For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  The Domestic Void

  Before the industrial revolution, there had never been any question about what women should be doing in the home. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century rural women (and most women then were rural) weren’t just making apple pies and embroidered samplers; they were making bread, butter, cloth, clothing, soap, candles, medicines, and other things essential to their families’ survival. A New England farmer wrote in 1787 that he had earned $150 from the sale of farm produce in one year, but:

  … I never spent more than ten dollars a year which was for salt, nails, and the like. Nothing to eat, drink, or wear was bought, as my farm provided all.1

  The pre-industrial rural home was a tiny manufacturing center, demanding of its female workers a wide variety of skills and an endless capacity for hard work.

  In fact, the pressures of home production left very little time for the tasks which we would recognize today as housework. By all accounts, pre-industrial revolution women were sloppy housekeepers by today’s standards. Instead of the daily cleaning or the weekly cleaning, there was the spring cleaning. Meals were simple and repetitive; clothes were changed infrequently; and “the household wash was allowed to accumulate, and the washing done once a month, or in some households once in three months.”2 And, since each wash required the carting and heating of many buckets of water, there was a considerable disincentive to achieve higher standards of cleanliness.

  Then, beginning in the early nineteenth century, came industrialization and the growth of the Market economy. Bit by bit, wage labor and “business” began to replace agriculture as the American way of life. Young women, adult men, and even children were drawn to the towns to produce for cash, rather than for their families’ immediate needs. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, through the upheavals of urbanization, industrialization, war—over 95 percent of married women remained, like their mothers before them, at home,3 seemingly untouched by the industrial and social revolution sweeping through American life. But, their lives too were drastically changed: the traditional home crafts were vanishing into the factories. Home textile manufacture, which Alexander Hamilton had hailed as central to the economy of the early republic,4 practically disappeared between 1825 and 1855.5 Cloth, and soon candles, soap, and butter, joined buttons and needles as things that most women bought rather than made.

  By the end of the century, hardly anyone made their own starch or boiled their laundry in a kettle. In the cities, women bought their bread and at least their underwear ready-made, sent their children out to school and probably some clothes out to be laundered, and were debating the merits of canned foods. In middle-class homes the ice box was well established, and easy-to-clean linoleum had made its appearance. “The flow of industry had passed on and had left idle the loom in the attic, the soap kettle in the shed.”6

  With less and less to make in the home, it seemed as if there would soon be nothing to do in the home. Educators, popular writers and even leading social scientists fretted about the growing void in the home. Sociologist Edward A. Ross observed that “four fifths of the industrial processes carried on in the average American home in 1850 have departed never to return” and demanded an accounting for “the energy released.”7 Economist Thorstein Veblen insisted that even when the affluent housewife did appear to be working in her home, what was left to do was so trivial that it could be counted among the “evidences of wasted effort” which made up the family’s round of “conspicuous consumption.”8

  For many working-class women, of course, there was no problem about what to do: they followed their old “women’s work” into the factories—making the textiles, clothing, and soap which had once been made in the home. But in the new urban middle class the domestic void was an urgent problem, tied to the ongoing debate over the Woman Question. If their mothers had been content with a few “accomplishments” such as fancy needlework and sketching, the young women of this class were increasingly demanding—and getting—a full-scale college education. Education only heightened their sense that something was missing in the American home. Some were resentful that male industrialists had pre-empted the productive functions which had once given dignity and purpose to womanhood. When Edward Bok, the influential editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, advised women to keep out of politics and stick to their own sphere, a writer in Woman’s Journal (the national suffrage newspaper) lashed back:

  The baker, the laundry-man, the manufacturer of underwear and ready-made garments, the caterer, the tailor, the man-milliner, and many more would have to go, for if woman is not to encroach on man’s especial domain, then he must keep his own side of the fence and not intrude on hers.9

  Ellen Richards, who was to lead the drive to put housekeeping on a scientific basis, told a male audience:

  … I must reiterate [home life] has been robbed by the removal of creative work … The care of children occupies only five or ten years of the seventy. What are women to do with the rest?… You cannot put them where their grandmothers were, while you take to yourselves the spinning, the weaving, the soap-making. The time was when there was always something to do in the home. Now there is only something to be done.10 [Her emphasis.]

  But others believed that that very “robbery” was woman’s greatest opportunity. Feminist Olive Schreiner agreed that the industrial revolution had greatly enriched “man’s field of remunerative toil” and had tended to “rob women, not merely in part but almost wholly, of the valuable part of her ancient domain of productive and social labor.…” But instead of looking nostalgically at the past, she believed, the time had come for women to recognize that the only challenging work for them lay in the male world of industry, science, public affairs. “Give us labor and the training which fits us for labor!” Schreiner demanded, and put her faith in the young woman whom she said was even then knocking on every door that shut off a new field of labor, mental or physical, anxious to fulfill “she knows not what duties, in the years to come!”11

  And of course there was reason to believe that liberation from domestic confinement was just around the corner. All around them in the nineteenth century, feminists had watched as the small, productive workshops—the cobbler, the blacksmith, the potter, the milliner—had been made obsolete by the factory system. Now cities had grown, the physical size of the middle-class home had greatly diminished, and family size had gone down too. Surely, they thought, only a few more steps need be taken to industrialize domestic work completely and free women to join the world of men.

  The Romance of the Home

  But as it turned out, the home was not just another quaint anachronism which could be tossed aside along with other antique reminders of the past. For every woman like Olive Schreiner or Charlotte Perkins Gilman who was ready to sweep domesticity into the dustbin of history, hundreds more believed that the only answer to the Woman Question lay in preserving the home.

  The home was becoming a major issue in and of itself. Clergymen, popular magazines, and politicians continually harped on the sanctity of the home and the dangers besetting it. The 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children declared that “home life is the highest and finest product of civilization.”12 The converse idea, that civilization was the product of decent home life, was held to be axiomatic. At the time of the Spanish-American War, Demolins’ widely quoted book Anglo-Saxon Superiority13 traced the imperial success of the Anglo-Saxon “race” to an inherent Anglo-Saxon love of home.* Home, with a capital “H,” was by this time a word which patriotic Americans could hardly breathe without feeling a rush of maudlin sentiment. But at the same time the home seemed to be coming apart. After surveying the last few decades—the rising divorce rates, the apparent indifference of young couples to a settled family life—the social historian Arthur Calhoun warned in 1919 that the future of the home was “problematical.”14

  Paradoxically, throughout the nineteenth century, Americans showed very little reverence for or, even interest in, the home as a phys
ical place. Whole villages had packed up for the westward trek that began in the eighteen twenties. People moved when they ran out of land to support a growing family or, as the story goes, when they felt hemmed in by the sight of a neighbor’s hearth smoke. The first of May was “moving day” in eastern cities, when “the streets were a clattering shambles of displaced furniture and families frantically playing the annual game of ‘move all,’ ”—to a few houses or a few blocks away.15 The parental home, where mother rocked by the fireside, was likely to be remote or even forgotten: grown children, especially sons, were expected to strike out on their own, as far as possible from the maternal apron strings.

  During the vast internal migrations of the early and mid-nineteenth century, home had to be realistically redefined as “where mother is” (or, even more minimally, “where you hang your hat”). But industrialization threatened even this scaled-down, stripped-for-action version of home and family. Looking back on the pre-industrial farm home, which grew more alluring with distance, end-of-century social observers could find nothing solid on which to base the modern home. Shared work no longer held the family together; the sources of subsistence lay outside the home in a factory system that valued neither Home, nor Motherhood, nor for that matter childhood—only the labor that could be extracted from individual workers. Even the well-to-do home, with all but the father unemployed, was torn by centrifugal forces: the father poured himself into his career and relaxed in clubs; the mother shopped and visited; the children went out to school. Life magazine commented sarcastically:

  The school as a civic center having become overcrowded, it occurred to some bright mind to advocate the use of the home as a civic center. The home is vacant so large a part of the day that it would seem that the highest efficiency would put it to some use other than as a possible place to sleep in after midnight.16

  But few observers were so cavalier. Historian Calhoun’s chapter on “The Precarious Home” quotes dozens of books, articles, special reports anxiously examining the health of the home, “the neglect of the Home,” the subtle danger to the Home,” and so forth.17

  To middle-class observers at the turn of the century, social stability seemed to require that people settle down. The old values of restlessness and adventure—which had been essential to the conquest of the West—were no longer appropriate and possibly dangerous. The frontier had closed. Railroads and ranchers had carved up the West and left little room for pioneering individuals. And the economic frontier was closing rapidly too. Monopolization was setting in, blocking the upward trajectories of would-be Horatio Algers, or confining them to the status of corporate employees. Class lines were being drawn, and in the new industrial order, the reckless values of the frontier could only mean turmoil and instability. People, at least most people, would have to withdraw their aspirations from the wider world and re-center them in the tiny sphere of the home.

  In fact, Americans found themselves increasingly drawn to the security of the home. Men who had grown up on farms were now confronting a work world in which a man could no longer control either the work process or the conditions of his employment. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, depressions repeatedly obliterated jobs and wiped out family savings. Even the neighborhood offered little security in the mushrooming cities, where the ethnic composition, and even the street signs, were likely to change every few years. Only the home seemed secure and stable. In his study of a lower-middle-class Chicago neighborhood in the eighteen seventies, historian Richard Sennett documents the retreat to the home—men went out to bars or clubs less often; families did less visiting.18 Even the trade union movement, which again and again drew thousands of people together in collective struggle, never questioned the middle-class ideal of domesticity and in fact used this ideal to justify demands for higher wages and shorter hours.

  Corporate leaders were as vigorous as anyone in advancing the virtues of domesticity. Sociologist Ross encouraged them to see home ownership as a means of social control or, as he put it hygienically, as a “prophylactic against mob mind”:

  A wide diffusion of land ownership has long been recognized as fostering a stable and conservative political habit … The man owns his home, but in a sense his home owns him, checking his rash impulses, holding him out of the human whirlpool, ever saying inaudibly, ‘Heed me, care for me, or you lose me!’ ”19

  Right after the great strike of 1892, Carnegie Steel went into the business of subsidizing home ownership for its Homestead workers. In the decades that followed, scores of companies built model villages and offered home loans to their workers. As the welfare director of an (unidentified) large company explained to early-twentieth-century housing reformer Charles Whitaker:

  Get them to invest their savings in their homes and own them. Then they won’t leave and they won’t strike. It ties them down so they have a stake in our prosperity.20

  But social control was an investment that only the largest and most farsighted corporations could afford. Most employers could not have cared less how their workers lived, and all, of course, viciously opposed the workers’ own attempts to raise their standard of living. Efforts to promote home values among the workers were usually confined to the least expensive, most trivial, measures. For example, the Palmer Manufacturing Company provided basins and towels for its employees so that they could return home looking like “gentlemen,” and thus gain a higher respect for home life.21 Not until the nineteen twenties when business came to see the home as a market would the nation’s corporate leadership launch a concerted effort to promote domesticity among the workers.

  Near the turn of the century, it was the middle class which expressed the greatest commitment to “saving” the home. In the home they saw an ideal that could unite the lowly worker and the corporate mogul: Didn’t the workers really want nothing more than a secure and cozy home? Didn’t the capitalists know that nothing would be better for “labor peace” than a domesticated work force? Furthermore, the home could be an essential training place in the industrial “virtues.” As Rev. Samuel Dike, a leading campaigner against the liberalization of divorce laws, explained:

  The industrial world should see that its fundamental needs of industry, efficiency, fidelity to tasks, and loyalty to all demands of the situation require qualifications of mind and character that depend very largely on the home behind the workman.…22

  Beyond that, the home was an ideal “container” for aspirations that could not be met in an increasingly stratified society: from a middle-class point of view it was a wholesome target for working-class ambitions and from a male point of view it was a safe focus for women’s energies.

  Many of the reform efforts of this period aimed, directly or indirectly, at the defense of the Home. The best-publicized causes were those which addressed themselves to the external dangers that threatened the home—alcohol, prostitution, poor housing, unregulated female, and child labor. The domestic science reformers received far less attention: they had no lurid abuses to expose; they made no claims on the collective conscience of industrialists and politicians. But only they addressed themselves to the danger within—the home’s eroded core, the Domestic Void. Necessarily their initial priority was the middle-class home, where the void was most palpable and threatening. Better housing, better wages, and legislation to restrict female employment—all of these could not save the home and enforce the domestic solution to the Woman Question if women did not have something useful to do within the home. As the Ladies’ Home Journal editorialized, social stability required that the void be filled:

  As a matter of fact, what a certain type of woman needs today more than anything else is some task that “would tie her down.” Our whole social fabric would be the better for it. Too many women are dangerously idle.23

  Domestic Scientists Put the House in Order

  Strictly speaking, domestic science was not a “cause,” as its advocates liked to think, but a new area of expertise. The idea of systematizing information
of housekeeping and making it available to large numbers of women went back several decades. As early as the eighteen forties Catherine Beecher—her English counterpart was the indispensable Mrs. Beeton—had campaigned for an educated approach to household chores, and by the late eighteen hundreds land-grant colleges in the Midwest were offering domestic instruction to future farm wives. By the turn of the century there were several hundred professional women in the United States—chiefly social workers and teachers—who saw themselves as experts on homemaking. As we have already seen, this was the heyday of professionalization: doctors were tightening their ranks and seeking a scientific basis for medicine; the various academic disciplines (sociology, psychology, political science, etc.) were congealing out of the interdisciplinary mush of the mid-nineteenth century; even social work was establishing itself as an exclusive and “scientific” occupation. It was only natural that the homemaking experts would organize to elevate their area of expertise beyond the stage of recipes and household hints and onto the higher ground of scientific professionalism.

  Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist by training, was the woman who led domestic science out of the cookbook stage. The medical profession had required, for its genesis, the combined talents of organizers like Flexner, researchers like Pasteur, and venerable public figures like Osler. For domestic science, there was only Ellen Richards. She did much of the basic research—tested household water purity, foods, and appliances; organized the conferences and journals; and publicized the new field on the international lecture circuit. And unlike the miscellaneous social workers and educators who were drawn to the new domestic science, she had had a genuine scientific education, complete with laboratory training: she represented the necessary link to the transcendent world of science. Contemporary “home ec” texts reserve a place of honor for Ellen Richards, whose photo portrait shows her at the peak of her career—firm-jawed, heavily browed, confident—decked out in the cap and gown that never ceased to represent her highest achievement as a woman.