On the industrialization of Housework

     Ruth Schwarz Cowan's More Work for Mother plays a significant role in thinking about the radical shifts in domesticity, particularly looking at the process of industrialization in the household.  She argues that our understanding of those shifts have been a 'victim of cultural obfuscation' due to the sort of popular romanticism of the home, which places it in opposition to the outside public sphere, a romantic notion embraced by conservatives and progressives for different ends.  Cowan proposes exploring this radical transformation, making the following argument.

    "Households did not become industrialized in the same way that other workplaces did; there are striking differences between housework and other forms of industrialized labor.  Most of the people who do housework do not get paid for it, despite the fact that it is, for many of them, a full-time job.  They do not have job descriptions or time clocks or contractual arrangements; indeed, they cannot fairly be said even to have employers.  Most of their work is performed in isolation, whereas most of their contemporaries work in the company of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of other adults.  Over the years, market labor has become increasingly specialized, and the division of labor has become increasingly more minute; but housework has not been affected by this process.  The housewife is the last jane-of-all-trades in a world in which the jacks-of-all-trades have more or less disappeared; she is expected to perform work that ranges from the most menial physical labor to the most abstract of mental manipulations and to do it all without any specialized training.  These various characteristics of household work have led some analysts to suggest that housework (or the household economy) is the last dying gasp of feudalism, a remnant of precapitalist conditions somehow (miraculously) vaulting the centuries unimpaired, the last surviving indicator of what the Western world was before the market economy reared its ugly head.

     Perhaps this is true, but there are other sides to the coin; industrialized housework resembles industrialized market labor in significant ways.  Modern housework depends upon nonhuman energy sources, just as advanced industrialized systems do....

     Thus, even if the household is an isolated work environment, it is also a part of a larger economic and social system; and if it did not constantly interact with this system, it could not function at all--making it no different from the manufacturing plant outside the city or the supermarket down the street....

     Finally, both household labor and market labor are today performed with tools that can be neither manufacture nor understood by the workers who use them....

     In sum, we can say that there are three significant senses in which housework differs from market work (in being--most commonly--unpaid labor, performed in isolated workplaces, by unspecialized workers) and three significant senses in which the two forms of work resemble each other (in utilizing nonhuman--or non-animal--energy sources, which create dependency on a network of social and economic institutions and are accompanied by alienation from the tools that make labor possible).  If we take all six of these criteria and group them together, we will have a good definition of industrialization.  Then we might be able to see that, in the West over the last two hundred years, women's work has been differentiated from men's by being incompletely industrialized or by being industrialized in a somewhat different manner. (Cowan 6-7)

     Before we work through the productive aspects of the quote, I want to point to out the most significant problem of the passage, the binary between the commercial space of men and the household space of women.  On one hand, the industrialized workplace certainly hasn't excluded women.  One can look at the factories Lowell in the 19th century, the wartime workplaces of the United States, amongst other examples.  On the other hand, the isolated space of the household has contained substantial amounts of commercial, particularly in the form of home work, piece work taken up by immigrant wives to supplement income.  Perhaps to put another way, the farther we move away from white, middle-class households, the less this split between the public and the private works.  It works best during the 1950's, precisely because of the explosion of white middle class households.  (As many note, the post war period coagulates a white, middle class identity, at the expense of the African American portion of the population.)

     Once we move beyond these problems, the text provides some provocative approaches to understanding the structures of domesticity and consumption that increasingly dominates industrialized, mass production through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Cowan provides some useful evidence to critique the notion taken up by a set of conventional marxist thinkers and feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Despite the fact that household labor doesn't mirror the structures of mass labor found in the Fordist factory, it is in fact modern, industrialized work that appears radically different than previous household labor.  In effect, the structure of the household is radically transformed by the structures of industrialization as much as any other form of work.  Just as significantly, the entire process of industrialization cannot be understood without thinking about the role of the household as an aspect of that process.  We can think about this in a couple ways.  The first way of thinking about this relates to the question of consumption, one not fully taken up by Cowan, but dealt with in depth by Stuart Ewen in his critical work.   The household becomes the place that legitimates mass production through the consumption of what is produced, and by acting as a place of solace, providing a substitute to any meaningful voice in the space of production.  What Cowan makes us see is that it also shapes the way that reproductive labor occurs.  Although she gestures towards the critiques that label this form of work as 'primitive' or non-modern, the reality is that it is intensely tied into the forms of industrialization that were occurring throughout the system.  Just as the work of carpenters and other craft workers was being deeply reshaped, the work of the housewife was just as significantly transformed, operating in isolation, but, at the same time, deeply shaped by the social structures of industrialization.  We might even say that the feminist movement played a class role in bringing out the common experience of this isolated socialization. 

     What I want to bring to this conversation might be understood in a two fold process.  1.  I want to argue that despite what Cowan argues, there existed deeply embedded structures of pedagogy for this newly industrialized labor.  Most obviously, this training occurred in a variety of classes for immigrant mothers and wives, in classrooms focused on home economics and other disciplines, but that could be expanded to the informal space of domestic and women's magazines, which became the prime location to popularize the academic discourses of home economics and other engagements with the home.  It also produced a heavily edited and monitored collective space in which women could discuss techniques and approaches to child care, gardening, and other activities.  Housework could only be understood as untrained labor if these spaces as well as other formal and informal spaces are ignored.  2.  In some sense, the types of labor discussed by Cowan, rather than being primitive gesture towards the forms of labor found in the contemporary forms of post-Fordism.  As Paulo Virno notes, this era is defined precisely by the expectation that workers can operate within a variety of rules systems, take on a multiplicity of tasks, and most notably, invest themselves passionately in each of them.  Perhaps, instead of thinking of the walls of the factory falling down to envelope society, we can see the reproductive structures of the household falling down with the fights brought on by feminism, and that fight and more notably, its reaction, leading to a generalization of the reproductive role of the household throughout social structures.  This obviously needs more thought, and I probably will need to deal with the question of the counter-revolution within this process, but I think I will leave my thoughts here for now.  Hopefully, this isn't too repetitive. 

works in progress

     As I mentioned yesterday, I'm writing a brief post before I go to bed today.  I got caught up in grading over the weekend, so I couldn't put up anything at that point.  Not that I'm complaining.  After all, it pays the bills, and some of the work that my students managed to put together in their interpretation of a series of clips I picked out was frankly pretty impressive.  (You can find the selections I chose here.)  There were a few responses that I would have been pretty happy with if I had produced them as blog posts.  At the same time, that probably took about twelve to thirteen hours to complete.  It didn't give me a lot of time to write for the blog or to deal with my own dissertation work, which is getting pushed increasingly to the summer.  I'm not all that thrilled about that.

      I had suggested that I might take up the series of blog postings on reinterpretations of the Babel story that I had left by the wayside a while ago, but my copy of James Baldwin's essays has seemed to have disappeared.  I either need to find that object again, or I need to find another interpretation of the story to go on with that.  I'm hoping I find the Baldwin essays at some point because his take on the story is considerably different than the narratives about transgression and loss that have been at the center of the previous stories.  Instead, Baldwin goes back to a more literal biblical interpretation of the story, but in such a way as to challenge the foundational structures of white supremacy that constitute the United States.  Not that any of that should be remarkably surprising for anyone who has made any attempt to engage with Baldwin's work.  (If you haven't read any of Baldwin's essays, I'd recommend dropping what you're doing, and going to the local library to check out a collection of his work.... right now.)

      On the other hand, I feel like I have a better sense of what my overall project is in regards to the dissertation.  I realized that I'm in some sense trying to challenge some of the stories around the laboring practices set up by some of the recent work by post-autonomist writers.  Largely drawing on the argument written by Toni Negri in the early 1980's on the transition from the 'mass worker' to the 'social worker', these writers have tried to argue that current regime of production is increasingly dominated by forms of affective labor.  This shifts the workplace considerably, moving towards a more flexible approach to production, dependent on the worker's creativity and ability to adapt to a multiplicity of situations, and to act as a sort of jack of all trades.  It is also tied to the worker's focus on producing affect, rather than a physical product.  I don't disagree with this at all, but these qualities become a lot less novel if you focus on the household, rather than the formal workplace.  As Ruth Schwarz Cowan notes, these very qualities were introduced into the household at the turn of the twentieth century, as the household increasingly industrialized.  In addition, Stuart Ewen notes the linkage between advertising and the production of affect in his work on public relations, advertising, and other forms of expertise.  It's significant that both workers' struggles for the social wage, and the attempt on the part of employers to stabilize mass production was centered on the space of the household.  In effect, the household was a significant space of overlapping contestation within the class struggle.  Borrowing from Cowan's structure of argument, I want to ask what happens if we center our focus on these struggles, rather than on the workplace.

       I have an answer for why science fiction, which links into Edelman's concept of 'reproductive futurism' and complicates it, but I don't have the energy to take Edelman's Lacanian framework right now, and translate it into the materialist framework that I am working from.  Needless to say, Edelman's focus on the concept of the symbolic is both very provocative, but also extraordinarily reductive.  Edelman manages to reduce the complexities of mass social life to the individualized structures of the psyche, something that Freud managed to avoid in his analysis of the social in Mass Psychology and Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, but I've always preferred Freud's actual work to the Lacanian framework.  I ultimately think by reducing all forms of social order to the symbolic as such, one loses out on the capacity of those social orders to operate in very different ways.  I suppose this shouldn't be terribly surprising out of a man who mistakes the Democratic Party for the left.  It's obvious that Edelman is working in some of the same terrain as thinkers such as Laurent Berlant, but I like that work.  Edelman just irritates me.  At the same time, I think there's something in Edelman's critique that is significant for science fiction studies, an argument that might make us focus on the conservative and preservative elements of the modes of estrangement in science fiction, as well as its radical qualities.  In any case, I suspect that this isn't the last time that I will write on the subject.

Gilman, Biopolitics, Race, and Economics

      I thought that I would work out some of my ideas concerning Charlotte Perkins Gilman on this space, as a sort of rehearsal for my dissertation chapter that I am completing.  There something inhibiting about putting the ideas there, so I thought this might be a good way of thinking through my project in a slightly less formal way.  I want to make a particular argument about the relationship between race, labor, and consumerism within these pages.  As I have previously noted, there is a considerable amount of revisionist scholarship dealing with the centrality of race and specifically a type of evolutionary racism in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This work was initially started by Gail Bederman in her text, Manliness and Civilization, but it was continued by Michele Newman in her text, White Women's Rights, and Alys Weinbaum in her text, Wayward Reproductions.  Each of these texts places Gilman's racism at the center of her theoretical and political projects.  Bederman does this through Gilman's focus on rewriting the dominant discourses on the concept of civilization, which allow for a change in status for white women, while reinforcing ways of naturalizing racial domination.  Newman and Weinbaum each focus on the racial biopolitics implicit in Gilman's particular take on reform Darwinist project in conversation with both Social Darwinism and Eugenics.  These projects succeed in placing this racism at the heart of Gilman's political projects, rather than acting as some sort of unfortunate accidental remainder that marked her as a part of her times.  Instead, Gilman's racism and demands for gender reform share at their core, the same theoretical framework, one that constructs a hierarchy of races, and sees the need for more opportunities for women and a professionalized home economics as a way of fully bringing white women into modernity.

     At the same time, I think that these engagements with Gilman are incomplete.  Gilman is certainly drawing from a racialized notion of the biopolitical control of population, but as Foucault would note, the biopolitical is the borderline zone between a particular biological notion of man as species, and an economic conceptualization.  What I want to argue is that Gilman imagines her biopolitical projects of reform in economic terms, emphasizing the need to bring the labor practices and consumption practices of the household into the modern processes of mass production that were just beginning to be introduced into the factories at a multiplicity of sources.  My initial impulse to follow this train of thought came out of my reading of a short article of Gilman’s contained in the 1980 collection, The Politics of Housework. Gilman’s article, “The Home: Its Work and Influence” poses a substantial challenge to the 19th century cult of motherhood, but that challenge operates through her evolutionary, Darwinist framework. Gilman poses a need to modernize the ‘primeval’ labor of the household with the new forms of expertise developed in the disciplines of ‘Household Science’ and ‘Domestic economics.’ Building on this new disciplinary framework, she proposes the sweeping away of the amateur, sentimentalized labor of the isolate household replacing it with newer, efficient, scientific procedures and techniques. Critic Sally Stein amongst others has explored the impact of assembly line production techniques on the conventional structures of the household, bringing not only the new technologies of the era into the house, but also the techniques developed in the Taylorist division of labor. The same forms of time-motion study used in the workplace to economize the movement of the worker were envisioned and implemented in the transformation of household labor, producing an instrumentalized economy of the household. Despite Gilman’s ability to shock sensibilities, her new experimental household built upon the techniques of domination and exploitation developed in the workplace, rather than challenged them

      It’s important to note that Gilman’s vision of the new, managed space of domestic and reproductive labor is not the privatized space of the household that eventually becomes the dominant post-war structure. Rather than translating the scientific management of Fordist modes of production to the privatized space of the home, Gilman proposes a far more direct model, proposing collective modes of daycare, cooking, and other aspects of domesticity. Unlike the later attempts to organize around the concept of wages for housewives who saw their campaign as a larger struggle to bring down the capitalist world system, Gilman was genuinely committed to these modes of collectivized, trained wage labor positions. However, her vision of modernizing the labor of the household presented a similar challenge to the erasure of that labor within the sentimentalized guise of motherhood. Although Gilman’s projection of the Fordist collective household draws upon and legitimates the apparatuses of expertise later to legitimate what Betty Friedan would later call ‘the feminine mystique,’ it cannot be read as a simple blueprint of the post-war economy.

      Although it is perhaps unfashionable to mention this within current critical standards, it's important to note that Gilman's critique of the primitive nature of the household operates on a fundamental error.  As Ruth Schwarz Cohen amongst other have noted, the notion of housework as a separate category of labor was only comprehensible quite recently.  Before industrialization, the separation of household labor from other forms of labor was far less common.  Cohen points out some of the mythic aspects of the funtionalist analysis of the household, of the totally sufficient large agrarian family.  Earlier economic systems had specialized craftsman such as candlemakers, as well as servants.  But the workplace and the household were interconnected.  In truth the position of an isolated housewife arose with industrialization.  As new technologies were developed in order to store food, clean, etc., housewives become increasingly isolated.  On one hand, the workplace becomes increasingly disconnected, on the other hand, the middle-class household needs less servants.  Increasingly the middle class household is one without servants.  This affects both the middle class who are working on their own and working class who are no longer working in those households.  Let's be honest, these relationships were often contentious and exploitative, but they gestured towards a different type of collective labor in the household.  The lone housewife far from being a primitive hold over from an earlier era, was a carefully constructed function, through a combination of new consumer technologies which reached their height slightly after Gilman's height as a popular commentator, and a whole set of popular discourse disseminated in the form of books and magazines.  This shift leads to an intensification of labor on the part housewives.  The level of labor remains consistent, and that labor is tied to intensified emotional expectations on the part of the housewife, often symptomized in the form of guilt.

     This process cannot be separated from the sorts of policies of racial assimilation that are also advocated by Gilman.  To understand this, we need to look at the phenomenon of the settlement house, which Gilman was briefly apart of.  Settlement houses were often seen as civilizing missions, equivalent to the missions in colonized countries.  Instead of pacifying indigenous populations, these houses were in existence to assimilate recent immigrations, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe.  This work has ties to the attempts on the part of white women to provide forms of popular education to African-Americans.  In both cases, the civilizing process was tied to the modern division of the home, educating women in hygiene, new consumption patterns, and childcare, while implicitly disciplining men to act as waged laborers.  The empty homogenous field of the marketplace constituted the modernity that was needed to assimilate into the dominant society.  It's notable that the particular emphasis on a kind of Lamarckian racial theory wasn't universal, but it certainly constituted the primary drive in the case of Gilman.  Although she moved away from settlement work, she never moved away from these basic goals of assimilation, even as she became more skeptical of its prospects.  (Another example of this process were the reform efforts to assimilate American Indians around the same period of time, reform efforts that still have devastating effects on those communities to this day.)

       At this point, this is pretty rough, but I think it gestures towards a way of thinking through the complexities of biopolitics in a different way... a very initial step, to be sure....