A lot has changed in a hundred years of household. But do all those household appliances actually save us time? Science Center NEMO shows in its new exhibition that this conclusion is a bit premature.
“I have time, because I have electricity”. That was the slogan of many a company that sold household appliances in the middle of the last century. Not surprising, because the arrival of the vacuum cleaner and washing machine, among other things, saved the housewife a lot of time. At least that was the thought. The housewife no longer had to carry her furniture outside, knock on mats and carry around liters of boiling water for the dirty laundry. This left much more time for fun things. Still?
Fifty years later, it appears that the fork is slightly different. Research shows that thanks to technology, we indeed spend less time on household chores than in the past. But the time savings are small.
Tidy or lingering
In 1955 most families did not have a vacuum cleaner, washing machine and gas stove. At the time, for example, you cooked on a coal stove, after all, gas was only available in the 1960s. In that year, the Dutch Household Council conducted a time-use survey among Dutch housewives for the first time. This showed that the woman spent an average of 62 hours a week on household chores. That's almost nine hours a day.
In 1984 the Social Cultural Planning Office (SCP) published a new study into the time use of the Dutch person. At that time, household appliances were fully established throughout the Netherlands. Housekeeping should no longer be a day job.
Not so. In 1984, the Dutch housewife still spent 51 hours a week on the household, more than seven hours a day. A time saving of eleven hours a week is included, but it is not revolutionary. It becomes even more serious when you look at the source of that time saving:only a third is due to the arrival of household appliances and natural gas for cooking. The 2007 collection 'History of private life' reveals that both developments each yield only two hours a week. We save the other seven hours by outsourcing household tasks, or simply not doing them anymore.
This seems strange, because standard household tasks did take a lot more time at the beginning of the last century. Doing laundry meant boiling water in the washbasin on the coal stove, cleaning each item of clothing by hand and then wringing it out, either by hand or with a wringer. To sweep dust and mud from the floor, the housewife first had to lug all the furniture outside. Mats had to be beaten, and swept dirt was collected with a dustpan and dustpan. Today, anyone who spends more than ten minutes vacuuming the room is either very tidy or a linger. The contrast can hardly be greater.
20 tablecloths
So why so little time gain? The influence of technology on the household is clear from the collection 'The happiness of the housewife', from the Historical Museum Rotterdam. The explanation is actually quite simple:thanks to better technology, we now do household things more often, such as vacuuming, washing clothes and bathing or taking a shower. In the meantime, the washing machine in an average family is turned on almost every day and we take a shower at least once a day. In the past, that was absolutely not the case:clothing was sometimes worn for a week, you only bathed at the weekend.
Another change becomes visible when you open household manuals from the early twentieth century (yes, there were). It states:"A good household has 72 pieces of clothing, 84 pieces of bed linen, 20 tablecloths, 66 napkins, 66 towels and 150 household towels". You should iron it. In 1954 those numbers were already a lot more manageable. The manual also stated that a household could suffice with 4 tablecloths, 22 napkins and 22 pieces of bed linen. Nevertheless, images of overflowing linen closets are still visible.
Dust flake
Technology did make household chores easier, but that came at a price:jobs that we used to do once a week have become so easy that we now do them every day. You could even say that household appliances save us so much time that we don't know what to do with them. That is why we do what we are used to, namely even more household. Whether that is due to habituation, boredom or a new standard for clean remains in the middle.
Did a hundred years of household revolution yield nothing but a neurotic people with a fear of contamination? No; according to professor Ruth Oldenziel, there is one clear advantage:back pain is a thing of the past. In her book 'Clean enough' she describes that the physical efforts have become a lot less thanks to all that technology. That makes a difference – luckily we can continue to crawl under the couch until our old age to get that last dust flake in the vacuum cleaner bag.
The Household Paradise can be seen from 24 June to 5 September 2010 (Monday to Sunday 10.00-17.00) in Science Center NEMO. In July and August NEMO has extra long (XL) summer evenings and is open until 9 p.m. on Friday evenings.
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