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I've said this before, but technology progress is the reason women now work outside the home. Not societal progress. Tasks that took all day in the 1900s - 193
by randyrand 9y ago
I've said this before, but technology progress is the reason women now work outside the home. Not societal progress.
Tasks that took all day in the 1900s - 1930s are now completely outdated or take minutes instead of hours. A housewife today would be bored out of her mind relative to how much work a 1900s era housewife had to do.
Making 3 meals from near-scratch for 6+ people every day, raising 6-10 children so they could help on the farm, making and hand cleaning your family's own clothes, fetching water because you did not have home plumbing, etc etc etc.
Today doing these tasks is either trivial or not necessary. Food prep has changed dramatically (freezers, microwaves, affordable food delivery, gas stoves, plumbing). As has the number of children because we no longer use child labor for farming.
The movement of women into jobs outside of the home was a change brought primarily through tech innovations. Not feminist protesting, a societal "wake up" or anything like that. Additionally calling a 1990s era housewife as "not in the labor force" is pretty condescending given how much work they did in the home.
- Retric 9y agoSchool is really societal progress. Many mothers stay at home with very young children, but K-12 is a free babysitter.
- randyrand 9y agoWe basically implemented public schooling as soon as it was technologically feasible. The main issues were affording teachers, affording your kids to leave the farm, and affording transportation. The cost of books and classrooms was non-trivial for a long time as well.
- alexashka 9y agoYou make it sound as if as soon as farmers had surplus, we took that surplus and invested in public education. Wikipedia reads that England had their agricultural revolution in the 16th century and the population boomed to 5.7 million by 1750. [0] School however: "The Elementary Education Act 1880 insisted on compulsory attendance from 5 to 10 years.[20] For poorer families, ensuring their children attended school proved difficult, as it was more tempting to send them working if the opportunity to earn an extra income was available." [1] The main issue with public education was that people didn't want it, hence compulsory attendance. The British Empire ruled the world, and had an industrial revolution - "The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840" [2] Something tells me given the choice to go work in a factory and make money, or go get educated - people chose to go make some money. None of this had anything to do with technology not allowing the existence of public education - if anyone could afford it, it was the British Empire at the time. They just had other priorities - like bullying the world and trade. The usual capitalist stuff. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture#British_agricultural_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture#British... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_England#Introduction_of_compulsory_education_1880 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Englan... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
- hyperpape 9y agoI'm not quite sure how your points contradict the parent saying school was about affording the expense. Saying people chose to have kids work for money doesn't seem to contradict that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alexashka 9y agoI think the last paragraph summarizes it well: "None of this had anything to do with technology not allowing the existence of public education - if anyone could afford it, it was the British Empire at the time. They just had other priorities." Britain had industrialized, had colonies all over the world, went to war with China over allowing to continue selling them opium in this time among other things. Education was not a priority for them - they were busy exploiting everyone they could get their hands on. If that sounds strangely familiar - it is because it is not unlike another country you know very well in modern times :) That was nearly 200 years ago, we as a species haven't changed a whole lot it seems.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hyperpape 9y agoI don't think your comment necessarily established that Britain could afford public education earlier. You can interpret 'afford' as "can literally pay for given any tradeoff" (I can afford a Mac Pro in that sense), or "can realistically make the tradeoffs" (short of cutting my 401k contribution, I don't have the money). Even in the first sense, you said nothing that implies that in the 16th century, the agricultural improvements that grew the population was large enough to spare children from agricultural work. All that population growth implies is that you've escaped the Malthusian trap. Going forward, my sense of the early industrial revolution was that families depended on the money from children's labor, though I could easily be wrong.
- 9y ago
- nitwit005 9y agoThe work seems to expand to fill the time. You'll notice people struggle to raise their 2-3 kids, when people previously had over a dozen. They're now putting in more effort per-child. Having cleaning be easier similarly seems to raise cleaning standards.
- Terr_ 9y agoOne important difference is that drastically fewer of the children die before adulthood.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoChildren also weren't expected to continuously be monitored by adults before. They left the house and hung out with siblings or neighborhood kids until it was time to eat.
- gozur88 9y agoThat was his whole point when he said the work expands to fill the time. There's no particular reason new to the current era that children should be continuously monitored.
- dzdt 9y agoWell if you have a dozen children it is a safe bet that some are over the age of 12 and have lots of experience with younger siblings, excellent babysitter qualifications.
- irrational 9y agoIf raising 3 kids is 3x work, raising 12 kids is not 12x work. The reason being is that as the kids get older they start to take on the chores and helping out with the little ones (unless the parents are morons and don't train the kids to work and assign them tasks). So you have 3 young children and that is 3x work. But, by the time the next three come along, the first three are old enough to help out (maybe 4-5x work) and they are even more capable of helping out when the next set of 3 come along (by which time the second set of 3 have taken over the tasks previously done by the first set of 3, so maybe 6x work). There actually reaches a point where the last set of 3 no longer have to be constantly monitored, fed, dressed, etc. and you have a whole pipeline of trained helpers and the parenting becomes fairly easy (maybe 2x work).
- Clanan 9y agoYour argument would be much stronger with data. I wouldn't be surprised if the truth is somewhere in the middle and I certainly wouldn't discount the impact of the Vietnam War, feminism, social services, heck even consumerism, etc. on the tendency of people to work or stay at home. And you're totally right that homemaker/stay-at-home-parent should be represented in the workforce... developing software is cake compared to that workload.
- hiram112 9y ago> And you're totally right that homemaker/stay-at-home-parent should be represented in the workforce... developing software is cake compared to that workload. I don't have kids, so I don't know just how tough the job is, but I'm always reminded of this funny clip when someone does mention it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoJrMaFlxOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoJrMaFlxOk
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoBoth of those jobs have very low minimum amounts of work. If you just want the kid to make it to 18 without dying and develop an android app to show the user pictures of cats while harvesting their data then it won't take all that much effort. Both those jobs can also be time black holes if you let them.
- zaroth 9y agoWith you up to the very last sentence. Labor force is an economic term with a specific meaning. It is not the same as saying that someone is not working for someone to not be in the "labor force". Since there's an economic purpose to the definition as-is, I don't see how you can possibly claim it is condescending without misrepresenting what the term actually means.
- randyrand 9y agoStay at home work has the same affect on the economy as away-work. I don't find the distinction useful in this context. The only thing we'd have to change is semantics. If house wives charged their husbands for their work, and vis-versa, then they could be 'employed' but nothing would have changed.
- int_19h 9y agoI would say that a lot would change for the housewives...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chrshawkes 9y agoI thought mainstream American History usually says that women mostly entered the workforce due to a shortage of men during World War 2?
- vacri 9y ago> I've said this before, but technology progress is the reason women now work outside the home. Not societal progress. This is a false dichotomy.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoHans Rosling said the the washing machine was one of the most transformative inventions ever. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...
- ams6110 9y agoExcept it's not true. Women between the ages of 18 and 64 spent 18 fewer hours on housework each week in 2005 than they did in 1900. However, men aged 18-to-64 took up much of the slack, spending about 13 more hours on housework in 2005 than in 1900. What has changed are the specific things they spend time on. http://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13985.html http://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13985.html
- randyrand 9y agoInteresting. Very hard to believe though.