Household Technology and the Social Construction of Housework

Abstract

Historians and social scientists generally agree that the forces of industrialization and the growth of the market economy have progressively absorbed much of the household's economic function. Furthermore, popular belief assumes that the vestiges of old forms of production in the home will surely be eliminated by the application of technological rationality. Put another way, it is thought by the public and many academics that technology, broadly defined, has freed women for other, nonhousework tasks-in particular, employment in the paid labor market. These assumptions are reflected in popular terminology such as fast foods (to save time), convenience foods (to increase ease of preparation), and laborsaving devices (conducive to easing the work load generally). This imagery has such power that much traditional research takes these effects for granted instead of demonstrating or disproving them empirically. Yet even with the unprecedented growth of the market sector and the almost universal availability of certain items of household equipment and goods, recent studies show that labor in the home still accounts for approximately half of this country's total work time.1 In this article our goal is to investigate the evidence concerning the effects of technological developments on household work. We believe that popular beliefs about the positive effects are inadequately sub-