Household Technology

Household Technology. Industrialization transformed American society, permanently altering the tools and work processes of preindustrial America. New technologies helped change how households fed, clothed, cleaned, and cared for their members, though these technologies affected men, women, and children differently. In addition, the rich and the urban tended to gain access to new technologies before the poor and the rural. Despite the unevenness and inequities of these changes, developments in household technology played an important role in elevating the American standard of living through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the Colonial Era, most households used simple tools to maintain their living standards, which for all but the very rich consisted of simple diets, limited wardrobes, and low standards of cleanliness. Open, wood‐burning hearths provided heat and a place to cook, while candles gave light. Women prepared and preserved food, made medicines, and used spinning wheels, looms, and needles to turn wool and flax into clothing. Men farmed, cut and hauled wood, whittled, and sewed leather items. Metalware such as kettles, pots, axes, and knives eased food preparation, wood gathering, and agricultural labor. Servants, slaves, and children, as well as male and female heads of house, provided household labor. Occasional reliance on people outside the household who produced and repaired metalware and sold staples such as salt and lime linked relatively self‐sufficient households to the developing market economy.

Through the nineteenth century, the mass production of goods by new industries removed many traditionally male tasks from homes and placed most household technology in the hands of women and servants. Beginning in the 1830s, versions of Benjamin Franklin's 1740s cast‐iron stove, modified to include ovens and stove‐top hot plates, began replacing open hearths and altering cooking practices. By 1850, many households were purchasing coal and commercially ground flour, eliminating traditional male tasks like gathering wood, shelling corn, pounding grain, and, increasingly, farming itself. New technology diversified women's housework as well, removing some jobs and adding others. Kerosene eliminated the job of making candles. Purchasing textiles reduced long hours spent spinning and weaving, and after the Civil War Isaac Singer's manufacture of a practical, treadle‐operated sewing machine allowed women to sew family clothes without hiring seamstresses. The shift from leather and woolen clothing to cotton garments boosted standards of cleanliness, but added the arduous weekly task of hand‐cleaning laundry. As culinary standards advanced, women invested more time preparing more varied meals.

Between 1880 and 1920, private industries began providing even more of the goods and services that households had traditionally produced. As increasing numbers of Americans moved from rural to urban areas, for example, many families began purchasing goods and services they had previously provided themselves: foodstuffs from grocery stores, health care from physicians and hospitals, and ready‐made clothing from department stores. As municipalities developed water systems, many homes acquired running water, water heaters, sanitary fixtures, and indoor bathrooms. Following Thomas Edison's invention of electric lights in 1879 and the first electric power station in 1882, many urban families gradually switched from kerosene lamps to electric light bulbs. By 1910, after the Westinghouse Corporation introduced alternating‐current motors, industries mass‐produced electric fans, sewing machines, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners for a national market. By 1920, when 35 percent of American homes had electricity, devices using resistance‐coil heaters like irons and toasters were widely available. A small but growing number of families also owned telephones and automobiles.

The national standard of living rose through the 1920s, fell in the 1930s, and rose steadily again after World War II as household technologies spread. General Electric began the assembly‐line production of home refrigerators in 1926, enhancing the ability to preserve food and enabling the Birdseye Corporation to make frozen food widely available by the 1930s. Owners of electric dishwashers and other new kitchen appliances found cooking and cleaning easier, if still time‐consuming. Radio, the phonograph, and then television brought free entertainment into homes around the nation. Businesses cut back on home delivery services in response to the spread of automobiles. The Great Depression of the 1930s reduced the number of households that could afford servants, but labor‐saving technologies such as automatic washing machines made it easier and more acceptable for housewives—still the primary operators of household technologies—to perform domestic work without hired help. New products, such as microwave ovens, compact‐disk (CD) players, and personal computers, continued to appear at the end of the twentieth century, but even more remarkable than the range of new technologies was the speed and extent to which citizens of all regions and social levels gained access to them.
See also Agriculture; Automotive Industry; Clothing and Fashion; Electrical Industry; Family; Food and Diet; Gender; Health and Fitness; Mass Marketing; Motor Vehicles; Technology; Textile Industry; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Susan Strasser , Never Done: A History of American Housework, 1982.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan , More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, 1983.
Jack Larkin , The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840, 1988.
Richard L. Bushman , The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities, 1992.
Judith McGaw, ed., Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, 1994.

Christopher W. Wells