I remember a story about historian couple (sadly I can't find it) who tried to live like the 1880's.
The husband basically came home completely exhausted every single day. The wife, however, literally broke down because the housework was completely relentless. She was completely busy maintaining the household every single waking moment.
Big families weren't just because of lack of birth control.
The book is called "More work for mother" because a lot of labor saving devices saved male labor by making the work physically less demanding and allowing it to thus be shifted to the wife.
Three hundred or so years ago, most couples were literally working to put food on the table and keep people clothed. They did so by raising their own food and sewing their own clothes, etc. Standards of living were generally lower.
Over the course of that 300 or so years (because I probably read the book around two decades back), cash money became more common and so did working for cash money instead of laboring to grow your own food, make your own clothes, etc. So labor saving devices shifted a lot of household tasks to women in order to free men up to go get a paid job. This made sense so women could be home with the children since they are the ones that get pregnant and also produce milk.
Men used to pull up the rugs and beat them one or more times per year. Then we invented vacuum cleaners and women took over cleaning the rugs.
Women and men were both often very overworked, but it's possible that the historian couple saw the wife collapse in part because a lot of what we classify as women's work today was handled by male labor at one time and in part because standards of living were generally far lower back then. Trying to maintain anything resembling our current standards without modern labor saving devices is crazy on the face of it. If, on top of that, you expect the woman to do a lot of chores that would have been male labor at one time, yeah, you are going to run someone into the ground.
Back when I used to read such things, studies typically found that women with children were chronically short of sleep whether they had paid jobs outside the home or not. People generally underestimate how much work homemakers are doing. Friends and neighbors routinely demand "favors" because they see a homemaker as someone who has nothing but leisure time on her hands, not someone busy cooking, cleaning, buying groceries, etc all day long.
In my marriage, I also saw evidence that my husband had no real appreciation nor respect for the amount of work I did as a full-time wife and mom. It is one of the reasons we are divorced.
So I'm abundantly familiar with the fact that most of the world underestimates how much work women typically do, dismisses it as "not real work" because you are just supposed to be thrilled to pieces to be home with your children, etc. But the book in question was a serious history book and was remarkably even-handed, which is one of the reasons I mention it relatively frequently. I don't like works that hate on men, that act like women are merely victims of the so-called Patriarchy, etc.
Definitely agree with most of the key points, but I do question the notion that men did all of the heavy labor.
Maybe in upper-class homes, but in the poorer families (which were most people), "women's work" was physically demanding... laundry was outright dangerous, for example.
but I do question the notion that men did all of the heavy labor.
There is no point at which I suggested that. In fact, I made some effort to try to guard against such an interpretation.
But let me reiterate some of my main points in nutshell form:
1. Men and women both worked physically hard. (I stated that previously as: Women and men were both often very overworked.)
2. Some tasks that are currently viewed by a lot of modern peoples as "women's work" would have been "men's work" about 300 years ago, such as cleaning the rugs.
3. It would be super easy to run someone into the ground by having one person try to maintain our current high standards for quality of life via manual labor.
4. I can see that easily being made worse by not doing your due diligence and determining that some of our current "women's work" was "men's work" when it was all done by manual labor.
It in no way requires any inference that women did no heavy labor to see that just piling more and more work on a woman without in some way making those tasks more manageable simply would not work.
> It in no way requires any inference that women did no heavy labor to see that just piling more and more work on a woman without in some way making those tasks more manageable simply would not work.
Certainly don't mean that -- I think if anything the physical toil that women traditionally did in my grandparent's lifetime, especially given the challenges of health, etc is very much under-realized.
Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson talks in depth about the life of ranch families in the Hill Country of Texas, and about the deep impacts that things like electrification had on those families. Personally, I found it moving and it painted a picture of life that family lore, etc just didn't capture.
I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can clean up their own messes now, and have been trained to poop, pee, and vomit into the approved receptacles.
A lot of the stuff people do as routine housework simply doesn't need to be done more often than quarterly.
Perhaps those people doing 60 hours/week in 2019 don't have the temperament to just sit on ass and enjoy all the machine-assisted, low-maintenance living?
Throw the clothes in the washing machine, and push the start button. Push the start button on the carpet-cleaning robot. Push the start button on the floor-mopping robot. Move clothes from washer to dryer and push start button. Put ingredients in bread machine and press start. Put entire meal in microwave and push start button. Put dishes in dishwasher and push start button. Hop on motorized treadmill and push start. Flop in massage chair and push start. Have problem; push button; no problem.
People have more time now, and they invent new things to do to fill it. If you only want to do 10 hours a week in housework, all you need do is lower your standards to whatever the machines do for you without supervision. Toss out some ant/roach bait and buy some spray-can air freshener. Avoid filth-producing pets or babies in your home. Substitute chemical engineering or electrical engineering for elbow grease. If you do almost any revenue-producing activity in lieu of housework, you will be able to pay for a pill-swallow, spray-on, or button-press solution to any routine housework problem.
Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes, dislodge the carpet cleaning robot when stuck, fill the mopping robot with water and soaps, cook a decent meal that's not a microwave meal, put the dishes away in the cabinets and wash all the dishes which cannot go in the dishwasher (pots/pans, knives)
There's a lot more happening that you give credit for even when doing the minimum.
> Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes...
Hanging a garment on a hanger is easier than folding it. Small clothes can be thrown into a "CLEAN"-labeled basket or bag. The laundry-person need not be responsible for restocking everyone else's wardrobes. You are inventing requirements for the task that are non-essential.
Essential laziness is rearranging your life such that the most labor-intensive parts of a task are unnecessary. The only thing that prevents the 3-pile method of wardrobe management (clean, dirty, and worn-but-smells-okay) is social pressure. And if you stop caring so much about what other people think of your lifestyle, but still care a little bit, you can replace the dresser with some postal-style plastic tote bins on a wire shelf: socks, underwear, jersey shorts, tee shirts. All your going-out clothes can go on hangers. No more folding.
A decent meal need not be haute cuisine. If you break your kids (or yourself, for that matter) of the "different foods can't touch" thing, you can make a lot of good stuff in a programmable pressure cooker/slow cooker. That's a single pot that doesn't exactly wash itself, but it is halfway to an autoclave already. Put plain water in it, select high pressure cook, and hit the start button. Pot sterilized. Add ingredients; beep beep boop, start. Dinner is done.
And maybe your dishwasher needs an upgrade. We put pots, pans, and knives in it all the time. The cast iron doesn't go in there, but that is all seasoned such that it just gets rinsed out and re-oiled, and is then clean.
Stop valuing things for the extra effort put into them, and start seeing human-required labor as an evil that should be destroyed. If you're doing 60 hours/week of housework, you aren't spending 1 hour/week thinking about whether all that "work" actually needs doing, or not.
Knives don't go in the dishwasher because they dull faster and I'd rather spend time washing them than time sharpening them. Post and pans in the dishwasher is just a waste of space. By putting one pot in there I can not put 6 plates. The pot is easy to clean, the plates are annoying.
I have to put things away because there's no room for the pile method. I share 4 ft of closet and a 4 drawer dresser with my wife. The rest of our bedroom is mostly bed area.
I cook meals because I'm lazy. Cooking cost less money. Microwavable meals mean I need to work more to pay for those meals which is something I don't want to do. Cooking saves me time in life by costing me less money.
My life is arranged around laziness but it is different laziness than yours.
It looks like no one in that thread could dig up any experimental evidence for it. Manufacturer recommendations are not to be trusted.
This looks like a job for some identical knives, some knife-use simulator robots, several dishwashers with a standardized typical load, hand-washing sinks, a pile of dishwasher detergent, a pile of hand-wash detergent, and an objective measurement device for knife sharpness.
My essential laziness (and lack of research grant money) prevents me from conducting the experiment myself, however. I'll just take my chances with the dishwasher.
I agree in general, but just a nitpick: When the $3500 Shirt article first went around in 2013, I saw several complaints that it was describing a very high-quality shirt. Typical peasant work wear was still very labor-intensive, but took a fraction of the time described.
I see the article says the math was updated in 2016, though, so I don't know how true that is now. And obviously that was only a part of a woman's overall workload, anyway.
This is a woeful underestimate before labor saving machinery. Here is a talk about the $3500 Shirt and the fact that women spun thread in any idle time: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... Here is a Hans Rosling visualization of wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
I remember a story about historian couple (sadly I can't find it) who tried to live like the 1880's.
The husband basically came home completely exhausted every single day. The wife, however, literally broke down because the housework was completely relentless. She was completely busy maintaining the household every single waking moment.
Big families weren't just because of lack of birth control.