Ruth S. Cowan: ...is that the history of household technology and the history of housework are very different, if viewed from different class perspectives. And that is a result of some of my own work as well as other work that people have done in the field. We now know something about the history of household technology and household work from the perspective of the middle-class, however we still don't know very much about it from this perspective.Here I must stop for a minute; I just finished a manuscript on household work and household technology and struggled mightily in its last chapters to find some way of describing people other than to use the expression either working-class or labor class or poor that matter and the reason I think those are inappropriate designations for talking about women's work is that they all relate to men's work. They either relate to the economic condition of the family as a result of men's work or they relate to the work that men do and have the work that men do designate a family as being of that class and I have yet to find any other word. The editor for my manuscript went bananas trying to sort out the different words that I tried to use; so that for bad reasons but expedient ones, I'm just going to call the other people poor for the moment. Since poor is a little bit better at least than working class or lower class, those are the two terms that I find objectionable for talking about women. And so what I'd like to remind you in general of the notion of what has happened to middle-class women's work in the course of the last century is the technologies with which that work has been done have changed.


Ruth S. Cowan: Some of which emerge from some things that I wrote myself and what happened to middle-class women over the course of the several generations of the 20th century was that they became proletarianized. As household technology became more efficient as it became based on electricity and applying gases rather than being based on wood and coal, housewives of the middle class ceased to be managers of others people's labor and became the laborers themselves. Whereas a woman, a housewife, managing a household about 1910, if her husband had been reasonably economically comfortable would have managed the labor of a lot of people. She would have had a servant in the household itself but in addition they were dozens upon dozens of services, delivery people who brought things to the house. No housewife of that class went out and got a case or barrel of flour herself, it was brought to the household. And that's the sense in which such a woman was managing other people's labor rather than doing the labor directly herself, although, she was referred to as someone who was doing her own house for that was the euphemism for not having a live-in maid but one such a woman had a lot of assistance although she did some housework herself. She spent a lot of time managing other people's work. Her granddaughter, with three or four children in the baby boom was doing all the work herself. The servants have gone, the delivery people had gone, the doctor no longer came to the house the children had to be brought to the doctor and so forth. That's what is meant by the proletarianization of middle-class women's labor. 


Ruth S. Cowan: What I want to suggest you today is that for women and for families that began the century not as middling people but as poor people the process was very different. In order to stimulate our memories, I'm going to show you some pictures of what housework was like about 1910. If you find it difficult to hear with the window open then let's shut it and then when some of us find it difficult to breathe we'll open it. I'm going the wrong way [in reference to clicking through her slides]. There is the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a picture we've all seen in many many times but I'd like you to think about it in terms of what that array push carts meant for doing housework. In an odd kind of way the poor also had delivery systems. Food was brought to the curb. Housewares were brought to the apartment; the peddlers went up and down the staircases with the pots and pans and the used clothing and the yard Goods on their backs. And shopping was not a time-consuming, although it may have been a heartbreaking endeavor, it wasn't a time-consuming endeavor. 

Speaker 1: Excuse me, but were these peddlers always men?

Ruth S. Cowan: That's a good question, I don't know the entire answer to it. Peddlers is, as I've read the descriptions were men but pushcart were frequently pushed by women. So I guess I would guess that it was both.

Ruth S. Cowan: Again the kind of picture we've seen before an interior of an apartment in which people are doing piecework, homework, the kinds of things that our speakers this morning were referring to rather frequently. Let us a think for a minute about, and we have all read these descriptions, of how many pants had to be sewn and how many shirts had to be completed in order to earn a dollar. Let us think about what that meant for what got cooked on their stove. Advertisers of spaghetti sauce aside, and immigrant children's reminiscences about Mama baking challah everyday of the week, all the evidence that we have from all of the sources indicates that very little cooking got done in such a household. Indeed if you think about it, if it took all day to earn a dollar how could one cook? 

Ruth S. Cowan: Vast amounts of food were purchased ready-made. Pickled herring is a staple of the diet because you eat it right out of the barrel, you don't do anything to it. Cheese is another. Bread was purchased from bakers. Every inquiry into the diets of working people in New York and other cities indicated that they purchased their bread, they did not make it, and when you think about if you've met bread you can't do it very well in such a technological apparatus and takes a lot of fuel and it was foolish in economic terms to expend the fuel on making bread if it was being sold down the street and up the block which it was. And so, poor families did not make bread at home although it may have been made on ceremonial occasions, which is why I think so many children remember challah and remember Christmas breads and sweet breads of various kinds that were prepared for Christmas or for Sabbath or for a special feast. Bread was the largest part of poor people's diets and at least in the cities they purchased it ready made. I keep going the wrong way [in reference to her slides]. And let me also say, cooking was one pot cooking. You put everything in the pot and breakfast cooking, that gruel of some kind or another grain that was stewed for a long time.And dinner cooking meant soup. Also something that didn't have to be watched and didn't have to be tended and just sat there until you were ready to eat it.

Ruth S. Cowan: This is just another illustration of the same phenomenon, these women are not pitting cherries for their own household, they are pitting cherries because that was one of the piecework industries in the tenements. Many canaries operated by farming out, literally - I used that word intentionally, farming out foodstuffs to tenements where the initial processing went on. The pitted cherries were then canned in a factory.
[inaudible comment from audience]. I put this one in just as immediate contrast [referencing image on slide]. If you will look at the clothing these women are wearing and its cleanliness and the kinds of fabrics it's made out of, and the states of disrepair. [Switches slide] and then these women who at least as far as the label that I found for this photograph were not affluent women. This is a tea party in Madison, Wisconsin. The assumption was, at least in the book of photographs, that these were faculty wives. But just look at the dresses they're wearing and imagine to yourself how much ironing it took to get one of those presentable, let alone what it took to wash one by hand. And these were [inaudible description of dresses], so you didn't put them, even if you had a ringer, you didn't put them through the ringer as far as I can tell from a household advice books of the time.

Ruth S. Cowan: This happens to be a picture of a shelter, established in a police station in Boston during the Depression of 1905. But it will serve to remind us again of what it meant to be homeless, what it meant - how one hung up one's wash when one try to stay clean and in what people slept in this time. I have tried to interview people who were poor in New York City in this period of time and to ask them the kinds of questions which I think interviewers rarely ask them. They get asked about union activities and they get asked about [inaudible] but I wanted to know what underwear they had. What underwear they had was no underwear.

Ruth S. Cowan: They will tell you about going to school and being embarrassed because some kids had underpants but they didn't. And ask them what they slept in, and they'll tell you "what do you mean what did we sleep in? We slept in our clothes when it was too cold to sleep nude". Or, you slept in the union suit; the union suit was your underwear and you wore the union suit all day and you wore the union suit all night and if you were lucky you changed it on the weekend when you had your Saturday bath which I will get to in a minute. If you were lucky you had an ultimate suit of underclothes although one can find lots of reminiscences of union suits that got changed twice a year: of winter union suits in summer. 

Ruth S. Cowan: This particular slide reminds us than that in such a household, and it could have been a shack of a tenant farmer in a rural area or it could have been a two room home of a mining family in Pennsylvania or in this case an urban tenement but in places where there are only two rooms and there are adults and children and boarders as well, many functions when on simultaneously in the same space at different times and at the same time. That is, some people slept in the same room while other people were cooking in it and then to have a place to put away something was in itself a a remarkable achievement which may be one of the reasons why social workers were befuddled by the fact that one of the first things poor families bought was a cabinet in which to display their prized possessions. One of those cabinets with a glass front. 

Ruth S. Cowan: The difference between having a child if you were poor everyday of the week and having a child if you were middling everyday of the week was in the first instance the difference between being dirty and torn and barefoot. I have, instead of looking in in pictures of have kids in one room school houses, instead of looking at their faces and what's at the board, I've been looking at what's on their feet and you will be astonished at how many photographs from the early decades of the century have barefoot children. It was not only a difference between being clean and being dirty, it being torn and not torn, having ribbons in your hair and having your hair all over the place, it was also the crucial difference from...sorry I'll master this technology one of these days [in reference to difficulties with her slides]...between being sick and being healthy and watching a child being sick and watching a child being healthy and the proportions of time that a parent spend with a sick child and with a healthy child.

Ruth S. Cowan: What are these parents doing? They are picking lice or some other insect out of their kids hair and one of the concomitants of being dirty, one of the things that was wrapped up with being dirty, was being sick, being infested, having rashes, having infections of various kinds that didn't get better quickly. We tend, in part because of some things that I once wrote, let it led me to say that the fetish with cleanliness was something that was generated by advertisers in the 20s, in the teens. I now wish I hadn't written what I wrote because the fetish with cleanliness was a real life and death issue for some kinds of people in the teens and the twenties. It was a question of whether or not you itched all day long, a question of what the infant mortality rate was in the neighborhood of which you were living, quite literally a question of whether if you got an infection that infection can heal or whether you ended up disabled or dead.

Ruth S. Cowan: We can go back in in a situation in which you couldn't really beg very effectively within your own domicile, you went to public bath houses which is what this is, this is the only picture of the inside of a public bath house I've ever been able to find it happened to be men, but they were similar institutions. People who went to public bathhouses couldn't do it very often, so then one remained personally dirty and consequently smelled if you will forgive me for reminding us of that. Smelling was a real problem if you wanted a better job. The question of staying clean was not just a question of status it was also question of raising your status because if you read instructions to department store clerks at this period of time, and some historians have, they're all about keeping clean. How to do your hair so your hair is not in the customers way all the time, how to keep dirt out of your fingernails, and how not to smell. Those were critical questions for getting a job that would take you out of that [indicates slide] - these are young girls shucking clams in Baltimore about the same period of time - into something that was literally white collar work. 

Ruth S. Cowan: Work in which you would be a clerk in a department store or a part of the typing pool or stenographic pool which may seem like a poor or inappropriate label to us now but which seemed like a hell of an improvement when this was the alternative. And again to remind you of what it meant to clean and to keep a child's clean, this is a picture of a bathhouse established by nuns in Boston for the purpose of allowing people to bring their children in to be bathed. [inaudible comments about slides]

Ruth S. Cowan: And then to suggest to you the point on which I want to conclude, since this was the kind of household technology or the kind of household technological systems with which those kinds of people function, that is this is a pump in the whole way of the tenement. It's the single pump that provided water for all the occupants of the town and these people were reasonably lucky at least they're pump was indoors, many tenements had one single hydrant or pump that was out in the courtyard and therefore in poor and difficult weather was even more inaccessible than this was and which tended even to freeze in bad weather. To get running water for such people it meant not the possibility of looking like the people in the Ladies Home Journal or looking like the ladies at the tea party, it also meant the possibility of staying healthy and staying alive and getting a better job. And that consequently, housework and household technology would intimately implicated in the process of getting out of poverty. You got out of poverty by having an efficient housewife who could do the wash. By moving into an apartment that had heat or that had hot and cold running water, that allows you to have cleaner clothes so that you could go out everyday smelling sweet. And if one understands that, one can see the history of housework for people who lived through that generational process: not as the proletarianization of women's work but as the increased productivity of women's work. In this case, technology did in the household what it had done in the factories which is for the same amount of time that a woman put in she could get out with a washing machine and hot and cold running water a lot more productivity, a lot cleaner kids, possibly healthier kids,  possibly a better job for her kids or for her husband then she could have without it. And that we can't begin to address people's feelings about their households and about the equipment with which they do their work unless we understand that for a vast part of the population, this kind of generational process is embedded in our behavior, not the kind that was described from middle class work. 

Ruth S. Cowan: Or to put it another way, there's a segment of the population you will never be able to convince that not having a washing machine is better than having. Does anybody want to take off from there? 

Speaker 2: Can I ask you a quick question about your research with those kinds of photographs? I'm teaching photography so I'm interested if you have other sources with which you corroborate the meanings of these images with?

Ruth S. Cowan: Actually, most of my sources are written. I used these [in reference to the photos on her slides] when I'm talking to groups of people because they make the point better than quoting long passages from novels. One of the sources that are used a lot are fiction written by people who have themselves lived in poverty. I tried very carefully to not read fiction by people who were not poor but writing about the poor during this period of time. But, for example, one of the richest novels, oddly enough written by a man, is Thomas Bells [inaudible title of written work]. Is anybody else familiar with that? Thomas Bell was raised in, well the novel is set in Pittsburgh, I'm not sure he was raised in Pittsburgh but he was raised in a family of steel workers and he was himself a steel worker for the early years of his life. It's about three generations of Polish steel worker families in Pittsburgh from that 1892 to the 1930s. If you read that with your ears atuned to the symbolic meaning of language, you find that he's constantly differentiating between the workers in the management, in terms of first their ability to articulate in English and second how clean they were and how clean their children were. And there are constant references to smelling, to the insides of our house, "we can never invite them into our house because we wouldn't be able to hold a conversation in our house and we can't sit at their houses either because we don't know how to sit at the table properly. 

Ruth S. Cowan: One of the expressions that social workers used in that period of time to denote the poor was people who must eat in their kitchens. So that the written sources that I've used to have been social workers accounts of what families were like, in fiction and in some few cases reminiscences, reminiscences are very difficult to use because children's view of the world is not and adult's view of the world. When an adult remembers their childhood you got a very distorted picture of reality and so they're few read books of reminiscences of poverty. I'm obviously wanted to make the same criticism of fiction but the fiction comes much closer to the social workers accounts than the reminiscences of immigrants who have now made it and are telling you what it was like when they were young. We do tend to repress what was unpleasant and you don't remember if you wished a lot when you were three. 

Speaker 3: Because [inaudible name] was a social worker in a sense, I suppose he had that same bias which is because he likes to see laundry hanging because it means these people are on the way to cleanliness or because he likes to see somebody who is acting out a little mother role because she's ten years old because it implies some sort of bourgeoisie family that is emergent. So that material is kind of suspect or at least it does have its own bias and I'm just wondering there's no way you get outside that in what you're doing I suppose?  

Ruth S. Cowan: The only way to get outside it is to use lots of different sources and on the places where they converge, that's what you can believe. 

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. 

Ruth S. Cowan: What I've tried to indicate are some of the places which it converges. The laundry hanging in itself is a very interesting business. There's a story that got related in Survey, which was one of the social workers magazines, and which has been repeated in social history textbooks about, you may have heard it at some point, about a group of social workers who wanted to establish a communal laundry in Greenwich Village in a particularly poor section of Greenwich Village. And the older men were the councilman for that area, opposed the creation of this communal laundry. Social workers wrote an angry article in survey magazine about how this man did not understand the real problems that women in his district had. But what the councilman had been saying to them was "we like seeing the laundry hanging out of the windows. We don't want the drying laundry kept in your communal facility, we want it out the windows because we are proud of it." And the social workers didn't hear that. They just thought what he was saying was "Go away, leave us in our dirt and poverty, we like it that way."

Ruth S. Cowan: So that's one of the reasons I like to use the pictures that have laundry hanging everywhere because I think you're quite right, in [inaudible name, potentially "Hine"]'s photographs, he knew those were signs of people pulling themselves out of a muck. 

Speaker 4:[inaudible start to sentence potentially: "I don't think this.."] necessarily holds true for small towns or rural women. 

Ruth S. Cowan: I'll believe anything you say on that subject because I wore out, I just couldn't get to that part of the topic at all.

Speaker 4: Because there were no bakers in small towns.

Ruth S. Cowan: Well certainly there were no bakers. There were however various kinds of traveling salesman. There was first of all the traveling salesmen of different housewares but there was also, starting in the 1880s, Sears, Montgomery, Ward, and rural-free delivery which mean there was another mechanism with which things could come to the house. But also, and this I'm not sure about at all, it's my impression that in rural areas in some parts of the country, what shopping got done got done by men when they went into town to transact whatever cultural business they had to transact and they also purchase the yard goats and the sugar and flour. So that, in that sense, from the perspective of the women doing the work, shopping was not part of the job description.

Speaker 4: I don't think that's very true. 

Ruth S. Cowan: I was saying I have not - 

Speaker 4: Research has shown that women, especially western women, once a month would go into town for two days and it was a lot of work and it would be a shopping trip, and it would be a two day trip, and it could turn into a week trip if it was winter time. But also I have a real problem with this photo's bias, the women who you showed [having a tea party] were from Wisconsin, and there were probably single women who are getting together once a month for a very special occasion. And that's why they were dressed the way they were, they were probably single women, boarding at ranches, teaching at schoolhouses if they are school teachers, and to show them in that situation right there rather then in their day-to-day work is very suspect when you compare it to the women in the eastern urban area who are doing their day-to-day work, not their once a month get together with other women, where they would also probably get together dressed up in their shirt-waist.

Ruth S. Cowan: I understand what you're saying but I don't think you're right. In the sense that, perhaps I picked that slide ill-advisedly, but I can show you accounts of the wardrobes of housewives. Now I can't think of where these accounts, well some of them come out of the Cornell School of Home Economics, out of a master thesis by people done at cornell so they were studying people in the immediate vicinity of Ithaca, New York that showed very clearly that middling women had many dresses that they were made out of wool, and that they were frequently white. So they may not have been the dresses that they wore when they were, well let me start that sentence again. As far as I can tell, such women did not do heavy labor in their homes. They didn't do the washing, they didn't do the heavy cleaning, they employ people to do that. 

Speaker 4: Which women were this? 

Ruth S. Cowan: Middling women. The kinds of women that the Ladies Home Journal was addressed to in the early decades of the century were rural middling and suburban and urban middling women.

Speaker 4: I guess I find a real problem with "middling" as a class distinction, especially if you're going to talk about rural women. I mean it really...it's very hard. I mean..

Ruth S. Cowan: That's the problem, I can't find any substitute for it.

Speaker 4: I mean it is very hard to find a substitution but I've done a lot of oral history with western women from the early part of the century and those women were what we would today term middling women. And they did housework. 

Ruth S. Cowan: But when you say they did housework, what do you exactly mean by that? 

Speaker 4: They did their washing, they took care of their homes, maybe sometimes they would have a student board with them if they were near a town or they would have a school teacher board with them if they were very rural and needed a school teacher. They did their own shopping, they did their own washing, they would talk about the long process of washing. They did their own healthcare as much as they could do it, which they considered part of housework. I think even at that time they would have considered themselves middling. 

Ruth S. Cowan: I'm prepared completely to believe you because in the amount of time I had to do this work, the far west and farm women in general were one of the many areas I had to exclude.  On the other hand, I think I would be prepared to argue that they're a minority compared to the people that I'm talking about were not just eastern and urban, and that they were also midwestern and town. In terms of numbers they were by far the majority of the population. 

Speaker 5: I think I have some facts, one of my hobbies happens to be reading late 19th century women's magazines, especially household articles, and letters from women to the magazine. I inherited a long run of [inaudible name of magazine] and read it. You're both right I'm sure. But the women who wrote letters from the West would write letters saying "it's all very well for you in the East to talk about the servant problem or how hard it is for someone to do the wash or this sort of thing, we don't have anybody.". There were widows and other women who had to earn a living somehow who took in wash. I'm probably the oldest person here and I can remember very distinctly when I was a child there was a woman who lived down the street from us who had an express wagon, the kind little boys would play with, and she would go around and collect wash, washed it, ironed it, and brought it back. That was a very common phenomenon, and it was something that these Eastern women when they moved West, missed. 

Speaker 5: There's another point I'd like to make. I'm married into an old Vermont family. My husband was the son and grandson of old Vermont ministers who lived in a small town who, I guess there's nothing more middle class than a small town minister. And, when I first met his family, his grandmother was still living in the family home, and there was a woman who came in every morning, she lived in her own home, she came in morning early enough to get breakfast, stayed to do housework, went home during the middle of the day and came back for dinner. She was one of the few descendants of one of the two founding families of the town. In other words, there was no class distinction here. Lucy was, in the little town in Vermont where we still live, was one of the aristocracy. She had no way to earn a living, she had a sister who was a school teacher, she had another sister who had married and moved out of town, but the way she learned how to earn a living was cooking and helping with the housework. She didn't do the wash, that was sent out. It was obviously, and when we kids were there at home, it was understood we would help lucy with the dishes by God. There's also this sort of small town situation that you also have to take into consideration. 

Speaker 6: Isn't there also a distinction between someone like a housekeeper and a domestic servant? Aren't there gradations within domestic service? 

Speaker 5: Less in small towns than in larger ones. That sort of thing was more in an urban area and in perhaps a more elaborate household.

Speaker 7: Did you find any differences between the ideology of the home economics movement towards these two groups that were meshed? 

Ruth S. Cowan: That's a good question. And I didn't focus on that so I'd have to think about it.

Speaker 7: Well I was curious, you said you looked through a lot of home economics literature and thesis. 

Ruth S. Cowan: But in order to establish the differences in an ideological approach to two groups you have to read with that in your mind and I wasn't reading. Glenda do you have any ... ? 

Glenda: I'm just trying to think um. 

Ruth S. Cowan: While I'm searching my memory.

Glenda: Well, everything I read in terms of advice had not only class and ethnic assumptions that were being made, but regional. Everybody assumed, certainly in the early 19th century, that the New England housewife was the housewife par excellence. I was really curious in photography, this isn't so much about class but this stereotype is so firmly fixed. A woman named Catherine Clinton just wrote a book about the plantation mistress for the Southern woman of the house and I asked her if in looking at the voluminous manuscript collections whether she came across any Southern women were bummed out that they would be [inaudible end to sentence]. She said that they were so conflicted about, one of the points in her book is that they didn't have the same handle on the cult of domesticity in the south. On the one hand they're supposed  to be so fragile and on the other hand they're supposed to be so hardworking. But I just wonder, I've been working on the ideology of domesticity and I,  there's class bias, regional bias, and and [inaudible] bias. They all think that Irish, probably that they're poor, but that they didn't have any notion of what domesticity was all about. 

Speaker 8: My own work in surveying home economics and the scientific stuff that comes out in the early part of the 20th century is that it's totally middle class. There's this kind of idea in it that you won't be able to teach these sophisticated ideas to immigrant women. 

Speaker 9: Not only these scientific techniques but simply the value structure. They just assumed  that these people didn't know what a home is. 

Speaker 10: Though, what they did say, and perhaps this is a partial answer to your question, I can recall lots of discussion not in the theses, which you know are little studies, but in the journals, like the journal of home economics, that it is impossible to get to the adults but it's possible  to get to the children, and that's why you begin teaching even before the kids go to school, in preschools. But let me just say one thing about this, because some of us were conversing over lunch, there's a certain sense that the home economics of the beginning part of the century got a terribly bad and undeserved press. Because, they may have created a rift between the two generations by trying to teach the kids not to appreciate, or to depreciate, what their mothers were doing. But they were sincerely trying to remedy physical conditions which they sincerely believe one causing people to die. In the same way that we might talk as one of our speakers did this morning about the families of the people working in the maquiladora and how cooking and house work gets done if a woman is working from 11:45 in the morning to 9:30 at night. And that's what the social workers were worried about too and the home economists - if you can teach the child to wash, do laundry, then more laundry will get done in that household and the family will be cleaner even if you can't teach the mother to do it, and that concerted effort might lower the infant mortality rate. So you can say they had a middle class bias about it, but they were really trying to help with the only tools that they regarded as A. Available and B. Potent. 

Speaker 10: And that was the reason why they championed pure milk legislation and drove themselves to getting laws on the books about proper ventilation in bathrooms and tenements because they believed with probably some rough foundation that foul air caused illness. So then they were middle class, so how could they not have a middle class bias? But unlike the vast part of the population, would try to help. 

Speaker 10: I just wanted to be a little bit autobiographical. In the late 60s, I taught a sewing class to a group of Chicanas in the St Jose area who were poor, their husbands were agriculture workers by and large and they were living on this ranch near St Jose. And I was determined to be as non class biased obviously this was in the late 60s, so I arrived and I was going to teach this class with which, if I may add, with very few qualifications. The first house I went to, I had the wrong address and I walked in and it was so chaotic. I mean, this person who was the housewife had not made any attempt to have an orderly house, and I thought "I'm not going to let this bother me, I'm not going to let this bother me" but you know it was appalling. And then I got to the right house ... and a point I was struck on was these women were so proud of the domestic environment that they created and I knew that if I, I mean one thing that horrified me was that some women talked about getting unvented heaters, and so I was trying to get the  St Jose board of supervisors engaged. It was a real fine line because there was a  safety issue here but if I had hinted that I thought they were living in a sloppy way, which they weren't, you know they were really keeping it very nice, it was a matter of considerable pride even though their economic status might not have been different from the first house. [microphone covered for the remainder of her story]. 

Ruth S. Cowan:[microphone covered for beginning of response] and that for those you she recounts the views of those who watch their neighbors and disorderliness. Their daily lines are composed of watching what's happened across the street and swearing it will never happen in their families. So that their domesticity was a form of survival for their families as far as they were considered. 

Speaker 11: I have a question that's not well formulated but I'm thinking of a photograph of a Wisconsin farm family, you may have seen it... with this abundant crop that has just been harvested [inaudible description] and I'm thinking about the correlation or the relationship between how the house looks and how the man's workplace what were the industrial workplace or whatever affects the decor and placement of things. And, where or how would you talk about that? 

Ruth S. Cowan: Well, there's referring to the notion that the New England housewife is the housewife par excellence. In that literature, what is frequently referred to is respect for one's tools and the proper care for one's tools which of course is the same thing that is said about New England husbandry. And that's the first thing that pops into my head but I've never thought about it in terms of the industrial workplace and what the industrial workplace looks like. There is there is a theme of keeping your kitchen orderly because that's the way a workplace functions best and as your husband's tool shed so your kitchen. I can't think of how that might have gotten transformed. 

Speaker 12: How about ... [inaudible][inaudible comments from other Speakers]
Ruth S. Cowan: That's what some portion of all home economists made their living out of for a decade or so. Christine Frederick literally made the living ... [inaudible conversation]. One of the reasons I've been able to write what I've written is that so many home economists did time studies of housewives in the lates teens, 20s, and early thirties. 

Speaker 13: How much nostalgia is there.. 

Ruth S. Cowan: There's a huge amount of it and it's all crock. [inaudible comment from Ruth S. Cowan] 

Speaker 14: I recently heard though, I haven't been able to locate the paper, some historian wrote a paper about Latin American peasants but its entitled "Cash is the Best Prop Gold" and that, even if it's not true that that's the title of the paper he wrote, I think it sums up the nostalgia about self-sufficiency. As near as though I can tell, in the colonial period and the early national period, there was some self-sufficient people and they were all rich. Self sufficiency was ... 

Speaker 15: [inaudible comment]

Speaker 14: Thomas Jefferson I think, from any view - Monticello might have well have been a self-sufficient environment to make the cloth, and do the black smithing, and make the cider. So that institution may well have been self-sufficient, but as soon as you began to go lower down the economic scale you had to at least be able to trade if you didn't deal in cash in order to get the fundamental things you need to live, like salt. You just can't produce your own salt in most parts of this country, and salt was absolutely essential to survival, let alone iron goods. 

Speaker 16: I'm thinking more specifically about the household itself....[inaudible]...the rural ideal of being able to do it all on your own. 

Speaker 14: Well let me say, most of my research was in the 20th century, but when I went back in the 18th and 19th and tried to find diaries to go through, I didn't find one that was a self sufficient household. I found examples of households that made a lot of cider and sold the cider for sides of beef or sides of pork. Or households that made tables and chairs and traded the tables and chairs for cider but not household goodnight all the furniture inside, all of the candles etc. And then trade was essential from the very beginning. 

Speaker 14: No, I think the idealization comes from the fact that you're one generation separated from the people who had to do it. One [generation] is the bare minimum. Children and families will tell you that they will do anything rather than to have to go back to doing that. [inaudible comment]

Speaker 14: It's grandchildren who think it's somehow nostalgic to...

Speaker 15: [inaudible comment] 

Speaker 14: I can't, I looked. My original interest in the subject was I was sure that women would have resisted technology and so what I started looking for was examples of women's resistance and there aren't any. Except the rich women. The women who resisted household technology were women who were rich. Lillian Gilberth never put a mechanical refrigerator in her house. Lillian Gilberth, who was an efficiency expert. And her son, in one book says, the reason she didn't put it in was that the family had several long-time servants, and one of those long time servants was a dear friend of the ice man. And Lillian Gilberth was not going to disrupt that relationship by putting in a mechanical refrigerator for him. [inaudible comment]

Speaker 14: And in fact when you read carefully, not only did she but that his mother lived with her for most of the time. [inaudible comment]

Speaker 14: I track down a lot of these stories, and I would hear about a lady in Huntington who never allowed her house to be electrified. Somebody told me they read an obituary of a woman in Huntington Long Island with an unnelectrified house in 1973. And she did die with an unnelectrified house in 1973 and she was the widow of a multi-millionaire and had four servants at the time. Those are the only examples that I've been able to find of people who didn't want to bring these things in, as soon as or even before they could actually afford them.

Speaker 15: [inaudible comment about hairdryers and efficiency it led to drying hair, if you had long hair would no longer have to wait 2-4 hours for it to dry, left many women supporting electric devices] 

Speaker 14: Can I ask you a question, you may not know the answer to, I've been trying to find somebody who might remember. Someone told me that the derivation of the word flapper, that what it stemmed from was wearing your galoshes untied, so that the tongue flapped back and forth, and that for some reason that was also connected to bobbing your hair, wearing short skirts, and drinking liquor. Does that .. ? [inaudible response] 

Speaker 14: So your guess is that may well be the derivation. 

Speaker 15:[inaudible question, mention of social workers, kids having lice]

Speaker 15: ...no technical solution. Or not technological fix.[inaudible response] 

Speaker 15: To take that remark a little further, another question is, if a child becomes sick, why is the automatic assumption that the only way to care for that child is to send that child home? If a worker becomes sick in the workplace, there is a way to deal with that in the workplace, and why isn't there a way to deal with that in the school? [inaudible response]

Speaker 15: That's certainly feasible.

Speaker 15: But what's being cut out, at least in my district as budgets get cut is school nurses. [inaudible response about taking domestic responsibilities outside the home, and the association of women with those responsibilities.]

Speaker 15: Indeed it is, the two things relate to each other. As soon as you ask the question "isn't there a ward to take care of sick children?" and people say "no no no! that's not the way we do it", you say, well why don't we have other ways...[inaudible comment about compromise] 

Speaker 15: ... where we all were 20, 30, or 40 years ago. First of all its always referred to as women who [inaudible] and it raises the question of [inaudible]. If that becomes encased in the technological system, given that [inaudible]. [inaudible end to statement]

Speaker 15: But that's what they said, electricity was going to liberate women from the household, but it didn't. [inaudible end to statement]