It’s Been 100 Years, and Technology Didn’t Eliminate Housework
Remember the scene in Downton Abbey where Mrs. Hughes brings home a toaster? When Mrs. Patmore replaces the icebox with a refrigerator? Or when the Downton household gathers around the radio to listen to a broadcast of the king’s speech?
The TV show is fictional, but the technological changes during the 1920s were real. In that decade — now 100 years in the past — innovations in home appliances promised to make life easier and better.
By 1920, telephones, gramophones, and automobiles had been around for decades. Likewise, many home appliances had already been invented, such as the vacuum cleaner (1901), electric iron (1905), washing machine (1907), and electric toaster (1908). But it wasn’t until the 1920s that electricity, along with a growing middle class and consumer culture driven by advertising and mail order catalogs, made home appliances possible, desirable, and easily obtainable — for those who could afford them.
The gadgets seemed to be just a little bit magical. You may recall in The Great Gatsby, set in the year 1922, narrator Nick Carraway marveled at the electric juicer at millionaire Jay Gatsby’s famous lawn parties:
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York — every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.
However, the average American in the 1920s didn’t live like Jay Gatsby or the occupants of Downton Abbey. At the beginning of the decade, only 35 percent of homes in the United States were wired for electricity. Almost all of them were in cities. In many cases, electric lines wouldn’t reach farms and homes in remote areas for another twenty or thirty years. Even by 1940, only one-third of farms had electricity.
Still, electric power was spreading rapidly. By the end of the 1920s, the overall percentage of wired homes grew to 68 percent. In cities, the percentage was much higher. And, as the availability of power spread, so did the prevalence of home appliances and conveniences. But, they were expensive.
According to the IRS, the average per capita net income in 1920 was about $3,269.40., or about $272 a month. Farm workers earned much less. While a toaster could be purchased for about $5, an electric washing machine could cost up to $100 and a refrigerator as much as $300. It’s no wonder that by 1930, only 8 percent of households owned an electric refrigerator.
Magazine and newspaper ads of the 1920s touted home appliances as tools to liberate women from the knuckle-breaking tedium of housework. An advertisement for a vacuum cleaner promised “Twice the cleaning, twice the leisure!” Another ad for a vacuum named Pearl claimed to “Abolish home drudgery.” Women were told they could get “All Your Laundry Work Done in One Day!” by purchasing an electric clothes dryer.
The truth of claims like these have been debated. Joann Vanek, in a 1974 article for Scientific American, claimed nonemployed women “devote as much time to housework as their forebears did.” Citing studies done by the U.S. Bureau of Home Economics, Vanek stated that the average woman in 1924 spent about 52 hours doing housework, compared to 55 hours in the 1960s.
Home appliances seemed to make little difference, considering other factors of sociological change, Vanek concluded. For example, a long-term study of the electric washer from 1925 to 1965 actually showed an increase in the time spent doing laundry, “apparently because people have more clothes now and wash them more often,” Vanek speculated. As labor-saving gadgets increased, other social changes including declining use of servants and “rising standards of cleanliness” seemed to “neutralize any time saving” (Bittman, et al. 2004).
Many other scholars also examined the social context of household appliances in the 1920s, including Ruth Schwartz Cohen in her 1985 book More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave .
A century later, it’s unlikely that any of us would want to give up our refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines, not to mention our move evolved technologies like microwaves, food processors, and electric pressure cookers. Yet, just as the computer didn’t eliminate paperwork or produce a four-day workweek in the 2020s, neither were household appliances a technological fix for housework in the 1920s.
References
Bittman, Michael, James Mahmud Rice, and Judy Wajcman. “Appliances and their impact: the ownership of domestic technology and time spent on household work.” British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 3(2004): 401–423.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. Basic Books, 1985.
Vanek, Joann. “Time spent in housework.” Scientific American 231, no. 5 (1974): 116–121.
