Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother

Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave was and remains a rare and welcome hybrid, valued by both academic and nonacademic readers. It was awarded SHOT's Dexter Prize for its high level of scholarship in 1984, the year after its publication, and might equally—had the Sally Hacker Prize been in place at the time—have been honored for its reach toward a broad audience of students and the general public. It is a rare reviewer, from the grumpiest scholar to the most avid young blogger, who does not remark on the pace and elegant vitality of Cowan's prose, or acknowledge personal epiphanies arising from both the historical and personal instances she so compellingly narrates. For myself, I watched sidewalk processions and my own mirrored reflection differently for days after rereading, at more than a decade's remove, her pages about the class and gender privilege that body-hugging garments once bespoke.

Cowan's scholarly finding, that during the last three centuries technological change shifted the burden of domestic labor from adult men and children to mothers and wives, has been distilled—just as Cowan as feminist popular intervener in the early 1980s hoped—into a cautionary tale on which to ground a different household ethic. More Work for Mother was excerpted in Reader's Digest and provided the hook for an article in the National Inquirer.¹ It was featured in guides to great books by women and in National Public Radio commentaries; one Internet reviewer argues that the book should be "assigned reading for EVERY women's studies course for a bit of reality mixed in with the theory" and "included in every bride's wedding shower" to dim the glimmer of such starry-eyed moments.² Museum curators have used Cowan's theme as the organizing principle for exhibitions of domestic technologies, and young scholars cite Cowan's homily as a corrective to the domestic perfectionism of Martha Stewart.³

Initially, the scholarly reception of MWFM was more critical. Cowan was trained as a historian of science in the decade before the insights of social construction opened up the black box.⁴ By her own recollection, she "knew almost no economics" when she started the project and proceeded rather from the understanding, based on personal experience, that production and consumption were both economic activities, and probably less categorically distinguishable than the American public then recognized.⁵

Although she introduced the terms "work process" and "technological system" early in the text, she employed them as "organizing concepts" (MWFM, 11) rather than as the protean deeply theorized tools for thinking that feminist and Marxist scholarship had made them by the early 1980s. One particularly testy reviewer found her grasp of theory "shaky."⁶ A leading student of domestic material culture, Kathryn Grover of the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, concluded that MWFM did "not allow the reader to appreciate the richness and complexity of the social and cultural environment in which technology emerges."⁷ Louise Tilly, whose Women, Work and Family (1978), written with Joan W. Scott, had by 1984 become a foundational text for theoretically informed scholarship in the social history of European women's industrial and domestic labor, praised Cowan's contribution as "interesting" (always a worrying sign) as well as "briskly written and tightly argued." But she also averred that "surely more complex processes lay behind the shift from subsistence or market agriculture to wage labor than the development of iron casting" and faulted Cowan for a technological determinism that failed to examine the influences of "structural change, household decisions and commercial response." In a spirited response, Cowan conceded that in order to position technology as a more forceful explanator in women's history she had overstated her case, and queried in rebuttal why social scientists generally were so loath to admit technology "as a...