Stats for nerds
4recommend
14mentions
5people
2010–2024years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- See:
More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave
By Ruth Schwartz Cowan
- She was significantly involved in the World War I version of the Victory Garden which was apparently home food preservation and recipes for meatless and wheatless meals. This is a program I had not previously heard about but it helps explain why victory gardens did so well: it wasn't the first time this type of model was used to help address shortages etc during a major conflict.
For anyone interested in the history of women's work and household technology, I highly recommend the book More work for mother.
- There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called "More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and standards were raised
Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of housework.
In most families, as women begin working outside the home, they still do 40 hours/week of housework. The men mostly have not picked up the difference.
I'm a former homemaker. I got divorced and got a corporate job. My adult special needs sons continued to live with me.
Co-workers would express pity anout how I worked full-time and also had to go home and cook dinner. They were flabbergasted to learn my oldest son did the cooking.
Given that I was working at a Fortune 200 company, these were presumably some of the most privileged "ordinary" women on the planet. Even the highest ranking woman in my department whose husband moved to let her accept the promotion was not comfortable learning about my arrangement at home because she apparently still did most of the women's work at home while having a VIP job.
- Thank you.
I think that's a really key point and it gets missed because most recorded history is male history. Men operated in the public sphere and most history is about that public sphere. It's really hard to find records at all about what went on in the private sphere. So our written records wind up de facto being an ode to male power and male tactics and we completely miss the fact that there was this whole other thing going on privately and it was a very big part of the world, but there is very little record of it.
So we wind up discounting it entirely and not even recognizing that it existed. It's a huge blind spot.
There's an interesting book about the history of technology for doing housework called "More Work for Mother." It details how in the past 300 years or so, we have very much reframed work in order to divide up domestic responsibilities and paid work. With the rise of money, we needed to free up male labor from the domestic sphere in order to empower men to bring home a bigger paycheck so everyone was better off.
Historically, men beat the rugs. Then we invented vacuum cleaners and vacuuming was "women's work." Historically, men took grain to the mill to be ground into flour. Now you can buy flour at the grocery store.
There were countless ways in which men were involved in running the household that got handed off to women so men could do paid labor. And now women are also doing paid labor and there's all these problems. And people fail to see the connection in part because they don't know how labor was divided up 300 or so years ago. They think the way it was done in the 1950s was always the norm and this is absolutely not true.
So there's a huge piece missing and we don't even see that it is missing and we wonder why in the hell things aren't working smoothly.
- That sounds like personal baggage talking. It sounds really venomous.
I successfully swapped gender roles with my sons. I got a corporate job and offered them the chance to take over the women's work rather than get jobs themselves. They did not half ass it, though they also did not handle it the same way I would. If it weren't for feeling attacked in an ugly and gratuitous way, there would be good common ground to be found there.
If you are interested, the book "More work for mother" details 300 years of history of household tech. It partly agrees with you that maybe women should learn to lighten up a hair. But it also asserts the pressure for women to work so hard comes from real gains in things like child survival rates.
I like the book in part because it is a rare example of not hating on either gender and not promoting the war between the sexes.
I don't plan to engage you further because this just sounds like someone venting their spleen on a random internet stranger and I am not interested in engaging with that.
- You might enjoy the book More Work for Mother. (I don't know why this is being downvoted, but the book is about the history of how domestic labor was shifted off men to women to free men up to get paid jobs.)
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-history-...
