes them to call in the help of the expert, which impels them to ask, " C a n I d o better than 1 am d o i n g ? " " I s there any device which I might u s e ? " "Is my house right as to its sanitary a r r a n g e m e n t s ? " " I s my f o o d the best p o s s i b l e ? " " H a v e 1 chosen the right colors and the best materials for c l o t h i n g ? " " A m I making the best use of my t i m e ? " 3 2 Simply asking such questions — perpetually re-examining one's homemaking in the light o f a continually unfolding science — was " t h e best use of time," and the first of the new "white collar" j o b s that domestic science a d d e d to homemaking. But domestic science's major white-collar innovation was the task of management. With the rise o f Taylorism and "scientific m a n a g e m e n t , " the middle-class public b e c a m e as enamored of " e f f i c i e n c y " as it was terrified o f germs. T h e idea, as applied to industry, was to analyze each task d o w n to its component gestures (lift the shovel, take three steps, etc.) and assign these gestures, rather than whole tasks, to the workers. The premise was that no worker could c o m p r e h e n d the organization of his or her own work and that time could be saved by putting all thinking, down to the m o s t minute decisions, in the hands of management. 3 3 The new "scientific m a n a g e m e n t " meshed immediately with the domestic scientists' goals of eliminating (or redefining) drudgery and elevating housekeeping to a challenging activity. Ellen Richards hated " w a s t e d m o t i o n s , " but it was left to

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Christine Frederick, writing in 1912, to promote the full managerial revolution in the home. 3 4 The promise was less work, which was especially appealing at a time when the "scientific" approach to cleaning was making more work. Much of what Frederick had to say was useful, though hardly startling. Ironing boards should be at the proper height to avoid bending; appliances should be chosen with care; schedules should be made for daily and weekly chores; etc. And it must have seemed to many women that the principles of industrial efficiency could result in more free time — without any sacrifice of standards. But in reality industrial scientific management techniques had very little to offer the housewife. First, the scale of household work was too small for the savings made by time-motion studies to mean much. The seconds saved by peeling potatoes with Frederick's scientific method ("Walk to shelf. . . pick up knife . . ." etc.) might add up to something in a factory processing thousands of potatoes, but would be insignificant in the preparation of dinner for four. Second, as later domestic scientists themselves realized, in the household, the manager and the worker are the same person. 3 5 The whole point of Taylor's management science — to concentrate planning and intellectual skills in management specialists — is necessarily lost in the one-woman kitchen. For the homemaker, household scientific management turned out to mean new work — the new managerial tasks of analyzing one's chores in detail, planning, record-keeping, etc. Much of Frederick's Journal series described this new whitecollar work. Each task had to be studied and timed. (Frederick clocked baby-bathing at a remarkably swift fifteen minutes.) Only then could precise weekly and daily schedules be devised.36 Then there was the massive clerical work of maintaining a family filing system for household· accounts, financial records, medical records, "house-hints," birthdays of friends and relatives, and (for what use we are not told) a special file for "Jokes, Quotations, etc." Not to mention the recipe files and a kind of inventory file giving the location and condition of each item of clothing possessed by the family. 37 So successful was the idea of household "management" that by the nineteen-thirties domestic scientists considered

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES "management" to be the major thrust of homemaking, practically eclipsing housework itself. Margaret Reid, an Iowa State College domestic scientist, categorized all household work into "A. Management," which included "choice-making," "task, time and energy apportionment," "planning," and "supervision," and "B.Performance," which included "housework." 3 « The domestic scientists prepared themselves for the possibility that, despite all the effort scientific management involved, it might actually lead to greater efficiency and more free time to be filled. Mrs. Alice Norton addressed this problem in a talk at the 1902 Lake Placid Conference entitled "What should we do with the time set free by modern methods?" After tossing around the possibilities of "self-cultivation," or just plain resting, she went on to say firmly that: If a woman undertakes homemaking as her occupation she should make that her business, and the possibilities of this today are almost endless . . . till more instruction is available to fit her for her business, she must use part of the time gained in preparing herself. 39 In other words, she could use the time freed by domestic science to study domestic science! Christine Frederick also pondered the free time, but happily concluded that as housewives became more efficient, their standards would rise apace. 40 And so the Domestic Void began to fill. Old work was invested with the grandeur of science·, new work — challenging, business-like — was devised. If homemaking was a full-time career, the Home would be safe. Feminism Embraces Domestic

Science

I T S K K M S I R O N I C , in retrospect, that one of the major constituencies for the domestic science movement was the contemporary feminist movement. By the turn of the century, American feminism had by and large abandoned its earlier radicalism and begun to focus on getting the vote and on opening up higher education to women. To understand the appeal of domestic science to feminists, we have to understand how bitterly these limited goals were opposed. College education, according to late nineteenth century medical theory, destroyed women's reproductive capacity (it caused their uteruses to atrophy). President Theodore Roosevelt himself denounced

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK higher education for women as a step toward "race suicide," that is, the extinction of the Anglo-Saxon "race." 4 1 In response to this sort of attack, the domestic science movement contended that higher education not only did not destroy women, it made them better women. Ellen Richards, herself a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Association of Collegiate Alumni in 1890: We [college women] have been treated for some years to discussions from eminent men as to our mental ability, our moral and physical status, our predilection for matrimony, our fitness for voting or for the Presidency; but the kind of home we should make if we did make one, the position we should take on the servant question, the influence we should have on the center and source of political economy, the kitchen, seem to have been ignored. 4 2 And it was in the realm of the home that college women were making their most significant contribution, she wrote in 1912: It has required many college women [from some fifty thousand college women graduates) to build and run houses and families successfully, here one and there another, until the barrel of flour has been leavened. Society is being reorganized, not in sudden, explosive ways, but underneath all the froth and foam, the yeast has been working. 43 A writer in Woman's Journal in 1898 lauded women like Richards for "the very important part college women have played in making everything pertaining to housekeeping a definite science," and concluded: Surely studying what men study in men's colleges, has not been able to turn these women out of their "natural sphere"! 4 4 Domestic science may have been the only way to make the demand for women's education palatable in a highly antagonistic society. The scientific housekeeper needed to have studied chemistry, anatomy, physiology and hygiene. To refine her taste for interior decorating, she needed an acquaintance with great works of iiterature and art. If one couldn't demand to study such things for their own sake—and certainly not for

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES the sake of a " m a l e " career — all that was left was to demand them for the sake of the home. As for the vote, domestic science had nothing to say about suffrage directly (some of the domestic science leaders were actually opposed) but it did help to guarantee that even voting women would be acceptably housebound. In the Woman's Journal, militant articles on suffrage were embedded in columns on homcmaking techniques and ads for baking powder and stove cleaners. When women's suffrage passed in Wyoming, a woman wrote to the Journal that, contrary to anti-suffrage predictions, home life had not fallen apart in that state: Were you to visit Wyoming, you would be impressed with the contented, happy expression of the bread-winners, as they return from the cares of the day to pretty, attractive homes, to a bright fireside and well-ordered dinner, presided over by a home-loving, neatly gowned, womanly wife. 4 5 As a matter of fact, there were very few appealing options for educated women outside of the home. Medicine and law were effectively closed off by the prejudice of the incumbent males. Social work was not yet a profession. Teaching was open to women only by virtue of the humiliatingly low pay (and low status) it offered. Feminist interest in domestic science was an implicit recognition of the lack of choices, a way to make the best of a bad deal. In an article entitled "Housekeeping as a Profession," an editor of Woman's Journal pointed to the growing prestige of law and medicine and remarked: So too, the creation of a body of graduates of Household Science and Art would lift the pursuit into appreciation and honor. Certainly it deserves to be as highly esteemed as medicine, law, or theology. What is so valuable as a good h o m e ? 4 6 Domestic science was a bid to elevate the status of women within the context of a social order divided into a public realm of male endeavor and a private world of female existence. But domestic science aspired higher than women's dignity within the home. Its more visionary advocates wanted the total transformation of the home itself. The architects of scientific housekeeping were disgusted with the cloying sentimentality that hung over everything associated with the home.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK The r o m a n t i c early n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y image of the h o m e — where t h e sweet " l i t t l e " w o m a n placidly awaited the weary breadwinner — repelled t h e m . 4 7 H o m e was n o t a retreat f r o m society, nor a haven f o r personal indulgence; it was a scientific enterprise. As H e n r i e t t e G o o d r i c h told t h e 1902 Lake Placid gathering: H o m e e c o n o m i c s aims t o bring t h e h o m e into h a r m o n y with industrial c o n d i t i o n s and social ideals t h a t prevail t o d a y in the larger world o u t s i d e t h e h o m e . This e n d can never be accomplished till the h o m e in p o p u l a r conception shall e m b o d y s o m e t h i n g m o r e than t h e idea of personal relationships to individual h o m e s . Men in general must admit consciously t h a t t h e h o m e is t h e social workshop for t h e m a k i n g of m e n . No h o m e , however isolated, can escape t h e social obligation t h a t rests o n it. 4 8 The h o m e existed for t h e public p u r p o s e of " m a k i n g m e n , " and the scientific h o m e — swept clean of t h e c o b w e b s of sentiment, w i n d o w s o p e n e d wide t o t h e light of s c i e n c e — w a s simply a w o r k p l a c e like any o t h e r . O n l y a clear professional commitment held t h e scientific h o u s e k e e p e r to her h o m e . T h e advocates of d o m e s t i c science did n o t follow t h e logic of rationalized h o u s e k e e p i n g t o its conclusion. If t h e activities of h o m e m a k i n g were indeed t h e s u b s t a n c e of a " p r o f e s s i o n , " then w h y n o t literally deprivatize t h e h o m e and t u r n its f u n c tions over to trained specialists? Ellen R i c h a r d s and her colleagues agreed t h a t soap-making, spinning, etc., had all been improved by their a b s o r p t i o n i n t o o u t s i d e industry. Why n o t cooking t h e n , or cleaning, or childcare? Why, in fact, have " h o m e s " at all?.Of all t h e A m e r i c a n critics of t h e c o n v e n t i o n a l , unscientific, h o m e , only C h a r l o t t e Perkins Gilman t o o k this step: We are f o u n d i n g chairs of H o u s e h o l d Science, we are writing b o o k s on D o m e s t i c E c o n o m i c s ; we are striving mightily to elevate t h e s t a n d a r d of h o m e i n d u s t r y — and we o m i t to notice t h a t it is just because it is a h o m e ind u s t r y that all this t r o u b l e is necessary. 4 9 A social arrangement in which o n e person c o o k e d or cleaned for three or f o u r o t h e r s was intrinsically irrational, she argued. No m a t t e r h o w m u c h " s c i e n c e " was applied, t h e very scale of the h o m e precluded t h e rationalization of d o m e s t i c w o r k . As

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES tor the " m a k i n g of m e n , " any h o m e — scientific or otherwise — in which w o m e n waited u p o n men was necessarily "a hotbed of self-indulgence," "breeding [in m e n ] a limitless personal selfishness." 5 0 The solution, according to Gilman, was to abolish the h o m e as it was; let people live in a p a r t m e n t communities with centralized, professionally staffed facilities for food preparation, cleaning, childcare, laundry. Rationalization of the home industries on this scale would free the great majority of women for productive work in the world on an equal basis with men. In practice, m a n y Americans were attracted to life styles not unlike that proposed by Gilman. According to Calhoun, large n u m b e r s of American families — large enough at least to excite the alarm of the clergy — seemed to prefer "promiscuous hotel [and boarding house] living to the privacy of family life," 5 1 apparently because it freed w o m e n from cooking. There were even, in the first decades of the t w e n t i e t h century, scattered experiments in c o m m u n a l living — a m o n g p o o r immigrant families as well as a m o n g the middle class. 5 2 Gilman's proposals could hardly have been m o r e distasteful to the advocates of domestic science if she had thrown in a request for " f r e e love" (which she did n o t ) . Yet she was only following their own logic. What prevented them f r o m taking the same step was t h a t their ideological c o m m i t m e n t to the home was, as we have already suggested earlier, far deeper than any other motivation. According to her biographer and colleague Caroline H u n t , Ellen Richards . . . believed in the family h o m e with a roof of its own and a plot of ground of its o w n so firmly that she considered its i m p o r t a n c e b e y o n d argument. T h e only question was how to preserve it. 5 3 "Right Living" in the

Slums

D O M E S T I C S C I E N C E leaders like Ellen Richards spoke of the endangered h o m e , their first concern was with the middle-class h o m e . But a n y o n e with a m i n i m u m of social awareness could see that the gravest threat to the home, and hence to "civilization," lay in the urban slums. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century immigrant workers poured

WHEN

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK into the tenements of the northern cities, crowding whole families, along with lodgers, into tiny apartments that commonly lacked running water and toilets. The eighteen-nineties, a decade of violent class struggle, saw the Homestead strike, the Pullman strike, Populist rebellion in the southern and prairie states, and near civil war in western mining towns. It did not take much imagination to foresee the results of crowding so many working-class people together under intolerable slum conditions, especially since the immigrant population was believed to be infested with Bolsheviks and anarchists. Professor C. R. Henderson aroused the 1902 Lake Placid Conference to the issue of the slums. The danger, he said, came not from foreign ideologies or unionists, but from the very way the people lived. "A communistic habitation [by which he meant a tenement house] forces the members of a family to conform insensibly to communistic modes of thought." 54 Slum living conditions led to evolutionary retrogression: It would be unworthy of us to permit a great part of a modern population to descend again to the animal level from which the race has ascended only through aeons of struggle and difficulty. In the long run the only solution was to disperse the poor and house them in individual private homes, but in the meantime domestic science leaders believed that creeping communism and bestiality could be stemmed by teaching them "the science of right living." In the slums, proclaimed Ellen Richards, "there is ready at hand a field for the Home Economics teacher." 5 5 This "field" was already intensively cultivated by urban reformers, charity organizations, and settlement workers. Philosophies of slum reform ranged from the conservative view (shared by most of the domestic science leaders) of the poor as a threat to be subdued or Americanized as quickly as possible, to the liberal perception of the poor as victims of a corrupt and inhumane society. But from both perspectives, domestic science was a valuable tool in the struggle. To conservatives, who blamed poverty on the shortcomings of the poor, domestic science instruction was an obvious solution to thriftlessness, intemperance, and general disorderliness. To liberals, it

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES c o u l d help the p o o r c o p c with t h e d e b i l i t a t i n g e n v i r o n m e n t ot' t h e slums — the s u b s t a n d a r d housing, filthy streets, and uns c r u p u l o u s m e r c h a n t s . A n d for b o t h liberals and conservatives, t e a c h i n g the p o o r to live within their wages c o u l d m a k e higher wages unnecessary. In f a c t , d o m e s t i c science did have a core of useful information f o r the hard-pressed, and f r e q u e n t l y b e w i l d e r e d , urban slum dweller. It was clear to r e f o r m e r s like J a n e A d d a m s that t h e p o o r needed whatever help they c o u l d get in m a k i n g the d i f f i c u l t a d j u s t m e n t t o city life. Most of t h e p o o r were rccent i m m i g r a n t s f r o m rural, agricultural villages, a n d m a n y c a m e exp e c t i n g to recreate their old p a t t e r n s of life — t o raise chickens in t h e streets, k e e p livestock in t h e b a s e m e n t s of their tenem e n t s , and bake bread on t h e p a v e m e n t s . 5 " But t h e old ways of life were u n w o r k a b l e in t h e c r o w d e d g h e t t o e s , if n o t simply unhygienic. Women w h o were used t o raising their o w n food had t o shop. T h e y had t o master the t e c h n o l o g y of t h e gas or coal stove, and t h e tactics of l a u n d e r i n g in tiny k i t c h e n s that lacked running w a t e r . T h e r e was n o t h i n g t o p r e p a r e t h e m for t h e dangers of t h e t u r n - o f - t h e - c e n t u r y c i t y : u n c o l l e c t e d garbage piling up in the streets and c o u r t y a r d s , unreliable water supplies, unsafe milk. For m a n y i m m i g r a n t w o m e n and their d a u g h t e r s , d o m e s t i c science i n s t r u c t i o n was a w e l c o m e bit of assistance in t h e struggle f o r survival. Wherever t h e r e were e f f o r t s to u p l i f t , A m e r i c a n i z e , or simply assist t h e u r b a n p o o r , d o m e s t i c science f o u n d a ready f o r u m . Public schools and s e t t l e m e n t h o u s e s o f f e r e d courses in d o m e s t i c science. Charity o r g a n i z a t i o n s like t h e New York Association for t h e I m p r o v e m e n t of t h e C o n d i t i o n of the P o o r dispatched trained d o m e s t i c scientists i n t o p o o r w o m e n ' s houses. S o m e d o m e s t i c scientists set o u t to establish courses in c o o k i n g or h o u s e h o l d m a n a g e m e n t . The useful instruction t h a t d o m e s t i c science h a d t o o f f e r c a m e with d u b i o u s messages. M u c h of t h e d o m e s t i c science missionary work was carried o u t in an a r r o g a n t a n d punitive m a n n e r . This was especially t r u e of t h e v o l u n t a r y charity organizations, which used d o m e s t i c science i n s t r u c t i o n as a subs t i t u t e , or prerequisite f o r , m o r e m a t e r i a l f o r m s of aid. As " f r i e n d l y visitors," t h e v o l u n t e e r s ( w h o w e r e later replaced by

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK trained social w o r k e r s ) were instructed to avoid giving charity at all costs. It c o r r u p t e d the character of t h e recipients and destroyed t h e " f r i e n d l y " relationship b e t w e e n t h e classes: T h e visitor should go as a personal friend, to enter into t h e h o u s e h o l d life, to discover its needs, its weak p o i n t s a n d possibilities; t o advise, encourage, and suggest; to lend a h a n d w h e r e it is n e e d e d , but never to hinder or h a m p e r his [ m o s t visitors were w o m e n ! ] work by doling out money, food, or raiment.57 Friendly visitors typically began a " c a s e " with an appraisal of the f a m i l y ' s s t a n d a r d of h o u s e k e e p i n g . In her r e p o r t , " F o r t y three Families T r e a t e d by Friendly Visiting," Miss Eleanor Hanson described t h e " f i l t h " a n d " d i s o r d e r " of t h e " u n t r e a t e d " families, and said of t h e successfully treated cases: " O r d e r and t h r i f t had been i n t r o d u c e d into the h o u s e . " 5 8 It was n o t an easy task. O n e sensitive friendly visitor confessed to t h e 1896 N a t i o n a l C o n f e r e n c e of Charities and Corrections: Before I w e n t to live so near these people, I must confess I sailed o f t e n i n t o a h o m e and told t h e m t o "clean u p " in a m o s t r i g h t e o u s m a n n e r . . . . [Now] we see the dirt a n d feel sorry f o r it, and we h o p e it will be cleaned u p and in b e t t e r c o n d i t i o n next time. I have been very discouraged a b o u t m y s e l f , and m y inability t o tell people t o clean u p . I c a n ' t d o it. 5 y A m o r e impersonal m e t h o d was p r o p o s e d at t h e 1 9 0 8 charity c o n f e r e n c e by t h e Keverend W. J . Kerby. C h a r i t y organizations could set up n e i g h b o r h o o d h o u s e k e e p i n g c o n t e s t s ; it w o u l d be inexpensive, because t h e prizes " n e e d n o t be i m p o r t a n t or costly."60 Even w h e n o f f e r e d in a c o n t e x t free of degrading associations with charity, as in t h e congenial setting of a s e t t l e m e n t house, d o m e s t i c science instruction r e p r e s e n t e d an e f f o r t t o discipline and A m e r i c a n i z e t h e urban p o o r . The useful inform a t i o n — on c o o k i n g , s h o p p i n g , etc. — which a t t r a c t e d neighb o r h o o d w o m e n was i n t e r t w i n e d with t h e entire ideology of "right living." A n d right living m e a n t living like t h e American middle class lived, or aspired to live. It m e a n t t h r i f t , orderliness, and privacy, instead of s p o n t a n e i t y and neighborliness.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES It m e a n t a life c e n t e r e d on t h e nuclear family, in a h o m e separated f r o m p r o d u c t i v e labor ( c h i c k e n s a n d lodgers would have to go!), o r d e r e d with industrial precision a n d presided over by a full-time h o u s e k e e p e r . Thrift, an obvious virtue, came with a h o s t of assumptions a b o u t what were w o r t h w h i l e e x p e n d i t u r e s . S o a p , yes; but wine, t h e c u s t o m a r y d i n n e r beverage of Italian immigrants, was o u t r a g e o u s i n t e m p e r a n c e . Cleanliness, a necessary virtue in t h e epidemic-ridden slums, was e q u a t e d w i t h Americanism itself; t h e h o u s e w i f e w h o wished her f a m i l y to succeed would find a way t o send t h e m o u t in f r e s h l y l a u n d e r e d and ironed w h i t e shirts each day. Orderliness m e a n t a d h e r e n c e t o a family schedule, which could p r e p a r e t h e children for t h e world of w o r k a h e a d . Even c o o k i n g lessons had a p a t r i o t i c , middle-class flavor; as J a n e A d d a m s w r o t e , " A n Italian girl w h o had had lessons in c o o k i n g at t h e public school, will h e l p her m o t h e r to c o n n e c t t h e entire family with A m e r i c a n f o o d and household habits."61 Within t h e d o m e s t i c science m o v e m e n t , m a n y activists were not satisfied with c o n v e y i n g t h e h a b i t s a n d techniques of " r i g h t living" t o t h e p o o r . D o m e s t i c science w a s b r o a d enough, t h e y believed, t o include m a n y less t a n g i b l e aspects of middleclass d o m e s t i c c u l t u r e . A Miss T a l b o t m u s e d at t h e 1905 Lake Placid C o n f e r e n c e : I w o n d e r if it w o u l d n ' t be w o r t h w h i l e t o sacrifice half a d o z e n lessons in c o o k i n g f o r t h e sake of having t h e child r e p o r t w h a t t h e y d o in t h e w a y of s t r e n g t h e n i n g the life of which t h e y are a p a r t , w h a t is t h o u g h t right in the family, w h a t t h e y have f o r diversion, w h a t art galleries they go to, h o w t h e y s p e n d their m o n e y , w h a t their church relations are, w h a t their m o r a l a n d spiritual life is. 62 T h e Louisa May A l c o t t C l u b , a B o s t o n s e t t l e m e n t located in an Italian a n d Russian Jewish g h e t t o , h e l p e d lead t h e e f f o r t to t r a n s m i t " c u l t u r e . " Isabel H y a m s , A l c o t t C l u b charity worker and d o m e s t i c scientist, r e p o r t e d t o t h e 1 9 0 5 L a k e Placid Conf e r e n c e t h a t her s t a f f ' s f r i e n d l y visiting ( a l w a y s " u n e x p e c t e d " ) h a d revealed f e w cases of gross i n t e m p e r a n c e o r extravagance to work on, but: We did f i n d , h o w e v e r , in m o s t cases u n t i d y h o m e s , filled

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK with unhygienic furnishings, and the food which was good never served in an appetizing manner. So we decided that for us the serving of the food, housekeeping, house furnishing, and decoration, and last but not least, manners were the most important, for, as Thomas Davidson says . . . "It is, to a large extent, the lack of the refinement of manners that unfits the uncultured man for mingling with cultivated people. . . . There is no reason in the world why men and women who have to earn their bread by manual labor should not be as refined in manners and bearing as any other class of people." 6 3 Seeing that "it is the duty of cultured men and women to try to arouse within these people a desire for right living," the Alcott Club presented itself to the neighborhood as "an idealized h o m e " where "all the activities of a natural home are taught." 6 4 The neighborhood kids were invited in for afternoon lessons in tidyness, tasteful home decorating, table setting, manners and the giving of tea parties. Hyams admitted that the lessons were not wholly practical for children from two-room slum flats, but argued that they shaped the children's aspirations for the future: While it may be impossible for them at present, owing to poverty-stricken conditions, to make practical use of all they learn, we are teaching for the future and the world, and when the opportunity does present itself, they will be able to embrace it intelligently. 65 Few settlements were as innovative in the teaching of "home values" as the Louisa May Alcott Club but, as Jessica Braley of the Boston School of Housekeeping said, "Every settlement has, of course, as a principal aim, to make better homes." 6 6 As middle-class enclaves in the slums, they were bound to succeed by the force of example: "The settlements are in themselves attractive houses and thus are always an example to the neighborhood." The schools also provided an outlet for the directly ideological aspects of domestic science. A widely used grade school syllabus prepared by Ellen Richards and Alice Norton and distributed by the Home Education Department of the New York State Library began as follows:

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Ideals and Standards of Living I. Historic Development of the Family a. The darkest ages of history b. The beginnings of human society c. The psychology of races — expression of the home ideal in races other than the Anglo-Saxon d. Early social life of the Anglo-Saxon people 1. The home life of the Anglo-Saxon vs. the communistic family system 6 7 Children began in the first grade with a "comparison of the child's home and mode of living with that of lower animals and primitive peoples." 6 8 By the third grade, the children had progressed to building model houses and decorating them. Despite the ethnocentrism of the subject matter, one public school domestic scientist reported that " t h e large proportion of pupils of foreign parentage is not a disadvantage as has been claimed." 6 9 In the decades that followed, domestic science continued to be important for the transmission of middle-class "home values" to ethnic minority groups and the working class generally. The number of high school courses on the "household arts" increased dramatically in the second and third decades of the century. Through " h o m e e c " courses, high schools, YWCAs, and other community agencies introduced girls to "higher ideals" and "appreciation and culture," in addition to such valuable techniques as how to prepare "eggs a la goldenrod" for breakfast. Completely furnished "practice cottages" and model homes were used in some cases as laboratory settings. For example, in the twenties the Douglass Community House in Cincinnati set itself up as a homemaking "practice cottage" for "a thousand Negroes": The aim is to affect standards of living by making this a model house used by everyone in the community. The girls do all the work in the house. . . . The girls love the work, and it is not to be wondered at, when one sees the pleasant home atmosphere and the perfect freedom with which they pursue their various duties. 7 0 Most of the recorded descriptions of domestic sciencc courses come, like this one, from professional educators or

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK domestic scientists themselves. There is no real way to judge the impact of domestic science education on the hundreds of thousands of young women who have been exposed to it. But this story, told to us by the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, is suggestive: I had domestic science classes in my junior high school in the Bronx in 1949. I remember it very well. They taught us table setting for fancy dinner parties. I can remember the smell of ammonia — they were teaching us to clean rugs. Who had rugs? What came across was this idea that your home environment was no good andyow had to make it different. For example, we learned that the only right way to cook was to cook everything separately . . . that was the good, wholesome way. Things all mixed together, like stews, that was considered peasant food. I would never have admitted to my teacher that my family ate its food mixed together. There was something repulsive about food touching. The string beans weren't supposed to touch the mashed potatoes and so forth. . . . Only later did I rer.'ize that 1 hate that kind of cooking. But then I can remember even asking my mother to buy plates with separations in them. The domestic science class taught us to make the beds a certain way, with "hospital corners." That's what it's all about, right, neatness and folding? While at home you just took the sheets and shoved them under. At school they took the things we hated to do at home and sort of made them fun. Then I would criticize my mother and she would really get mad at me and say, "This isn't a fancy house." Now that I think back, that's more or less what my mother and I fought about all the time. We were fighting about how life should be in the home. Ideology Takes Material Form E L L E N R I C H A R D S A N D H E R C O L L E A G U E S 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

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES 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 i t ? " 7 1 By the fifties, something had long since been done about "it" — the. haphazardly managed, endangered h o m e — t h o u g h not entirely through the direct efforts of the domestic science movement. In fact, a domestic science " m o v e m e n t " had become unnecessary. As early as the nineteen-twenties, there was no more need for crusading writers and lecturers to set the standards and dictate the tasks of homemaking. By the midtwentieth century, the exhortations of the movement—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 science movement, 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, especially in the turbulent thirties, 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." 7 2 With postwar federal financing, home ownership expanded into the blue-collar working class. Today more than sixty per cent of nonfarm homes are owner-occupied, compared to 36.5 per cent in 1900. 73 With home ownership, homemaking takes on an importance that goes 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. Today advertising, rather than a visiting lecturer in domestic science, educates the homemaker to new standards of performance and suggests new tasks to her: protect your family with Lysol spray; make your guests envious with Lemon Behold furniture polish; add luster to the interior of your oven with Mr. Muscle stove cleaner. And then there are all the nonverbal messages embodied in the homemaker's growing armamentarium of appliances: washing machines that permit you to do daily, instead of weekly,

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK laundries; vacuum cleaners and rug shampooers that remind you that you do not have to live with dust or countenance a stain on the carpet. Each of them — dishwashers, roll-warmers, freezers, blenders — is the material embodiment of a task, a silent imperative to work,74 In the heyday of the domestic science movement, when its connections with feminism were strongest, it had at least appeared to be a movement of women, for women. It took its own stand, however compromised, and it was in a position to demand and receive at least some respect for housework and the women who performed it. And, with its emphasis on selfeducation, it could provide both middle-class and workingclass housewives with some means of self-defense against a corrupt commercial world. Under very different circumstances, the domestic science movement might have developed in the direction of a consumer movement capable of putting up some resistance to the pressures of the advertising age. But it was the domestic science leaders themselves who eagerly passed the banner of "right living" on to the manufacturers of appliances and household aids. Ellen Richards longed for the day when the homemaker would be an "engineer" presiding over her stock of machinery. 7 5 Home economists exhibited brand name equipment at fairs and home shows, and put their professional honor behind the ubiquitous "Good Housekeeping seal of approval." Christine Frederick personally provided continuity between the early days of the "cause" and the later days of commercialization, ending up as a market researcher for the appliance industry. In her 1929 book Selling Mrs. Consumer (dedicated to Herbert Hoover) she gave the domestic science movement credit for serving as the advance guard of the appliance revolution that hit middle-class America in the twenties, and offered nearly four hundred pages of advice on how advertisers could appeal to the fears, prejudices, and vanities of Mrs. Consumer, the homemaker. 7 6 If they had lived to mid-century, the early domestic science reformers would have been pleased to see so many of their goals realized. Standards of cleanliness had risen to the near antiseptic; managerial chores (especially consumption) had expanded; and the home had been opened to penetration by outside "experts" who, if no longer scientists, were the

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES m a n u f a c t u r e r s and advertisers w h o directly represented the new industrial order. These " r e f o r m s " were n o t c o n f i n e d to t h e traditional middle class. T h e d e s c e n d a n t s of t h e d o m e s t i c science movement's urban target p o p u l a t i o n — s t i l l mostly w o r k e r s — were no longer prey t o " c o m m u n i s t i c " life styles. T h e y t o o were investing in t h e paraphernalia of " r i g h t living": m e n w o r k i n g overtime to pay f o r the f u r n i t u r e a n d , ironically, wives going o u t to work to pay off the mortgage. True, there were still large pockets of unassimilatcd people, but even they n o longer needed "friendly visitors" to teach t h e m t h e principles of middle-class domestic life. Increasingly, television was taking over the task of domestic science missionary w o r k . Commercials, soap operas, and family comedies s h o w e d w h a t a " g o o d h o m e " looked like, h o w a " g o o d " h o u s e w i f e ordered her w o r k . T h e old goal of t h e s e t t l e m e n t h o u s e w o r k e r s — to give t h e p o o r something to aspire to — was being achieved with e l e c t r o n i c efficiency. But in o n e central way t h e r e f o r m e r s w o u l d have had to a d m i t d e f e a t . Their p r o m i s e t o " f e m i n i s m " — t h e upgrading of h o u s e k e e p i n g to professional status — h a d been broken. Instead of b e c o m i n g an elite corps of professionals, homemakers w e r e as surely as ever a vast corps of menial workers. If anything, their s t a t u s fell w i t h m o d e r n i z a t i o n . C o n t r a r y t o the e x p e c t a t i o n s of t h e d o m e s t i c science ref o r m e r s , t h e intellectual c o n t e n t o f h o u s e w o r k had actually declined. Ellen R i c h a r d s h a d envisaged t h a t t h e homemaker's role w o u l d shift still m o r e t o w a r d c o n s u m p t i o n and away from p r o d u c t i o n , b u t she h a d seen this as an advance. Drudgery w o u l d decline; ever m o r e professional expertise would be required f o r " m a n a g e m e n t " a n d decision-making. But it turned o u t d i f f e r e n t l y . In an e c o n o m y d e p e n d e n t o n t h e multiplication of family " n e e d s , " n o t h i n g could b e m o r e dangerous than a knowledgeable, " s c i e n t i f i c " c o n s u m e r . T h e d o m e s t i c scientists' ideal h o m e m a k e r — w e l l - v e r s e d in chemistry, sanitation, n u t r i t i o n a n d e c o n o m i c s — w o u l d be as o u t of place in a garishly seductive, Muzak-filled s u p e r m a r k e t as Mrs. Richards herself w o u l d have been at an Avon party. H o u s e w o r k skills themselves were going o u t of style. Consider t h e b r a i n - n u m b i n g c o m m u n i c a t i o n s t o be f o u n d on food packaging: O n e . O p e n b o x . T w o . E m p t y c o n t e n t s into large

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK bowl. . . . Here at last is genuine "scientific management" in the home: the ultimate task breakdown, the complete separation of the "worker" (the housewife) from the "manager" (the manufacturer in a distant factory). The semblance of autonomy remains: you have, after all, selected the flavor and the brand yourself, and you may, if you wish, add an egg. The domestic scientists had expected to elevate the homemaker into partnership with the scientific experts — nutritionists, sanitary engineers, economists. They would have been shocked, at mid-century, to discover that the homemaker had instead become the object of "scientific" study. 77 Corporate sociologists probed for her foibles; psychologists worked on techniques to make her dazed and suggestible. As a result, supermarkets were designed to make the shopping trip as long as possible. Displays were designed to produce enough "sensory overload" to stimulate "impulse buying." Cereals and candies were placed, cunningly, at the child's eye level. Consumer education had become consumer manipulation. Market researchers had discovered that the most purchaseoriented shopper is socially isolated, technologically uninformed, and insecure about her own domestic competence. The new consumer "educators," the manufacturers and ad men, sought to cultivate these traits. The TV housewife is anxious about the brightness of her wash, the flavor'of her coffee, or the lustre of her floors. Enter the male " e x p e r t " — a professional-looking man or perhaps a magician helper like "Janitor in a Drum" or Mr. Clean — whose product, "studies show," will set things right. The actress housewife beams with gratitude, and testifies to the impact that Hamburger Helper or Brillo soap pads have had on her life, if not on her total self-image. As far as the manufacturer is concerned, the modern homemaker is still (thankfully) a domestic but not (hopefully) a scientist. REFIiRtNCtS 1. Heidi Irmgard l l a r t m a n n , " C a p i t a l i s m a n d W o m e n ' s W o r k in t h e Home, 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 3 0 , " u n p u b l i s h e d d o c t o r a l d i s s e r t a t i o n , Yale University, 1974, pp. 2 1 2 - 7 5 (available f r o m University M i c r o f i l m s ) ; J o a n n Vanek, "Time S p e n t in H o u s e w o r k , " Scientific American, N o v e m b e r 1974, p p . 116-20. 2 l l a r t m a n n , p p . 2 4 2 , 2 6 6 ; V a n e k , g r a p h and c a p t i o n , p. 119.

429

430

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES 3. See Margaret Reid, Economics of Household Production (New York· J o h n Wiley & Sons, 1934), p p . 8 9 - 9 0 . 4. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963), p p . 233-57. 5. Q u o t e d in Reid, p. 4 3 . 6. William F. Ogburn and M. F. N i m k o f f , Technology and the Changing Family (Boston and New York: H o u g h t o n Mifflin Co., 1955), p. 152. 7. Elizabeth F. Baker, Technology and Women's Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 4. 8. Reid, p. 52. 9. Caroline L. H u n t , The Life of Ellen H, Richards 1842-1911 (Washingt o n , D.C.: American H o m e Economics Association, 1958), p. 141. 10. Fannie Perry Gay, Woman's Journal, 12 November 1889, p. 365. 11. Quoted in H u n t , p. 159 (Richards' emphasis). 12. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labor (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911), p p . 4 5 - 4 6 . 13. Quoted in R o b e r t H. Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. 2, 1866-1932 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p . 365. 14. E d m o n d Demolins, Anglo-Saxon Superiority: (New York: R. F. F e n n o & Co., 1898).

To What Is It Due?

15. A r t h u r D. C a l h o u n , The Social History of the American Family from Colonial Times to the Present, vol. 3 (Cleveland: A r t h u r H. Clark Co., 1919), p. 197. 16. Q u o t e d in C a l h o u n , p. 197. 17. Calhoun, p p . 1 7 9 - 9 8 . 18. Richard S e n n e t t , Families against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago 1872-1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 19. Charles H. Whitaker, The Joke about Housing (College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing Co., 1 9 6 9 [first published 1 9 2 0 ] ) , p. 9. 20. David J. Pivar, The New Abolitionism: The Quest for Social Purity 1876-1900 (Ann A r b o r , Mich.: University Microfilms, 1965), p. 283. 21. Q u o t e d in C a l h o u n , pp. 1 9 7 - 9 8 . 22. Editorial, Ladies'Home Journal, October 1911, p. 6. 23. Hazel T . Craig, History of Home Economics (New York: Practical H o m e Economics, 1945), p. 9 (emphasis in the original). 24. Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference on Home Economics, Lake Placid, New York, 1904, p. 64. 25. Ibid., p. 16. 26. Editorial, "Public School Instruction in Cooking," Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 32 ( 1 8 9 9 ) , p. 1183. 27. Sallie S. C o t t e n , " A National Training School for Women," in The Work and Words of the National Congress of Mothers (New York: D. A p p l e t o n & Co., 1897), p . 2 8 0 . 28. Q u o t e d in Mrs. Η. M. P l u n k e t t , Women, Plumbers and Doctors, or Household Sanitation (New York: D. Appleton 8c Co., 1885), p. 11.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK 29. Helen C a m p b e l l , Household Economics ( N e w York: G . P. P u t n a m , 1907), p. 2 0 6 . 30. P l u n k e t t , p. 10. 31. S t u a r t E w e n , " A d v e r t i s i n g as a Way of L i f e , " Liberation, vol. 19, n o . 1 (January 1975). 32. Q u o t e d in H u n t , p. 1 6 1 . 33. Harry B r a v e r m a n , Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the twentieth Century ( N e w Y o r k : M o n t h l y R e v i e w Press, 1974), pp. 8 5 - 1 2 3 . 34. C h r i s t i n e F r e d e r i c k , " T h e N e w H o u s e k e e p i n g , " serialized in Ladies' Home Journal, S e p t e m b e r , O c t o b e r , N o v e m b e r , a n d D e c e m b e r 1 9 1 2 . 35. See C a r o l L o p a t e ' s discussion in " T h e I r o n y of t h e H o m e E c o n o m i c s M o v e m e n t , " u n p u b l i s h e d m a n u s c r i p t , 1 9 7 4 , ρ. 11; a n d I l a r t m a n n . 36. F r e d e r i c k , " The N e w H o u s e k e e p i n g : H o w It H e l p s t h e W o m a n W h o Does l l e r O w n W o r k , " Ladies' llome Journal, O c t o b e r 1 9 1 2 , p. 2 0 . 37. F r e d e r i c k , N o v e m b e r 1 9 1 2 , p. 19. 38. R e i d , p p . 7 5 - 7 6 . 39. Proceedings of the Lourth Annual Lake Placid, New York, 1902, p. 5 9 . 40. L o p a t e , p . 10.

Congress

on llome

Economics,

41. Barbara E h r e n r e i c h and D e i r d r e English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (Old W e s t b u r y , N.Y.: F e m i n i s t Press, 1974), p p . 2 8 , 5 4 . 42. H u n t , p. 113. 43. Ellen R i c h a r d s , Eutbenics: t he Science of Controllable Environment (Boston: W h i t c o m b & B a r r o w s , 1 9 1 2 ) , p . 1 5 4 . 44. L e t t e r f r o m " E . W. S . , " Woman's Journal, 10 S e p t e m b e r 1 8 9 8 , p. 293. 45. L e t t e r f r o m Mrs. Vivia A . B. H e n d e r s o n , Woman's vember 1 8 9 8 , p. 3 7 5 .

Journal,

46. II. Β. B. Blackwell, " H o u s e w o r k as a P r o f e s s i o n , " Woman's 27 August 1 8 9 8 , p . 2 7 6 .

19 N o Journal,

47. See B a r b a r a Welter, " T h e C u l t of T r u e W o m a n h o o d , 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 6 0 , " in T h o m a s F r a z i e r , e d . , I'he Underside of American History (New York: Harcourt Brace J o v a n o v i c h , 1 9 7 4 ) , p p . 2 3 7 - 6 0 . 48. Proceedings of the Eourth Annual Uke Placid, New York, 1902, p . 3 6 .

Conference

on Home

Economics,

49. C h a r l o t t e P e r k i n s O i l m a n , 'I'he Home: Its Work and Influence (Urbana, C h i c a g o , a n d L o n d o n : University of Illinois Press, 1 9 7 2 ( r e p r i n t of the 1903 e d i t i o n ) ) , p. 93. 50. Ibid., p p . 1 7 9 - 8 1 . 51. C a l h o u n , p. 180. 52. Ibid., p. 1 8 5 . 53. H u n t , p. 1 6 1 . 54. Q u o t e d in R i c h a r d s , p. 1 6 0 . 55. Q u o t e d in H u n t , p. 1 6 3 . 56. J a n e A d d a m s , 'twenty Years at Hull House I960 I first p u b l i s h e d 1 9 1 0 ) ) , p. 2 9 4 .

(New York: Macmillan,

432

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES 57. Mrs. L. P. Rowland, "The Friendly Visitor," in Isabel C. Barrows, ed., Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections 1897 (Boston: George Ellis, 1898), p. 256. 58. Miss Eleanor Hanson, "Forty-three Families Treated by Friendly Visiting," in Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections 1907, p. 315. 59. Mary E. McDowell, "Friendly Visiting," in Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections 1896, p. 253. 60. Rev. W. J. Kerby, "Self-Help in the Home," in Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections 1908, p. 81. 61. Addams, p. 253. 62. Quoted in Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference on Home Economics, Lake Placid, New York, 1905, p. 67. 63. Isabel F. Hyams, "Teaching of Home Economics in Social Settlements," in Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference on Home Economics, Lake Placid, New York, 1905, pp. 56-57. 64. Hyams, "The Louisa May Alcott Club," in Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Home Economics, Lake Placid, New York, 1900, p. 18. 65. Ibid., p. 19. 66. Jessica Braley, "Ideals and Standards as Reflected in Work for Social Service," in Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Home Economics, Lake Placid, New York, 1902, p. 49. 67. Quoted in Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Home Economics, Lake Placid, New York, 1901, p. 93. 68. "Report of the Special Committee of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in Elementary and Secondary Schools," 1901, p.'10. 69. Quoted in Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Home Economics, Lake Placid, New York, 1901, p. 69. 70. Education for Home and Family Life, Part /.· In Elementary and Secondary Schools, Report of the Subcommittee on Preparental Education, White House Conference on Child Health and Protection (New York: Century Co., 1932), pp. 78-79. 71. Hunt, p. 109. 72. Allie S. Freed (chairman of the Committee for Economic Recovery), "Home Building by Private Enterprise," address to the Cambridge League of Woman Voters, 26 February 1936, at the Harvard School of Business Administration, p. 3. 73. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1973, United States Department of Commerce, p. 693. 74. For an excellent study of the production and marketing of new products for the home, see Hartmann, pp. 275-386. 75. Hunt, p. 160. 76. Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York: The Business Bourse, 1929), p. 169. 77. See Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Workingman's Wife (New York: McFadden-Bartell, 1959).

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

433

TIME SPENT IN HOUSEWORK by Joann Vanek ne would suppose, in view of all the household appliances that have been introduced over the past 50 years, that American women must spend considerably less time in housework now than their mothers and grandmothers did in the 1920s. I have investigated the matter and found that the generalization is not altogether true. Nonemployed women, meaning women who are not in the labor force, in fact devote as much time to housework as their forebears did. The expectation of spending less time in housework applies only to employed women.

O

Certainly the reasons for thinking that the time spent doing housework must have diminished are abundant. Most of the household appliances that have come on the market since the 1920's have been marketed as (and have generally been regarded as) laborsaving devices. Many other products and services designed to ease the homemaker's task have been put on the market during the past 50 years. In addition to these technological changes one can cite several other factors that would seem to indicate a shorter work week in the household. They include the movement of families from the farm; the decline in boarding; changes in the birth rate that cause women to spend fewer years in the direct care of children; the fact that fewer members of the family come home for lunch, and the pronounced increase in the number of married women in the labor force.

Fortunately information is available about time spent in housework. It is not as complete as an investigator might wish or as readily comparable from one period of time to another, but it does provide data on how women budget time for their daily activities. In 1925 the Federal Government made money available (under the Purnell Act) for research in home economics. One of the results was a series of studies of how women budgeted their time. My analysis is based on about 20 of these studies. They are reasonably comparable because they were conducted under a set of guidelines developed by the U.S. Bureau of Home Economics. Although most of the studies were made in the 1920's and 1930's, the guidelines were also applied to a few studies conducted in the 194σ$, 195ffs and 1960's. For detailed analysis of the contemporary period I have employed the United States Time Use Survey, a study made in 1965 and 1966 by John P. Robinson and Philip E. Converse of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. In this study women were asked to keep a diary of activities at 15minute intervals for a full day. In the earlier studies women kept a diary of activities at five-minute intervals for at least a week. Only the Robinson-Converse survey is based on a national sample. The studies made under the aegis of the Bureau of Home Economics involved certain localities and tabulated primarily the ac-

434

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

tivities of rural women. To infer national averages from such limited studies is open to question. It is significant, bowever, that the findings of .the earlier studies were much the same, which lends support to the supposition that they reflect national patterns. At first the primarily rural composition of the early samples appears to be a limitation. Actually it is an advantage. During the 50 years under consideration the scene of household activity—in terms of the preponderance of women—shifted from the farm to the city. Thus one comparison I want to make is between time spent in homemaking by rural homemakers 50 years ago and time spent by urban homemakers today. Several of the early studies included town and city samples, so that it is also possible to make comparisons between rural and urban women in the 1920's. Let us tum first to nonemployed women [see illustration on page 437]. In 1924 such women spent about 52 hours per week in housework. The figure differs little (and in an unexpected direction) from the 55 hours per week for nonemployed women in the 1960's. It is remarkable that the amount of time devoted to household work by such women has been so stable, varying only within the range from 51 to 56 hours. It is also noteworthy that the work week of homemakers is longer than the work week of the average person in the labor force. A comparison of rural and urban women yields another unexpected finding: Rural homemakers spend no more time in household work than urban ones. At least in part this consistency may be due to the way the early researchers distinguished between housework and farm work. Farm work included all tasks connected with the home that were not commonly carried on by both rural and

urban women. Among the tasks defined as farm work were gardening, dairy activity and the care of poultry. In this way rural and urban women were compared on the same set of tasks. Notwithstanding the distinction between household work and farm work, one would suppose that at least in the early period urban women would have spent less time on the job than rural women, inasmuch as a number of differences in working conditions remained between them. For example, urban homes were more likely than rural ones to have electricity, running water and laborsaving machines. In addition urban women could make more use of markets and commercial services, simply because they lived closer to them. Another factor was that the farm household produced a larger proportion of the family's material needs than the urban household. (A study in 1924 showed that rural families produced about 70 percent of their own food, compared with 2 percent for urban families.) In spite of all these differences urban and rural women have spent about the same amount of time in household work throughout the 50-year period. Urbanization reduced women's work only by eliminating the 10 hours per week spent in farm tasks. Ρ erhaps trends affecting the house*• hold have created as much work as they have saved. If less time is required for producing food and clothing, time must be added for shopping. It is not difficult to think of a number of other time-consuming household tasks that must be done now but that were nonexistent or rare 50 years ago. Therefore the figure for time spent on housework probably conceals a shift in the amount of time devoted to various tasks. The data do show that the nature of household work has changed [see top

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK illustration on page 439]. The time spent in the tasks classified as shopping and managerial has increased. So has time devoted to family care. Less time is spent preparing food and cleaning up after meals, although together these activities continue to be the most timeconsuming aspect of housework. No change has occurred in general tasks of home care such as cleaning. Probably no aspect of housework has been lightened so much by technological change as laundry. In the 1920*s a great many houses lacked hot and cold running water. A large variety of soaps and detergents and automatic appliances have come on the scene, and the once burdensome requirement of ironing has been greatly reduced by wash-and-wear fabrics. Nonetheless, the amount of time spent doing laundry has increased [see bottom illustration on page 440]. Presumably people have more clothes now than they did in the past and they wash them more often. Time spent on child care has also increased. The change reflects postwar modifications in standards of child care. Today's mother is cautioned to care for the child's social and mental development in addition to the traditional concerns of health, discipline and cleanliness. More time is spent today in the tasks associated with consumption. They include shopping, household management and travel connected with the household. Contemporary women spend about one full working day per week on the road and in stores compared with less than two hours per week for women in the 1920s. Although technological change has created new time demands in homemaking, this factor alone does not explain the consistently large amount of time devoted to housework. If it did, all

435

women would spend long hours in housework. The data I have analyzed show that they do not. Employed women spend considerably less time in housework than nonemployed women. Tn contrast to the 55 hours per week that nonemployed women spend in housework, employed women spend only 26 hours. In other words, employed women devote about half as much time to household tasks as nonemployed women. Technological change has in fact liberated some women from a certain amount of household work. The time patterns of employed women become more significant when trends in the employment of women are taken into account. During the past 50 years women have entered the labor force in increasing numbers. Moreover, since World War Π the increase has been caused primarily by the dramatic rise in the employment of married women. In 1920 it was rare to find married women working outside the home; today about 40 percent of them are in the labor force. Proportionately fewer women are fulltime homemakers. Notwithstanding the stability of housework time for nonemployed women, therefore, the shift in the proportion of women employed signifies a reduction over the years in the amount of time women spend in housework. Although the impact of social change on time spent in housework is thus clarified, the question remains of why nonemployed women spend so much time in homemaking. It is possible that this finding can also be explained in a fairly straightforward way. Perhaps nonemployed women have larger families and younger children and therefore more work than employed women. In addition the nonemployed women may have less household assistance. It has been shown by other investiga·

436

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

437

70

60

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1943

1953

1965-1966

HOURS PER WEEK devoted to household work are charted lor rural women (gray) and nrban women (color) on the basic of surveys made in the years cited. The women covered by the chart were solely homemakers, having no ontside employment. Notwithstanding the many social and technological changes affecting honsework during the period covered by the data, the time these women devote to homemaking has remained remarkably stable.

tors that a woman's decision to work is limited by the presence of children, particularly young children. In other words, women are less likely to work when the burden of household tasks is greatest. I tested this argument with an analysis

drawing on employment, marital status, socioeconomic status (family income and woman's education) and family composition (number and age of children) as points of comparison. The technique enables one to see

438

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

whether or not a difference between employed and nonemployed women remains if the distribution of women is the same on the other points of comparison. Assuming that the distribution of women according to social class, family composition and marital status is the same, nonemployed women would still spend considerably more time in housework than employed women. Although these adjustments somewhat reduce the time differences between the two groups of women, the major amount of difference remains. A nother explanation is a reflection of the amount of assistance the homemaker receives. The employed wife may be able with her earnings to buy laborsaving devices and the services of others. In addition she may have another, perhaps subtler resource: help from other members of the family. The fact that she works outside the home may give her leverage to call on them for help. However plausible this explanation appears to be, information from the Robinson-Converse study shows -that differences in help with housework do not explain the time differences between employed and nonemployed women. Employed women made no greater use of paid help than nonemployed women. Furthermore, husbands of employed women gave no more help than husbands of nonemployed women. Contrary to popular belief, American husbands do not share the responsibilities of household work. They spend only a few hours a week at it, and most of what they do is shopping. Other factors could explain the puzzle. Perhaps employed women receive more help from children, live in smaller dwelling units or rely more on commercial services and laborsaving devices.

Unfortunately the Robinson-Converse survey did not cover these matters. Other studies, however, contain little evidence that such factors would explain the time differences between the two categories of women. Apparently one must look deeper for the explanation. One clear contrast between employed and nonemployed women is that work in the labor market earns a paycheck whereas housework does not In the families of nonemployed women this contrast underscores an imbalance in the economic roles of husband and wife. This kind of imbalance was not always embedded in marriage. In the farm household of earlier decades there was little separation of domestic and productive roles. Both the husband and the wife contributed to the family's production, and their contributions were probably regarded as being equal. It seems unlikely that anyone would regard the bread, butter and clothing made by the woman as any less valuable than the man's work in the fields. In modem society the homemaker's contribution to the family economy is less clear. Although cooking, cleaning and shopping for bargains are important to the family, one cannot find much evidence that they are regarded as contributions equal to the wage earner's. As S. Ferge of the Sociological Research Institute in Budapest has written: "The results of housework do not serve this [economic] justification in a satisfactory manner because they are accepted as natural and are only noticed when they are absent. It is therefore the work itself whose existence must be felt and acknowledged; working long hours and working on Sunday can serve to demonstrate this. (These considerations are not

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

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