Ruth Schwartz Cowan
Effort saved, time not
Make a task cheap and the standard rises to eat the saving
More Work for Mother, 1983; figures from 'Less Work for Mother?', American Heritage 38:6, 1987
The tools got several times faster and there is no less to do. Where did the saving go?
What actually happened?
Once the washing machine was in American homes, clothes were washed more often. Men stopped wearing detachable collars and cuffs, so whole shirts had to be washed and ironed. Housewives changed two sheets a week instead of one. Teenagers changed their underwear every day instead of every weekend. By the 1980s a housewife processed roughly ten times, by weight, the laundry her mother had. "Drudgery had disappeared, but the laundry hadn't." The weekly hours went from 5.8 in 1925 to 6.2 in 1964.
Labour has two halves
She splits labour into energy spent and time spent, and the history of laundry shows one can be conserved while the other is not. The effort saved was real. Nobody who has washed a sheet by hand wants the washboard back.
The weekly report drops from three days to one hour, and now five versions are expected.
Cheaper work, higher standards
The vacuum often came with a bigger home and wall-to-wall carpet. Rugs once beaten twice a year were vacuumed weekly, in some homes daily. In economists' terms, productivity went up and the time spent by each worker did not significantly fall.
Photo editing becomes effortless, so every picture is now retouched like a magazine cover.
Fifty to sixty hours, half a century apart
The early time studies were small and inconsistent but agreed: a full-time American housewife did fifty to sixty hours of unpaid housework a week. Fifty years and dozens of motors later, the far better surveys found the same fifty to sixty.
Before buying the next time-saver, count how many hours the last three actually took off your week.
The road not taken
Steam laundries existed in America from the 1860s and by the 1920s were in almost every urban neighbourhood. Pooling the work and handing it to specialists was a different road. The home washer ended it: one machine per house, and one person per machine.
Ten flats in one building, ten dishwashers, ten people each loading theirs at nine at night.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: the tools get faster every year, the work does not shrink, you are more tired, and you suspect it is you.
Ask first: did this tool save effort or time, and after it arrived, did the standard quietly rise? Who raised it, and to where?
Where it goes wrong: reading it as 'standards are fake, just lower them'. Cleaner clothes and larger homes are often real gains, and she says so. What she separates is that a rising standard is a choice, not something the machine brings with it, and it only becomes your choice once it is named.
Lines to keep
Effort saved is not time saved.
The washboard went; the laundry grew tenfold.
Productivity went up; the hours did not come down.
Same situation, other people are asking
I produce more than I ever did and feel less.It genuinely saved effort at first. Now I can't say who it is helping.My day was full and I can't name one thing that stayed with me.I added one tool and the whole day changed shape.More output, emptier · all 6 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.