The Making of Home Read online

  While amalgamated roles remained a constant, the vocabulary used to describe them, and therefore the way people thought about them, had been modified over the centuries. In England in the sixteenth century, men’s wills had often referred to their wives as ‘fellow labourers’; by the mid-seventeenth century that term had disappeared, and wives were now the source of ‘wise Advices’, dispensed through ‘their holy Examples, their devout prayers, and Labours of Love’. By the eighteenth century in Germany, a new term, Hauswirt, a household manager, replaced Hausvater to describe the head of the household, while Hausmutter became Ehegenossin, a marriage partner – now defined not as part of the economic system, but as a personal adjunct to the manager. No longer were the household and the economy the same thing. And so by the nineteenth century, housework was being redefined as those tasks confined to the province of women, tasks that were entirely separate from the cash economy. When women earned cash, it was commonly described as ‘supplementing’ the family’s income, not contributing, or supporting the family, despite the fact that at the middle of the nineteenth century 42 per cent of American women were in paid employment, and a quarter of British women were; three decades later, half of all women in the Netherlands worked outside the home. In D. W. Griffith’s silent film The Mothering Heart (1913), Lillian Gish is ‘the good wife’ whose job it was, in the words of the caption, to make ‘The Path of the Struggling Young Husband … Smooth’. He goes out to his unnamed job while she takes in laundry at home. Yet the captions tell us that while he is ‘struggling’ to make his way in the world, she is only ‘Helping’. At the end of the working day, his exhaustion is a sign of his manly labour. By contrast, Gish’s good wife fixes her hair and pretends not to be tired at all: her work has not been work, and must be hidden. She was only doing what good wives were supposed to do: household manuals routinely advised women to hide their labour and consequent fatigue from their husbands.

  By this time, women as well as men believed that their tasks were not work. Esther Burr, whose tasks were itemized above, was surprised to find herself tired at the end of the day; it was, she wondered, as though she had been hard at work – her ‘as though’ conveying clearly that she thought what she had done could not properly be so called. This was common. A housewife in Salem, Massachusetts, whose days were occupied in weaving, tending livestock, boarding lodgers, working in the fields, tanning leather and carting wood, wrote of her regret that she ‘in no way [did] any thing towards earning my living’; instead, she lamented, she was entirely ‘provided for in the best manner’ by her sailor husband.

  Women’s tasks had become perceived as non-work. Many household manuals implied, and many novels and magazines agreed, that the main female task – or, as it became restated, her mission, through her biology, and ordained by God – was twofold: looking after their husbands at home, and child-rearing. It was not merely that the heavy labour involved in housekeeping became invisible. As women’s work was increasingly dismissed as housework, no longer productive, so women themselves, whatever the complex realities of their lives, came to be reduced to their biological function, reproductive.

  As early as the sixteenth century, sewing, knitting and embroidery had been called ‘work’. It was not paid for, but it had recognizable economic value. By the nineteenth century, the value was no longer apparent, and ‘work’ meant its diametric opposite, a ‘tranquil pastime’. As women’s work, whether sewing or more, began to be seen as non-work, so the stereotype of women as a gender entirely devoted to spending their husbands’ money also developed. Now, went these new morality tales, women busied themselves with ‘work’ not to keep households in shirts and sheets, but simply to pass the time: they were producers of fripperies that no one wanted. As early as 1758, the New York Mercury had run a comic piece in which a woman, ‘an irreconcilable enemy to Idleness’, made ‘twice as many fire-skreens as chimneys … three flourished quilts for every bed … futile pictures which imitate tapestry … [and] curtains wrought with gold … which she resolves some time or other to hang up’. A century later, this previously satirical view gained a formal governmental imprimatur. In 1871, the British census gave a token nod towards housework as ‘noble and essential’ in its introductory remarks, but in the main section, only female labour outside the house was classed as ‘productive work’, which implicitly rendered all work inside the house as ‘un-productive’. The 1881 census made the implicit explicit when it re-categorized housewives as ‘unoccupied’. If there was no cash pay, it was no longer work.

  While most housewives barely had time to sit down, much less be ‘unoccupied’, the nineteenth century nevertheless saw a reshaping of the entire nature of housework: what it entailed, how people thought about it and how it was performed. In that itemization of the sixteen hours spent on chores in the eighteenth century (here), it is notable from a twenty-first-century viewpoint that cleaning occupied barely 10 per cent of the housewife’s time. Hearths were swept, floors swept and sanded, pots and pans scoured, trenchers, spoons and drinking vessels wiped, and then the housewife was ready to move on to the next task. In the nineteenth century, however, changing attitudes, changing medical knowledge, and especially changing technology, turned cleaning into the core activity of every housewife’s day.

  Advice books for housewives became popular from the middle of the nineteenth century, their penetration into the middle-class market and beyond a publishing phenomenon. In Germany, a cookbook by Henriette Davidis, a minister’s daughter, went through sixty-three editions in the decades following its publication in 1844. Frau Davidis was sometimes described as the ‘German Mrs Beeton’, whose own Book of Household Management (1861) sold two million copies in the first decade after publication. These books were for middle-class urban women who were running their own homes, without much money and, as a consequence of the new world of technology and urbanization, perhaps far away from their mothers, or with food available that their mothers did not recognize, or faced with technology that had been unknown to previous generations. Or they were moving up, or down, in the world, facing social situations their mothers had never encountered. The books had internalized the previous half-century’s theories of separate spheres, taking them now entirely for granted. And so, if a woman’s mission was found in her home, then the state of that home was the most telling indicator of her own merits or demerits as its housewife.

  If a woman was defined by her ability to rear the next generation, and her house was the crucible that shaped those children, then the woman’s ability to keep house became central: it reflected her value. It was no longer simply a matter of was the house adequately cleaned, scrubbed, polished? It was how the upkeep had been achieved, which measured not hygiene, but morality. And so physical labour became a measure of assessment, and purchasing ready-made products to replace labour was frowned upon. American advice books warned that while ‘some people’ thought shop-bought baked goods were as inexpensive as homemade ones, they were ‘not half as cheap’ really. The vagueness of ‘some people’ and the lack of price comparisons suggest that the value was perceived rather than actual. German advice books were no different. Starch laboriously made out of potato peel, the housewife was told, was superior to shop-bought starch, omitting to consider that the former worked no better and the latter cost less. Similarly, using oilcloth instead of a fabric tablecloth at mealtimes was condemned: ‘nothing leads so easily to uncleanliness and carelessness at mealtimes as these convenient waxed tablecloths, which can be simply wiped off’. Convenience led to dirt and carelessness, because housekeeping was valued by the physical labour put into it, by the effort it took.

  Purchasing labour was every bit as dubious as purchasing goods, as though bringing the cash nexus into the supposedly non-commercial sphere brought contamination with it. German women were quick to praise Dutch houses – they were wonderfully clean, they agreed – but they were much less quick to praise Dutch housewives, who were less admirable than their German counterparts be
cause they employed servants. In the 1860s, one German woman spoke severely to her neighbour for sending her family’s socks out to be darned. The younger woman’s rationale – she had children to look after and, without a servant, had no time to darn; the woman she sent the work to needed the income – were swept aside, and she was warned that she had taken ‘the first step on a [downward] path … no family could get ahead, if a healthy woman paid for things to be done that she could do herself’. She must ‘never think of such a thing again’. Abashed, the neighbour accepted the reprimand, and so the older woman’s tone softened: if her neighbour gave her the socks, she would darn them herself ‘this once’. Hiring someone to do housework was wrong, but having it done for nothing, as a favour, was not. American manuals also focused on commercial labour vs labours of love, but while in Germany it was the monetary payment that polluted, in the USA it was the work migrating out of the house to commercial premises. ‘Attend to all mending in the house’, advised one manual. But ‘If it be impossible to do it in your own family, hire someone into the house’. In Britain, where there was a higher proportion of domestic servants in middle-class households, domestic work came to include a number of daily tasks that were seen as essential, but in reality made no contribution to hygiene. The most common of these was whitening the front doorstep, in which the step was washed and a white paste applied. This whiting was impermanent, scuffed away immediately it was walked on. Had hygiene been the aim, washing the step alone would have sufficed; had it been appearance, whitewash or paint would have produced a more permanent solution. The combination of spotlessness and impermanence instead indicated the householders’ belief in the value of labour.

  The insistence on this labour was, at least in part, a response to the way nineteenth-century technology was changing the household, just as the belief in separate spheres was, at least in part, a response to the arrival of industrialization. Once a place of production, new technology was now turning the house into a place of consumption. Many basic foodstuffs (bread, jam, butter, cheese, meat, beer and more) and items of clothing had been made at home by many, if not by all; now for many, they had become goods to be purchased. And by the end of the century, most households bought at least some of these goods as a matter of course. They were, as the advertising said, ‘labour-saving’.

  What, or whose, labour was being saved was not, however, a straightforward question. We saw how many elements of housekeeping had, earlier, been a combined effort of both man and wife. To return to the single example of making a stew: by the eighteenth century in Britain (and in some areas as early as the seventeenth) and in parts of urban Europe, and the nineteenth century in frontier America, it was cheaper for most families to buy grain than it was to grow their own. Growing wheat or corn, and shucking the corn or transporting the wheat to a mill to be ground into flour had been a man’s contribution to the stew. His contribution now might be making the purchase, or that task might equally devolve onto his wife. But using store-bought flour didn’t decrease her work. It increased it. Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her fictionalized 1870s and 1880s frontier childhood, describes her mother baking cornbread: after heating a metal dish in the open fire, ‘she mixed cornmeal and salt with water and patted it into little cakes’, put them in the dish, covered them, then set the dish on the fire. For those with an indoor hearth and able to purchase baking soda (bicarbonate of soda had been available from the early nineteenth century, baking powder from mid-century), the method was the same, except that the cornmeal mix was left to rise slightly by the fire before baking. But with the arrival of store-bought flour, low-rise breads became food for the poor, or slaves, while yeast-breads were what every family would have if they could. Yeast-breads involve far more time, labour and planning: flour could be bought in bulk and then stored, but a trip to buy it had become necessary; live yeast lasts only days in liquid form, requiring regular replenishment; the dough needed an overnight rise, and so required advance planning.* Suddenly, stew and bread was no longer a meal produced by two people working together, but a meal planned and produced by one.

  The new technology of cast-iron stoves, also called closed ranges or kitcheners, similarly increased women’s work while eliminating men’s. Stoves consumed up to 90 per cent less fuel than open fires, reducing the cutting, hauling and stacking of wood – the men’s contribution – almost to vanishing point. And when coal replaced wood as the primary fuel, it was delivered by a coalman, and carrying the buckets – a mere 10 kilograms – to replenish the fire, and now the new kitchener too, became a woman’s chore, not a man’s. Men’s involvement with the fire had become transactional – paying the fuel bill. It is difficult to use more than one pot when cooking over an open fire, hence the prevalence of stew-like meals, where meat, vegetables and grain were all cooked together. Closed ranges created the possibility of cooking with several pots in action at once, and so meals became more elaborate, with more dishes. The time devoted to food preparation and cooking, both women’s tasks, increased, as did the number of pots that had to be cleaned afterwards, another job that was undertaken by the women.

  In addition, a hearth had only needed to have the ashes swept out before a new fire was laid; a kitchener too had to have its ashes emptied and sifted daily, but then a number of new cleaning stages had to be undertaken twice a week. The flues had to be cleaned, any spilled grease scraped away, and abrasives used on the metal; then the cast-iron areas were blackleaded: the work of almost six and a half hours.

  The kitchen was only one area where men’s household work was outsourced. Mass production of shoes meant that men did less leatherwork at home; mass production of household implements, from spoons to plates to clothes-pegs, released men from whittling and carving for the household; commercial butchery, and later refrigeration and railway transport, made home butchery redundant. And while all these items could be purchased, freeing men from hundreds of hours of labour, it was not they who took on the new task of shopping for these goods. Buying was women’s work. Other jobs remained in the house but, as they became less physically arduous, they too switched from being men’s work to being women’s. Men had emptied the waste from privies, carting it to fields to be used as manure, or in towns to be sold to farmers; cleaning their replacements, flush-lavatories, was women’s work.

  Technology for the most part did not alter men’s domestic tasks, it made them disappear. While technology altered some of women’s tasks, for the most part their work did not vanish. Candle-making had been a terrible chore – ‘sevenfold worse in its way even than the washing day’, according to Harriet Beecher Stowe. When oil lamps became both cheap and efficient, making candles was no longer necessary, but the lamps themselves required repetitive and time-consuming maintenance. Other jobs for women increased. The world of trade and industrialization brought cheap textiles, with cottons and muslins becoming the most common fabrics for clothes, replacing the traditional wool. While women no longer had to spin and weave, they had to shop for fabric, and they continued to have to sew it; cottons were less expensive, but they were also less durable, and so everyone had more clothes, which meant more sewing for women. Even ‘labour-saving’ sewing machines in reality increased the amount of work women did. As clothes could be produced more quickly with a machine, fewer women hired seamstresses or went to dressmakers, instead making their own, at least in part. New clothing styles for men popularized shirts that no longer had detachable collars and cuffs: now the entire garment had to be washed. And finally, wool, being difficult to wash, had most often just been brushed; cottons could be, and therefore were, washed more frequently, increasing the household’s laundry, one of the heaviest of all housekeeping chores. Even a blessing such as running water, and stoves with boilers that heated it, led to baths becoming more frequent: more cleaning of baths, more washing of towels.

  Household cleaning took longer more generally. Coal fires were dirtier than wood ones, while the new lighting technologies and improved glass for windows meant t
hat the dirt was also more visible. Windows that had previously been small, with tiny panes of glass, or with no glass at all, were glazed and enlarged, and needed to be washed regularly; then, as ‘Glass windows must have curtains’, so fabric had to be purchased, sewn and then regularly laundered. Meanwhile, brick or earthen floors were being replaced by wooden ones, and then covered with newly affordable carpets, producing two layers that needed to be cleaned. Likewise the new world of commodities brought increased quantities of household objects, both functional and ornamental, all of which also had to be cleaned.

  By 1940, middle-class housewives equipped with the latest in labour-saving technologies actually spent more time on housework than their mothers had at the turn of the century: because fewer households had servants; because technology had reduced heavy labour, so more work was undertaken by the housewife, and less by commercial services; and because, finally, the new technologies and advances in science had, when combined with older views of women’s roles, produced a change in expectations of living standards. An acceptable standard of living was no longer a matter of what could be achieved within the economic unit of the family. Now it was, said one advice book, ‘a set of attitudes towards certain values, toward articles to be bought and used, services to be paid for, and conditions under which we prefer to live’.

  Together technological advances and alterations in standards ensured that a woman’s work not merely increased in the house itself, but now spread outside, even when she didn’t officially ‘work’. Public transport, and then cars, removed the need for service-providers to bring goods and services to the house; instead housewives increasingly travelled to places of business, whether shops, or locations where services were offered, such as doctor’s surgeries, or workshops, where goods were made or repaired. And in the USA towards the end of the nineteenth century, even where goods continued to be delivered, they were no longer brought by a regular procession of individual traders but, as catalogue shopping spread, came as a once-a-day drop through the letter box. Technology, for women, came accompanied by solitude.