Never Done : A History of American Housework

Traces the history and development of housework, household technology, and the lifestyles of American housewives from the nineteenth century to the present

Industrialization replaced the arduous productive work of the nineteenth-century household with products that raised the standard of living and made life easier for many people by the 1930s; the large centralized concerns that manufactured those products invaded daily life with their advertising, creating new needs to establish economic demand. The very activity of buying came to represent happiness, and perhaps indeed to produce it, if only temporarily. The new consumerism declared that things that cost money had more value than those that did not; it even defined the time of year as tasks like spring housecleaning and laying in the wood for winter once did. The expandable task of consumption, like the other new task of motherhood capable of taking up whatever time the new products released, became ever more necessary as families adapted their daily lives to manufactured existence.

Without indoor plumbing, most women hauled every drop of water they used for cooking, dish washing, bathing themselves and their families, laundry, and housecleaning; after using it, they hauled it back outside the house, though not necessarily going as far as they had come from the well, the spring, the creek, or the urban hydrant or pump. Heavy work even in the spring or fall, it became unbearable in summer's heat, and in winter women had to crack ice and thaw pumps to get to their frigid water supplies, and empty more chamber pots.