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BEAUTY IN THE SERVICE OF A POLITICAL AGENDA
By Dr. Ruth Schwartz Cowan
In the cities and suburbs, things
were very different. For an increasing number of people
living in America’s cities and suburbs, that traditional
regimen no longer obtained. Most of their households, even
some that coped at or below the poverty line, had been modernized,
either at their own expense, or because landlords had been
forced to modernize by local building codes or by market
forces. By 1940, the vast majority of urban and suburban
households had electric service, as well as central heating
and indoor plumbing. This meant that many housewives, even
those who could not afford domestic servants, could manage
to cook and launder and clean without the help of their
children and husbands. As a result, children could be sent
to school, often for more years than their parents had been
able to go; in a modern household, children’s work
at home was no longer essential to the family economy. Similarly,
in urban and suburban settings, many household necessities--
ranging from soap to shoes and from sweaters to soup pots--could
be purchased in stores. As a result, husbands needed to
go “out” to work, to earn the wages that made
it possible to purchase those necessities. Thus, in American
cities and suburbs in the interwar years, only adult women,
housewives, worked at home; everyone else left the house
either for school or for gainful employment. In addition,
a large part of an urban or suburban housewife’s work
was consumption work. Shopping well was a complex skill
and it was just as crucial to the urban family economy as
the production work that was occupying the time of rural
women like Hazel Parkinson. The difference, of course, was
that the work done by urban and suburban women housewives,
even those who did not have servants, was not nearly as
physically taxing as the work that rural women were doing.[
iv ]
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Thus, modernization had very complex consequences
for families. Some of those consequences were deeply disturbing
to traditional patterns of gendered and generational relations.
In cities, children learned what they need to know in order
to succeed in the world from their teachers; on the farms,
they learned most of these critical lessons from their parents.
The men and women that REA wanted to reach, reasonably prosperous
farmers who could afford to sign up for electric service,
were very worried about the implications of switching to electric
technologies. If their daily work was transformed by appliances,
then children would no longer need to help with that work
and would no longer need to be taught how to do it expertly—in
which case, what would children need to learn at their parents’
knees? Certainly not the mundane but crucial skills that rural
mothers and fathers had learned from their own mothers and
fathers, the kinds of skills--how to bake a good pie, how
to chop wood effectively, how to harvest a great deal of corn,
how to pluck chickens quickly—that rural men and women
had perfected through years of practice, skills that had been
passed down through countless generations, skills that were
part and parcel of rural parents’ definitions of themselves
as good men and women. In a modernized economy those skills
would no longer be of any value—and neither would the
ethic of hard work that had accompanied them. Perhaps even
worse, in a modernized economy, family members would no longer
need to work together, to co-operate, to subordinate their
own needs to the needs of the family unit. Husbands, wives
and children could go their separate ways for most of the
day; the old fashioned ties that bind would start to unravel.
[
iv ] The differences between
traditional and modern patterns of doing housework are discussed
at length in my book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies
of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave
(New York: Basic Books, 1983).
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