Ideology and Social Surveys: Reinterpreting the Effects of “Laborsaving” Technology on American Farm Women

Abstract

Ideology and Social Surveys: Reinterpreting the Effects of “Laborsaving” Technology on American Farm Women RONALD R. KLINE Among the many strands of technological optimism running through the 20th century, the idea that “laborsaving” technology would revolutionize the factory, office, field, and home pervaded the discourse of advertisers, engineers, reformers, and social com­ mentators in the United States. While critics might point to the de­ humanizing effects ofthe Machine Age in the 1920s or to widespread technological unemployment in the 1930s, a positive ideology of technological progress seems to have prevailed before the late 1960s.1 In regard to the household, a wide range of social groups thought that “modernizing” homes with electric lights, running waDr . Kline is associate professor of the history of technology at Cornell University. An early version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in October 1993. The author thanks the members of the audience at that session, Margaret Rossiter, Carolyn Goldstein, and the T&Creferees for their comments, and Carolyn Goldstein for assistance in using the Archives of the Bureau of Home Economics of the Department of Agriculture, as well. Research for this article was supported by National Science Foundation Grant Number SBR-9321180. 'For recent work on these issues, see Merritt Roe Smith, “Technological Deter­ minism and American Culture,” Michael L. Smith, “Recourse of Empire: Land­ scapes of Progress in Technological America,” and Leo Marx, “The Idea of ‘Tech­ nology’ and Postmodern Pessimism,” in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma ofTechnologicalDeterminism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Howard Segal, Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (Amherst, Mass., 1994); andJohnJordan, Machine Age Ideology: SocialEngineering and American Liberalism, 1911-1939 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994). I use “ideology” in the nonpejorative sense of cultural codes as advocated by Clifford Geertz in The Interpre­ tation ofCultures (New York, 1973), ch. 8. For a similar usage in the history oftechnol­ ogy, see Eric Schatzberg, “Ideology and Technical Choice: The Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States, 1920-1945,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 34-69.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3802-0003$01.00 355 356 Ronald R. Kline ter, washing machines, electric ranges, and vacuum cleaners would eliminate drudgery, save labor time, and increase leisure. Rural re­ formers, including home economics researchers, hoped these tech­ nologies would create an electrical utopia on the farm to match city comforts. Reformers classified many nonelectrical household fea­ tures, such as hardwood floors and window screens, as “laborsav­ ing,” but their belief in a progress ideology of electricity, shared by a wide political spectrum, helped to inscribe “modern” domestic appliances with a largely unquestioned power to transform urban and rural cultures.2 Scholars did not seriously challenge this interpretation until the women’s movement of the 1970s spawned the pathbreaking and in­ fluential work of sociologist Joann Vanek and historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Vanek analyzed forty years of time-use surveys to argue that electrical appliances and other “modern” household technologies might have reduced the energy required to perform specific tasks, but ownership of these appliances did not correlate with less time spent on housework by full-time home workers. In fact, time spent by these workers remained remarkably constant— at about fifty-two to fifty-four hours per week—from the 1920s to the 1960s, a period of significant change in household technology.3 * 5 In surveying two centuries of this technology in the United States, Cowan argued that the “industrialization” of the home often re­ sulted in “more work for mother” because the use of such artifacts as coal stoves, water pumps, and vacuum cleaners tended to reduce the workload of married women’s helpers (husbands, sons, daugh­ ters, and servants) and to promote a “higher” standard of house­ work. The full-time home worker’s patterns also shifted from pro­ duction to consumption, which included household management, child care, and the post-World War II phenomenon of being 2On the progressive ideology of electricity, seeJames W. Carey andJohnJ. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” American Scholar 39 (1970): 395-424...