Is The Modern Housewife a Lady of Leisure?

1929

National Agricultural Library

Survey-Graphic Magazine, June 1, 1929

In most masculine eyes — and even in some feminine — the average housewife today is a Cinderella in modern dress. The magic wand of the Industrial Revolution is supposed to have transformed her from a household drudge into a lady of leisure. On every hand the opinion is heard that she has ceased to be a "producer", that insofar as she still has a job, it is that of director of consumption. According to this view, another wave or two of the wand will imperil her very existence. Her early demise as an occupational type would seem inevitable.

In the long run this prediction as to the housewife's fate will probably prove correct. For her fairy godmother seems to have no intention of ceasing to lighten her burdens. Every year, every month, sees a further increase in the use of ready-cooked food, ready-made clothing, ready-washed laundry, even ready-trained children — and this despite our almost violent prejudice in favor of the home product.

But we appear to have overestimated the speed at which the transformation has been taking place. We have been so absorbed in watching the changes in the home that our ideas as to what has already happened have gotten somewhat ahead of the event; we gaze into the future and think we are viewing the present.

In the days of our great-grandchildren the housewife may be as extinct as the dodo. But at the present time some 26,000,000 hale and hearty followers of the trade might rise and announce in the words of Mark Twain, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
Keeping our eyes firmly, then, on those 26,000,000 housewives who are with us here and now, we may well ask, "How alive are they, occupationally speaking? How many of them still find full-time jobs in their homemaking, how many are still overworked, how many are underworked?"

In a study at the Bureau of Home Economics we have been seeking an answer to this question. With the help of the extension and research staffs of several colleges, we have induced more than 2,000 homemakers to keep careful daily records of how they spent their time for seven days of a typical week. Most of these records came from middle-class homes — from farm and village women with whom the college extension service is in touch, and in smaller numbers from club-women in towns and cities. The results so far tabulated are surprising to those of us who by temperament belong to the historical, eyes-on-the-future school. Five-sixths of these homemakers spent over 42 hours a week in their homemaking, more than half spent over 48 hours, and one-third spent over 56 hours. The average for all is slightly over 51 hours a week If this be part-time work, what, one may ask, would be full-time?