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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Home ownership, long a dream of the domestic scientists, expanded steadily throughout the twentieth century. The domestic science reformers had believed that the single family, owner-occupied home was the necessary material condition for the full practice of domestic science, if not for the totality of “right living.” Business leaders believed that “socialism and communism does [sic] not take root in the ranks of those who have their feet firmly planted in the soil of America through home ownership.86 With postwar federal financing, home ownership expanded into the blue-collar working class. By the late nineteen seventies more than 60 percent of non-farm homes were owner-occupied, compared to 36.5 percent in 1900.87 With home ownership, homemaking took on an importance which went beyond the maintenance of daily existence; it becomes the maintenance of an investment.

  Even more important, new taskmasters arose to dictate the regimen of domestic work. Consider the strange effect of “labor-saving” devices which began to be mass-marketed in the nineteen twenties. Historian Heidi Hartmann provides ample documentation to show that the introduction of new appliances has not in any way reduced the time spent on housework.88 In one well-known study, Joann Vanek found that “the time devoted to laundry has actually increased over the past fifty years”—even with the introduction of washers, dryers, and wash-and-wear clothing—“apparently because people have more clothes and wash them more often.”89 Washing machines permit you to do daily, instead of weekly, laundries. Vacuum cleaners and rug shampooers remind you that you do not have to live with dust or countenance a stain on the carpet. Each of them—the dishwasher, the roll warmer, the freezer, the blender—is the material embodiment of a task, a silent imperative to work.

  So, if they had lived a few more decades, the early domestic science reformers would have been pleased to see so many of their goals realized: standards of cleanliness have risen to perfectionist levels; “managerial” activities, such as shopping, have vastly expanded; the problem of the “domestic void” has been all but forgotten. A writer in the May 1930 Ladies’ Home Journal testified to the expansion of housework which had occurred within her own memory:

  Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after the dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for a daily immersion. If our consciences don’t prick us over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking.90

  But in one central way the reformers would have had to admit defeat: their promise to feminism—the upgrading of housekeeping to professional status—had been broken along the way. Instead of becoming an elite corps of professionals, homemakers were as surely as ever a vast corps of menial workers. The scientific knowledge of and control over housework passed from the housewives, and even from the domestic science experts, to the corporations which had “robbed” women of their work in the first place.

  It was the domestic science leaders themselves who had passed the banner of “right living” on to the manufacturers of appliances, soups, convenience foods, and household aids. Home economists exhibited brand-name equipment at fairs and home shows, and put their professional honor behind the ubiquitous “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” Christine Frederick personally provided continuity between the early days of the “cause” and the later days of commercialization, ending up as a market researcher for the appliance industry. In her 1929 book Selling Mrs. Consumer (dedicated to Herbert Hoover) she gave the domestic science movement credit for serving as the advance guard of the “appliance revolution” and offered nearly four hundred pages of advice on how advertisers could appeal to the fears, prejudices, and vanities of Mrs. Consumer, the homemaker.91

  Thirty years later, the home economist was an accepted part of the corporate team—not only helping to develop new product lines, but participating directly in marketing and advertising. “We have always considered the members of our Home Economics Department masters of the soft sell,” said Corning (Pyrex) vice-president R. Lee Waterman, and Sales Management, the marketing journal eulogized the corporate home economist in a 1959 article:

  It takes one to know one—could be said of women, too! Certainly only the bravest, or most foolhardy, of the stronger sex claims to grasp the workings of the female mind … Hence the growing importance of the home economist in marketing …

  She has the touch of the sociologist, a creative temperament, a background in natural sciences—and the vaunted feminine touch. She is the Home Economist in marketing … a woman to convince women.92

  By mid-century, the job of the home economist was no longer to educate, but to “convince.” From a corporate point of view, nothing could be more dangerous than a knowledgeable, “scientific” consumer. The domestic scientists’ ideal homemaker—well-versed in chemistry, sanitation, nutrition, and economics—would be as out of place in a garishly seductive, Muzak-filled supermarket as Mrs. Richards herself would have been at an Avon party.

  Housework skills themselves were getting out of style. Consider the brain-numbing communications to be found on food packaging: One. Open box. Two. Empty contents into large bowl.… Here at last is genuine “scientific management” in the home: the ultimate task breakdown, the complete separation of the “worker” (the housewife) from the “manager” (the manufacturer in a distant office). The semblance of autonomy remains: you have, after all, selected the flavor and the brand yourself, and you may, if you wish, add an egg.

  The domestic scientists had expected to elevate the homemaker into partnership with the scientific experts—nutritionists, sanitary engineers, economists. They would have been shocked, at mid-century, to discover that the homemaker had instead become the object of scientific study. Corporate sociologists probed for her foibles; psychologists worked on techniques to make her dazed and suggestible. As a result, supermarkets were designed to make the shopping trip as long as possible. Displays were designed to produce enough “sensory overload” to stimulate “impulse buying.” Cereals and candies were placed, cunningly, at the child’s eye level.

  Consumer education had become consumer manipulation. Market researchers had discovered that the most purchase-oriented shopper is socially isolated, technologically uninformed, and insecure about her own domestic competence.93 It was these traits that the new consumer “educators”—the manufacturers and admen—sought to cultivate. The TV housewife is anxious about the brightness of her wash, the flavor of her coffee, or the luster of her floors. Enter the male “expert”—a professional-looking man or perhaps a magician-helper like “Janitor in a Drum” or “Mr. Clean”—whose product, “studies show,” will set things right. The actress-housewife beams with gratitude, and testifies to the impact that Hamburger Helper or Brillo soap pads have on her life, if not on her total self-image. As far as the manufacturer goes, the homemaker is still (thankfully) a domestic, but not (hopefully) a scientist.

  * We finally came across a “scientific” explanation for this Anglo-Saxon “trait.” In his classic work Social Psychology, Edward Ross explains what he calls the “familism” or family-centeredness of Anglo-Saxons as a result of their being “obliged by climate to centre their lives in the circle about the fireside.” It is strange then, that the sociologists did not attribute the greatest racial superiority to the Inuits or Lapps.

  † A note on nomenclature: Ellen Richards had been calling her new field “domestic science” since the failure of “oekology” to catch on in 1897. In 1904 the Lake Placid Conference proposed the following official usage: the subject would be called “handwork” in elementary school, “domestic science” in secondary school, “home economics” in normal and professional (i.e., technical) schools, and “euthenics” in colleges and universities. In practice the Lake Placid group tended to use “home economics” and “domestic science” to mean the same thing. Here we use Richards’s term “domestic science,” although “home economics” became much more
common later on.

  ‡ The hope that education will make housework interesting dies hard. A 1974 home economics text states: “Much has been written in the past few years concerning the boredom and frustrations of the American homemaker. People who do things poorly are often bored and/or frustrated. The homemaker who is educated for homemaking is able to use her knowledge in a creative way for the attainment of a personally satisfying happy life and for the achievement of the social, economic, aesthetic, and scientific values in successful family life.”33

  SIX

  The Century of the Child

  There was always something missing from the world of the domestic scientists. There was a curious silence in the dustless rooms, an absence in the gleaming kitchen and pantry. For all the things the domestic scientists concerned themselves with—the correct ways of cleaning, sorting, scheduling—they were only the stage setting, and not the central drama. Now we turn to the human actor for whom the stage was set. And in the twentieth century that is no longer the patriarchal husband, but the child. Right at the turn of the century, America “discovered” the child as the leading figure in the family, if not in history itself.

  “If I were asked what is to be accounted the great discovery of this century,” the school superintendent of the State of Georgia told the National Education Association in late 1899:

  I would pass by all the splendid achievements that men have wrought in wood and stone and iron and brass. I would not go to the volume that catalogs the printing-press, the loom, the steam-engine, the steamship, the ocean cable, the telegraph, the wireless telegraphy, the telephone, the phonograph, I would not call for the Roentgen ray that promises to revolutionize the study of the human brain as well as the human body.

  Above and beyond all these the index finger of the world’s progress, in the march of time, would point unerringly to the little child as the one great discovery of the century now speeding to its close.1

  “On the whole it cannot be doubted that America has entered upon ‘the century of the child,’ ” wrote social historian Calhoun. “… As befits a civilization with a broadening future, the child is becoming the center of life.”2

  The discovery of the child by adult male public figures, scientists and experts of various kinds, was a step filled with humanistic promise. Perhaps women had always known what the male authorities were now asserting: that the child is not just a stunted adult, but a creature with its own needs, capabilities, charms. Now, with public recognition of the special needs of children, the door was potentially opened to public responsibility for meeting those needs: vastly expanded programs for child welfare and health, free public day care, community resources for dealing with problems which arise in child raising, and so forth. But, except for the expansion of the public school system in the early twentieth century, very little of this promise was realized. The children who had been “discovered” with so much fanfare would remain the individual responsibility of their mothers. What historian Calhoun failed to explain was that the child was becoming the “center of life” only for women. Any larger social interest in the child would be expressed by the emerging group of child-raising experts—and they of course had no material help to offer, but only a stream of advice, warnings, instructions, to be consumed by each woman in her isolation.

  The rise of the child-raising experts, which we will trace in this chapter, depended on the elaboration of a scientific approach to child raising. This too was a promising endeavor. A scientific approach, even if it stayed within the framework which made mothers solely responsible for their children’s care, could potentially be based on the real needs of children, as well as the needs and feelings of mothers. But the child-raising science which developed was a masculinist science, framed at an increasing distance from women and children themselves. It was a science which drew more and more on the judgments and studies of the experts, less and less on the experience of mothers—until, as we shall see, it comes to see the mothers not only as the major agents of child development but also as the major obstacles to it.

  Discovery of the Child

  What had happened near the turn of the century to bring the child out of the background and into the spotlight of public attention? The discovery of the child as a unique and novel form of life, like the discovery of women as an “anomaly” or question, could not have been made in the Old Order. Even a hundred years earlier, the individual child was hardly a figure to command the attention of adult men. Women had, on the average, seven live births in the course of their lives; a third or a half would not survive to the age of five. Each individual child had to be seen as a possibly temporary visitor. Frontier parents often left their infants nameless for many months, lest they “waste” a favorite name; and mothers spoke not only of how many children they had raised, but of how many they had buried. This note in a local Wisconsin paper, October 1885, was typical for an era when it was the young, not the mature, who lived in the shadow of death:

  The malignant diphtheria epidemic in Louis Valley, La Crosse County, proved fatal to all the children in Martin Molloy’s family. 5 in number. Three died in a day. The house and furniture was burned.3

  By 1900 child mortality was already declining—not because of anything the medical profession had accomplished, but because of general improvements in sanitation and nutrition.4 Meanwhile the birth rate had dropped to an average of about three and a half: women expected each baby to live and were already taking measures to prevent more than the desired number of pregnancies.5 From a strictly biological standpoint then, children were beginning to come into their own.

  Economic changes too pushed the child into sudden prominence at the turn of the century. Those fabled, pre-industrial children who were “seen, but not heard,” were, most of the time, hard at work—weeding, sewing, fetching water and kindling, feeding the animals, watching the baby. Today, a four-year-old who can tie his or her own shoes is impressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockings and mittens, at age six they spun wool.6 A good, industrious little girl was call “Mrs.” instead of “Miss” in appreciation of her contribution to the family economy: she was not, strictly speaking, a child.

  But when production left the household, sweeping away the dozens of chores which had filled the child’s day, childhood began to stand out as a distinct and fascinating phase of life. It was as if the late Victorian imagination, still unsettled by Darwin’s apes, suddenly looked down and discovered, right at knee-level, the evolutionary missing link. Here was the pristine innocence which adult men romanticized, and of course, here, in miniature, was the future which today’s adult men could not hope to enter in person. In the child lay the key to the control of human evolution. His or her habits, pastimes, and companions were no longer trivial matters, but issues of gravest importance to the entire species.

  This sudden fascination with the child came at a time in American history when child abuse—in the most literal and physical sense—was becoming an institutional feature of the expanding industrial economy. Near the turn of the century, an estimated 2,250,000 American children under fifteen7 were full-time laborers—in coal mines, glass factories, textile mills, canning factories, in the cigar industry, and in the homes of the wealthy—in short, wherever cheap and docile labor could be used. There can be no comparison between the conditions of work for a farm child (who was also in most cases a beloved family member) and the conditions of work for industrial child laborers. Four-year-olds worked sixteen-hour days sorting beads or rolling cigars in New York City tenements; five-year-old girls worked the night shift in southern cotton mills.

  So long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed.8

  These children grew up hunched and rickety, sometimes blinded by fine work or the intense heat of furnaces, lungs ruined by coal dust or cotton dust—when they grew up at all. Not for th
em the “century of the child,” or childhood in any form:

  The golf links lie so near the mill

  That almost every day

  The laboring children can look out

  And see the men at play.9

  Child labor had its ideological defenders: educational philosophers who extolled the lessons of factory discipline, the Catholic hierarchy which argued that it was a father’s patriarchal right to dispose of his children’s labor, and of course the mill owners themselves. But for the reform-oriented, middle-class citizen the spectacle of machines tearing at baby flesh, of factories sucking in files of hunched-over children each morning, inspired not only public indignation, but a kind of personal horror. Here was the ultimate “rationalization” contained in the logic of the Market: all members of the family reduced alike to wage slavery, all human relations, including the most ancient and intimate, dissolved in the cash nexus. Who could refute the logic of it? There was no rationale (within the terms of the Market) for supporting idle, dependent children. There were no ties of economic self-interest to preserve the family. Child labor represented a long step toward that ultimate “anti-utopia” which always seemed to be germinating in capitalist development: a world engorged by the Market, a world without love.

  So, on the one hand, the turn-of-the-century focus on the child was an assertion of what were felt to be traditional human values against the horrors of industrial capitalism. The child represented, as it had for decades, a romanticized past—rural, home-centered, governed by natural rhythms rather than by the industrial time-clock. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall saw children as a race related to the “savages” of Africa—gentle, spontaneous, and badly in need of protection by grown (white) men.