WOMENS HISTORY; Housework MORE HOUSEWORK FOR MOTHER, Ruth Schwartz Cowan I am a scholar who studied the history of housework.... One of my children dribbled egg yolk onto the front of her shirt; and, after putting her into her pajamas, I proceeded to throw her shirt into the laundry basket. What are you doing that for? I said to myself. You know perfectly well that its the soap manufacturers, and no one else, who foster such absurd notions of cleanliness, and that they do it so as to be able to sell more soap. You of all people, should not be taken in by such foolishness. Take the shirt out of the laundry basket. No, I dont think I will, my revery continued, because whatever my feelings about soap manufacturers and advertising copywriters may be, I do not want my daughter laughed at in nursery school. The shirt got washed. A year or two later, I caught myself, once again, doing the same thing, although perhaps this time the stain was chocolate rather than egg yolk. Now wait a minute, quoth I to myself, its time for you to be a bit more honest about what youre doing. The other day your daughter dressed herself for school in a skirt that was absolutely filthy, and you were the one who made her take it off. Shes very sensitive about what other children think of her, but she would have happily worn that skirt to school. Youre the one who has the hangup about cleanliness. Youre afraid that the parents of the other children and the teachers will think less of me because I am a working mother or to pity my child for that reason. That skirt got washed, too. Another two or three years passed ...and I was still putting into the wash shirts that had just been worn one day and catching myself at it. Now wait just one more minute. I finally instructed myself. If it were truly the soap manufacturers or other parents who were responsible for this silliness, I would have stopped it ages ago. The fact of the matter is that I cannot stand the sight of my children in dirty clothes. I associate dirt with poverty, with loss of control; and like a somnambulist, I am walking through the rituals and responding to the symbols that really meant something SEVENTY years ago. Isnt it time to lay the past to rest? That shirt did not get washed - and neither did many subsequent ones.Not long afterward, I was confined to bed with a serious illness for almost six months, and my husband was forced to assume some of the responsibilities of housework that had previously been mine.....he became the laundress in the family. No matter how many times or how patiently I explained the rules of laundry work to him, he persisted....in mixing dark colors with light and permanent press with cotton. One day my nagging on the subject must have been even more than he could bear and he pointed out to me rather sharply (to put it politely) that not a single piece of clothing had been ruined under his tenure, and that the rules for doing laundry were not unlike those that the Civil Rights statues were intended to abolish; that is, rules propagated to create a spurious expertise, which allows one group of people to exclude another group from an enterprise that should be accessible to all. My husband was absolutely right; and since that time we have shared the laundry work between us, without abiding by all the rules and without causing any damage worse than one slightly pinkened undershirt. As near as I can tell, neither his masculinity nor my femininity (so far as these may be identifiable qualities) have been compromised in the process. Many of the rules that tyrannize housewives are unconscious and therefore potent. However manufacturers and advertisers may exploit these unconscious rules, they did not create them. By exploring their history we can bring these rules into consciousness and thereby dilute their potency. We can then decide whether they are truly useful or merely the product of atavism or of an advertisers hard sell, whether they are agents of oppression or liberation. If we can learn to select among the rules only those that make sense to us in the present, we can begin to control household technology instead of letting it control us. And only then is it likely that the true potential of that technology - less work for mother - will be fulfilled. The quintessentially American solution to the problem of housework is commercialization. Ruth Schwartz Cowan muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v046/46.3parr.html
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 09:18:27 +0000
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