Never Done: A History of American Housework

By Susan Strasser

Never Done is the first history of American housework. Beginning with a description of household chores of the nineteenth century--cooking at fireplaces and on cast-iron stoves, laundry done with wash boilers and flatirons, endless water hauling and fire tending--Susan Strasser demonstrates how industrialization transformed the nature of women's work. Lightening some tasks and eliminating the need for others, new commercial processes inexorably altered women's daily lives and relationships--with each other and with the people they served.

In this lively and authoritative book, Strasser weaves together the history of material advances and discussions of domestic service, "women's separate sphere" and the impact of advertising, home economics and women's entry into the workforce.

Hailed as pathbreaking when originally published, Never Done remains an eye-opening examination of daily life in the American past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466847569

Susan Strasser

Susan Strasser is the author of the award-winning Never Done: A History of American Housework, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation. A professor of history at the University of Delaware, she lives near Washington, D.C.

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Prologue: Never Done

Mathilda Larson, an eighty-eight-year-old woman who was raised on a North Dakota farm, lists the household tasks and remembers the tools—doing laundry with tubs, washboards, and flatirons, cooking on a wood stove with iron pots, growing and preserving food, sewing and mending, cleaning filthy kerosene lamps—and speaks with little nostalgia: I’d hate to go through it again. Took us all day to do a big washing. Near the end of a lifetime of making cakes from scratch, at home and in the bakery she ran with her husband, she now serves a cake made from a packaged mix: Not as good, but easy.

Mrs. Larson dates her first electric lights by her daughter’s age—My daughter is sixty-two now, and I think she was about three years old, so it must have been fifty-nine years ago. She brings out her own wedding pictures to display her wedding dress, made of silk poplin, sixty cents a yard. She speaks as readily of the work she did for money, first as a seamstress before her marriage, later at the bakery, but the two kinds of work hold very different meanings for her. Housework for her family is tied in with other components of her life, and she cannot discuss its working conditions without telling tales of the people she loved and worked for; sewing and baking for money were jobs, and she speaks of them as such. Mrs. Larson could not believe that her unpaid work had any importance to a historian. Why did I want to record this junk, she asked, referring to anecdotes about her mother’s roasting and grinding coffee from barley and refilling the mattresses yearly with new straw. After a lifetime of hard work, she discounted her experience.

Oral historians often interview subjects who consider their lives of little importance, believing history to be a matter of presidents and generals and kings. For Mrs. Larson, as for other housewives, humility finds daily reinforcement in a society that measures value in money and holds the work of those who earn no money to be without value. In a society where most people distinguish between life and work, women who supervise their own work at home do not seem to be working. This devaluation appears on all levels, from Mathilda Larson’s incredulity at being interviewed to conventional social intercourse (Is she working?) to the economist’s numerical expression of national well-being, the gross national product. Defined as the sum of the values of all the goods and services produced during a year, the GNP ignores unpaid housework; the man who marries his paid housekeeper and stops paying her thereby literally lowers the GNP. Conventional economic analysis affords little insight into the historical process that changed American women’s lives during Mrs. Larson’s lifetime; understanding that process requires reflection on the relationship between household work and the broader social and economic world.

No static conception of the function of housework in the economy will provide the theoretical basis for a clear historical picture. The colonial household was colonial society, as one historian, calling it the little commonwealth, points out; it served the functions of home, factory, school, and welfare institution. One by one, private industry and government have assumed those functions, moving the work of the household from the private realm to the public. Before industrialization, most housework produced goods and services used within the household: women spun and wove cloth and sewed it into clothes, grew food and prepared it for eating or storage, made soap and candles, and washed clothes for other family members, who shared those tasks and—according to the sexual division of labor—worked in the fields and as small craftsmen. As increasing numbers of men and single women went to work in factories during the nineteenth century, housewives served their society by reproducing the labor force, both in the literal sense of conceiving, bearing, and caring for children and in the broader one of preparing workers to go to work daily. At the end of the century, as households began to consume the products of American industry, as the economy expanded and factories produced a wide variety of consumer goods on a mass scale, housewives began to serve the economy by organizing consumption for individual households.

Mathilda Larson’s story suggests that even this more dynamic description oversimplifies: at the turn of the twentieth century her farm family still produced most of what they used, and consumed few industrial products. Even in the colonial period, few households produced everything they used, and today, despite frozen foods and day-care centers, households continue to produce some goods and do some of the work of reproducing the labor force. An account of the housewife’s services to the economy and to the rest of the population over the past two centuries provides a key to understanding some of the fundamental changes in the nature of the work itself, and gives insight into the distinctions between housework and wage labor that have often been regarded as if they resulted from biological differences between women and men.

The industrial revolution removed textile manufacture from the home and brought crafts like shoemaking, formerly done by independent crafts-persons, into factories. Entrepreneurs gathered workers together to produce goods for profit, assigning them different tasks for greater efficiency, supplying them with machines and raw materials, and supervising their labor to ensure peak production. Most people still farmed, and by modern standards those factories look small and inefficient, but as the new industrial order developed, people came to consider the home as separate from the rest of society. There married women labored alone, supervising themselves, isolated from the dominant trends of the new society in what popular writers, around 1825, began to call their own sphere. Although not totally accurate, this ideology of separate spheres for men and women reflected the new and growing reality of industrial society.

By the middle of the century, however, the distinctions between the spheres of the household and the world of industry had blurred. Households had to adapt to industrial workers’ new schedules; natural cycles of light and dark could not dictate routine when some family members lived by the clock. Factories had begun to produce goods that helped people adapt to urban industrial life—soap for urban dwellers who had no reserves of fat left from slaughtering, lamps and lamp oils to brighten the time left after work, textiles that lightened the burdens of preindustrial housework. Domestic writers recognized and confronted these trends, along with the degradation of unpaid domestic labor that went along with the steady expansion of the money economy, but they held to the ideology that set the working world of women apart from that of men.

That ideology still rang true, in large part. Because only the very wealthy could afford gas or plumbing, industrialization hardly changed the major daily tasks of housework. For the vast majority of married women before the twentieth century, housework was, by definition, a full-time chore, largely taken up with building fires and hauling water. Women who needed money earned it by increasing their housework, by taking in laundry, sewing, or boarders. Men had bosses; married women bossed themselves, deciding what needed to be done according to the task and not the clock, controlling their own work process. Men left home to work; women’s work remained intertwined with the rest of their lives, their time restructured by new products and by the demands of their husbands’ jobs, but still fundamentally their own. Although they adapted their work to the schedules of the industrial order and used money to buy some of its products, most married women continued to work under conditions sufficiently different from those of their husbands to obscure the connection between the spheres.

Between about 1890 and 1920, mass production and mass distribution brought new products and services—gas, electricity, running water, prepared foods, ready-made clothes, and factory-made furniture and utensils—to large numbers of American families. With these products, households became the direct beneficiaries of an economic transformation as profound as the industrial revolution, during which business corporations assumed their modern structure and united Americans into a national consumer market. Standardized, uniform goods that cost money replaced the various makeshifts that had constituted most people’s subsistence, dealing blows to the satisfactions of home production but bringing about a general end to the arduous labor of the household and a general rise in the standard of living. Those goods began to substitute for much of the massive productive and maintenance work that housewives had provided throughout the nineteenth century.

Their burdens lightened by the new technology, married women continued to work alone in homes increasingly dominated by industrial production, preparing daily meals, caring for children, and organizing the social and affectional lives of their families. A network of reformers, responding to the new trends, had redefined the relationship of the home to the larger society. Like the ideas of their predecessors during the industrial revolution, the ideas of these reformers may best be understood as expressions of reality, formed during an important period of economic transition, that helped to shape the social and economic changes that followed. Working with other reformers during what has come to be known as the Progressive Era, those interested in household life established the home economics profession and campaigned against the traditional ways in which women had made money without becoming wage laborers for the entrepreneurs. They defined new tasks in mothering and in consumption, tasks to be overseen by experts who claimed to combine the rationality of science with the efficiency of business, replacing love, common sense, and old-fashioned ways as guides for housework. These ideas set the stage for changes in housework during the rest of the twentieth century. Even the functions that remained in the home at its start—cooking, child care, and emotional life—became public matters, increasingly fulfilled by commodities and services designed by corporations for their own profit.

The history of housework provides a description of fundamental changes in American daily life as the economy developed; just as it demonstrates the effects on individuals of the periods of economic transformation, so it also demonstrates the effects of long-run trends. Because the American economy was capitalist, it had to grow: capitalists by definition went into business to make profits, which they invested in new ventures, and they sought new areas of investment that would expand the economy as a whole. Food, shelter, and clothing became matters of social production, not private, created by profitable industrial manufacture; new kinds of transportation, communication, and business methods created new distribution systems, facilitating that growth. As the factories and the railroads multiplied, so did the social relations that went with them: American economic expansion substituted the new roles of boss and worker, manufacturer and consumer, for the old ones of male and female subsistence farmer, who worked for themselves and consumed what they produced. As it expanded, the economic system became increasingly centralized. During most of the nineteenth century, bankers and financiers dominated the economy, investing their money in building the transportation and communication structure that would assure continued growth; centralization was not yet a feature of production in the industries making goods for households—soap, lamp oil, and cast-iron stoves came from small, local companies. By the end of the century, large corporations were coming to dominate the distribution and production of household goods, making their decisions on the basis of their own profit.

The increased availability of consumer goods only partially obscured the fact that the profit motive outweighed the well-being of workers and consumers. Bloody battles characterized worker-employer relations for decades after the first nationwide strike, which paralyzed the railroads in July 1877; rank-and-file resistance and militant union organization eventually brought industrial workers decent wages, hours, and working conditions, concessions to industrial peace from employers who earlier had bestowed libraries on starving steelworkers or displayed the profits from their workers’ labor in ostentatious houses for themselves. No such resistance from consumers greeted their similar disregard for the needs of the housewife. Industrialists ignored most of the patents for household labor-saving devices because they could not produce them profitably; they produced others, like canned foods and washing machines, for military and commercial applications decades before they offered them to households. The commercial laundry industry, which removed a chore from the home, suffered in competition with the more profitable washing-machine industry; Edison developed the basic elements of electric service under constraints that ensured its competition with gas. American manufacturers offered little to ease the work of most households before 1900, and they introduced the new products of mass production with newly developed advertising techniques that eventually assured their domination of the so-called private sphere.

With their advertising, the manufacturers joined the home economists—who welcomed them from the start—in their roles as household experts, perverting the role in the interest of selling goods. Advertisements used guilt and fear to promote dependence on products, creating artificial burdens to substitute for the disappearing real ones. (Women, it seemed, were meant to be burdened.) Manufacturers advanced the notion that convenience constituted an end in itself, holding out the promise that the burdens might be lightened with enough of the latest products. They attempted to end the conviction that money (the currency of the public sphere) cannot buy love (the central feature of the private), using sex to sell things, suggesting that buying things for loved ones would bring love to the purchaser, and promoting products and the act of consumption itself as substitutes for intimate relationships. Plugging individual consumption of standardized goods, they created an illusion of individualism, leaving consumers stranded in the marketplace, isolated in a mass. Mass production replaced the monotonous nineteenth-century winter diet with burgers and fries; it transformed the dimly lit family circle, an arena of intimacy and productive work, into a scene of corporate-sponsored leisure, no better illuminated by the flickering TV. Women lost the compensations of nineteenth-century housework: satisfaction in their craft, intimate connections with their families and with other women formed through work, and the sense of value derived from work done for love, not money.

They suffered the loss of their old compensations, however, in the context of new ones. Craft satisfaction, intimacy, and community went along with grueling amounts of heavy labor, a lack of privacy that most modern Americans would find intolerable, and the oppression of women on both individual and social levels. Women took for granted a staggering burden of household work—We expected to do those things, we didn’t know any different, says Mathilda Larson—and made little of the compensations, which they took equally for granted. Mass communications brought information about the rest of the world, and new ideas about doing household work, along with the advertisements; gas and electricity rescued Americans from severe discomfort and from virtual slavery to the seasons as it took them farther from the cycles of nature. Tainted water supplies, rancid food, soot and skin burns from open fires, and full chamber pots offer a more accurate picture of daily life for most people before the twentieth century than the less frequent pleasures of the quilting bee.

Women had plumbing installed to make their lives easier; they preferred electric lights to kerosene lamps because electricity gave more light with none of the dirty work; they bought ready-made clothing because they wanted to spend their time on other things besides sewing. Like that of Mathilda Larson, who did not buy an electric iron until about ten years after she had electric lights, most women’s lives changed incrementally; many events in their own lives and in the rest of the world—new technology, their children’s growth, new kinds of job opportunities, and new attitudes that came from their neighbors as well as from the popular media—combined to make those changes. Over the long run, bit by bit, seemingly unconnected and unprofound events in millions of lives formed patterns that the participants, who considered the events either trivial or wholly personal, could not necessarily see.

Many of the changes in housework matched changes in other kinds of work during the long process of industrialization. Shorter hours and better working conditions—less hard, constant physical labor, in safer and more comfortable circumstances—distinguish twentieth-century housework as they distinguish other twentieth-century labor. Like other workers, the housewife lost control of her work process; manufacturers exerted their control on her through product design and advertising rather than through direct supervision. The clock and the calendar replaced the sun as arbiter of everyone’s time. Yet the isolation of the full-time housewife increased. While other workers went to work in groups, however thoroughly supervised, full-time housewives lost the growing daughters and full-time servants who worked with them at home, the iceman and the street vendors who came to their houses, the sewing circle and the group of women around the well. That isolation, combined with the illusory individualism of consumerism, intensified the notion that individuals could control their private lives at home, protected behind the portals of their houses from the domination of others: the central legacy of the doctrine of separate spheres.

Those spheres were never separate in fact, and the apparent distinctions between the household and the outside world continue to erode. Ecological concerns suggest that private decisions have social consequences; distinctions between men’s work and women’s work have lost their former clarity, both in household work and in work for pay. For all the private distress of the rising divorce rate, and despite the continued refusal of many employers to pay women wages equal to those of men, women need no longer accept either housework or marriage as their inevitable lot in life, terminable only by death, nor can they assume that marriage will provide them with a permanent deliverance from the world of bosses, as their grandmothers could. Modern women, who can wash their laundry in automatic machines and pick up both their dinners and their children on the way home from their jobs, must consider the implications of the lost satisfactions of old-fashioned housework and find ways to re-create some of those satisfactions in their daily lives both as workers and as consumers. At the same time, they must avoid romanticizing the past. The lost satisfactions must be balanced against the thorough subjugation of women, their work, and the values they were charged to protect at home as industrial society developed, the economic dependence that allowed that subjugation to persist and stultified individual women’s life choices, and the staggering burden of running households where women’s work was truly never done.

ONE

Daily Bread

During the nineteenth century, many Americans began for the first time to buy their food. Poor people still struggled to produce as much as they could even in urban areas, and rural Americans outnumbered urban until 1920; however, nineteenth-century changes in the production and distribution of food set the stage for a profound transformation. In 1790, the year of the first United States census, one American lived in a town of 2,500 or more for every eighteen who lived in the country; a century later, nearly 40 percent of the population lived in urban territory. Urbanization, as the historians describe this process, like its frequent partner industrialization, changed the American landscape—rural as well as urban—and the most intimate rituals of everyday existence.

City living and industrial development created food consumers out of producers; consumers were progressively removed from the sources of their food—in miles and in numbers of intermediary people and processes. Even the food itself changed. Modern transportation and food-preservation techniques lengthened the seasons and introduced variety even in the diets of the poor. In 1900, the distinctions between rich and poor, urban and rural, continued to dominate food habits—poor people and rural dwellers produced more of what they ate—but mass distribution, large-scale commercial agriculture, mass production, and the new corporate structure paved the way for universal