"More Work for Mother" Ch 3: Industrialization

• The text provided is from "More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave" by Ruth Schwartz Cowan
• It's a book about the history of housework and technology in the home

Chapter 3: The Invention of Housework: The Early Stages of Industrialization

• The 19th century marked the industrialization of the United States

• This impacted international merchants by transitioning them from dealing in raw materials to manufactured goods

• Landless laborers shifted their work from farms to factories

• Politicians had to address complex financial and corporate structure issues with minimal legal precedent

• Bankers adjusted their practices to accommodate capitalists who wanted to invest in machinery rather than land

• For local merchants and rural peddlers payments increasingly required to be in cash

• Farmers had to acquire cash for new implements like harvesters/combines, seeds, and fertilizers

• Industrialization spurred new transport forms (canals/railroads) and communication (telegraph/telephone/daily newspaper)

• New goods appeared altering social relations such as ready-made cloth potentially replacing home spinning/weaving

• Ready-made clothing could eliminate home sewing or seamstress jobs

• Canned milk offered a substitute for fresh milk, leading to the iceman's new social role

• Households were affected by this process similarly to law courts, workplaces and general stores

• Young people went to work in factories, and their wages were returned to the households, providing cash traded for goods

• The demand for said goods would continue to fuel the economy

• Households stopped making cloth, purchasing kerosene instead of candles, coal instead of chopping wood; and buying meat from Chicago meat packers

• Urban settings made old activities impossible while wages allowed for people to buy even more goods

• Industrialization altered the relationship between households and the economy

• People supported theses changes, wanting to buy manufactured goods

• They sold labor and socialized their children for employee roles

• Some were unwillingly dragged into this new society while others welcomed it with open arms

• It has proven difficult how women's work in their homes and industrialization related to each other

• Some historians said that manufactured goods eased women's burden

• Buying kerosene is easier than making candles, purchasing cotton easier than combing and spinning

• Urban populations and the middle class both grew because of industrialization

• Arguably fewer women had to work as hard to maintain their families health

• It must be easier to do housework under urban conditions with the assistance of servants

• The fertility rate fell from 7.04 in 1800 to 3.56 in 1900

• Fewer children meant less women with broken health, ultimately making like easier

• Contemporary documents tell a different tale because American women seemed to be exhausted a lot of the time

• Catherine Beecher blamed the widespread ill health of women on the nature of their work

• Census statistics, articles in women's magazines, economic histories, genre paintings, patent records, and the extant artifacts document countless household conveniences were invented

• Paradoxically with labor-saving devices, little labor appeared to have been saved

• The paradox can be resolved without impugning the reputations of observers of daily life in 19th century America

• Labor-saving devices reorganized housework in such a way that did not save labor

• A beef stew recipe demonstrates this, meat and vegetables come from butchering your own animal and tending your garden

• Grain, used as thickening agent was an exception, demonstrating a key change in early household labor

Milling Flour and Making Bread

• Merchant flour mills from major cities became a commonplace as opposed to local grist mills

• Oliver Evans designed an automatic flour mill powered by water in the 1780s that eliminated work previously done by laborers

• In 1795 Evans and Thomas Ellicott published instructions and designs for these mills

• Evans mill required half the workers

• Modifications resulted in more white flour from each bushel of wheat allowing for higher profits

• By using modern flour mills your life would be changed drastically

• Husbands would spend less time chopping wood and making meal

• Children would spend less time doing seasonal tasks and men had little to no useful role to play in the kitchen, making the home a place of leisure

• Merchant flour milling thrived in the late 1700s

• Flour, biscuit, and meal became the second most important American export second only to tobacco

• European devastation during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars increased reliance on American grains

• Merchant mills primarily produced superfine flour

• City residents bought some of this flour but others continued to grind their own grain

• This changed in the 1820s with the cessation of European hostilities that led to American merchants attempting to expand domestic sales

• Canals were opened in the upper parts of New York state, New England, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, facilitating transport and lowering prices

• Settlement/wheat production in the Middle Western states grew

• “Mass produced” grain became cheaper, it also became less profitable for farmers in New England/Middle Atlantic to grow wheat, rye, and corn for market

• Home grain disappeared due to the above factors

• A profound expansion of commercial flour milling happened in the first half of the 1800s

• 268,000 barrels of flour were shipped on the Erie Canal in 1835, then by 1840, that number hit 4,344,000

• The average wholesale price of 100 pounds of flour dropped to $5.36

• Evans designed a steam powered mill in 1808 allowing for conducting of milling in 1860 almost anywhere

• By 1860 flour milling was the leading American industry valued at $249 million

• To transition to industry rural couples had to switch from home-grown cornmeal to manufactured wheat flours produced from automated mills

• Resulting in the crucial transition from producer to consumer and encountering it only at its last stage- trade

• Hand grinding of corn was part of men/children but became an evening job

• Milling provided relief for men/boys from one of the most time consuming chores they were responsible for

• However the switch increased required time and energy for women in cooking and baking

• Before the early 1800s corn as the dominant grain as it was easy to grow, harvest, and cook

• Liquid and leavening are both added to cook cornmeal

• Similarly with coarse flours wheat and rye were prepared into quick breads, porridges, and griddle cakes which required complex preparation

• "Salt rising" was one quick bread

• White flour would be used only by the rich to make pies and cakes

• Rye flour and indian cornmeal was used in making bread that they would eat

• As years wore, however white flour became cheaper and easter to obtain

• Yeast breads began to replace quick breads which required lots of hard work

• Households could afford the cash it take

• Which is why white bread became on of the first symbols of status in the industrial period

• It’s a requirement for housewives to make the bread, with no postponements

• Quickbreads were considered to be fit only for negros Indians and the Irish

• What was true for bread was also true for cakes

• Meals and whole flours do not lend themselves to cake making only fine cake

• Under typical 19th century kitchen it called for great amount of time and hard work

The Evolution of the Stove

• A 19th century stew would have fine white flour instead of brown meal and prepared with different tools

• Although slightly different, the knives, spoons, pots, and brushes were all similar to it predecessors, it would be different that there would be marvelous product of American ingenuity

• The cast-iron cooking stove would serve as an important dome stick system of the 19th century

• It is difficult to trace since it would be an implement that changed in a short time

• Many changes were wrought by manufactures scatter,

• Benjamin Franklin's stove invented during the 1740s was intended was for room heating, with channels through warm gas could also pass to provide additional heating- vented out chimney

• American cooking stoves began to appear when the idea to controlling passages of combustion gases was combined with stove

• Simple stoves, which have evolved into monster American, cooking stove has four to eight ok in poles 2-3 ovens for warming and hot water attached the boy 1830 stove became a separate instruments

• The poor used stove

• Heating stoves would begin to evolve separately and get smaller Culminating in the efficient base burners with the fire at its base and a magazine for maintaining continuous supply fresh call above

• The enclosed stoves, were not greeted with complete enthusiasm for some due to its lack of symbolism

• Bolles said that the open heart felt more loved

• Ethnicity, symbolism status and tradition aside, cooking and heating stoves replaced the open heart in American home due to economy or demands and developments in the iron industry

• Stoves were economical for a couple of reasons because it allowed the fire to control the air controlling the usage of fuels

More Chores for Women, Fewer for Men

• You can understand why more likely for men to enter workforce and why rural Connecticut families came to depend on the Cash wage labor supplied

• They also had to purchase luxuries or necessities

• Stoves reduced men's work for comfort

• Each fathers stopped cutting wood, each generation of Sons knew less about how it should be done. And more about how to get wage job and how girls will continue train domestic chores

• As 19 century were own, industrialization served, eliminate the work that men assign assigned to do what the same time leaving the work of women

• Male household occupations like butchering were eliminated by the new technologies and innovations

• But there were no changes men cannot eliminated need women spin because because clothing made by women a

• Due to sewing being exclusively a job done by women

• Laundry became weekly with women was dreaded as it was hard work

• Men and children do not need to make the effort where women did not have a choice

• Waste system eliminated the chore but added The cleaning of toilets in out houses

• Home canning equipment make it possible to preserve more roots and vegetals for consumption during winter but increased as I have to work that women were expected to do when season was on

• Industrialization had introduced many novelties to the homes but they still had hard work to do

• 24 women also ate a More varied died suffer left of cold, more space and more luxuries

• Merchant flour cast iron municipal, water would need men for work

• Once men were given opportunity they stay it and they and they cease to train their sons. Men made a new and a whole new world of work leaving women at the old.

• For Man, women were tied Even more strongly to cast-iron Hearst and family.

• Material life during first stages industrialization required need women to stay so as protect the women

• Women work and children have to make the effort where they do not have a choice it was the side what identified the women with whom only virtue. Children did not have the crafts that this would did not happen and were sealed in best social, and the relations of parents and children

Chapter 4: Twentieth-Century Changes in Household Technology

• Separate spheres created from domestic sphere, and not only possible but desirable

• Over, the increase the productively to be possible with news

• That serves the undermine the very ideology the light to their to base

• The phases has lead the new technological systems would serve to undermine the very ideology that Lay.

• In order understand, this dialetical process

• We must first understand the nature of the chains and household technology during the 20th century

And in order understand them, we must first disabuse ourselves of a set of commonly receive notion

• To this conventional wisdom has telling to stay with the 20 century radical is

• I had to make technology would radical transform America household by turning its production come assumption

• This means that the food and clothing people wants made in their how this made in factory it we do in their homes

• And in plain English

• Eat clothes and occasionally launch

• Now it looks at this particular peace conventional with some wisdom which ironic enough seem to be subscribe to your

• In the first phase of the industrialization chains and health other of work presence household that say the separate spheres 4 minutes that were not only also desirable

• As American families passed from me get units with production that me get units what com assumption com Assumption econd that as factory production replace don't touch nothing was a lot like that and do at home for the adult women

• Many Americans believe that these color laser to to write true and act in police in various.

• Some hope to reestablish family solidarity by learning lost productive crafts.

• Some just to let the the of what's the the movement has has some bunch and have nothing better to do. Do you do the year that that

• Huston has spent too much can't no original plan for what

• The conventional one would go not so conventional has it root in of the painstaking service of social scientist would do the most important empirical and theoretical work in what's year 1890 1930

• they all were one way another can discipline survey what they lived with the changes with the 19-

• From what's is you know but the automobile for what they're gonna get

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