Episode 36: A history of domestic engineering
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Falling asleep under a million stars by Springtide
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In this episode, the hosts discuss the rise of modern domestic engineering in the early 20th century. As changes in science and technology swept the world, women sought to raise house work to its level by bringing modern techniques of industry into the home.
Show Notes
“The Business of Home Management, The Principles of Domestic Engineering” by Mary Pattison
Labor-Saving Devices Supplant Servants by Harriet Gillespie
In the Name of the Home: Women, Domestic Science, and American Higher Education by Elisa Miller
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Leila: - engineers, including Frederick Wilson Taylor, develop—
Anna: Nope. You said Winston the first time and Wilson this time.
Leila: What is it?
Anna: It's Winslow.
Rebecca: It's one of those weird oldy-timey W names.
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 36 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Anna: And I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: Well, we recorded our last episode on November seventh, when it became clear that Trump lost the election, and coincidentally, here we are today, recording on Inauguration Day, so we've got another weird energy day for you. And it has been a tough several months on top of a tough four years, but we're really grateful that you've stayed with us while our regular podcast release schedule has been a little uneven. And for this year we've got some great topics planned and something new and a little different in the spring, so stay tuned.
Leila: And one more thing before we get into the episode. I want to ask for your help. Since the pandemic hit, we have understandably lost some monthly patrons on Patreon. And we very much understand that times are tough for a lot of our listeners and readers, so we hope that if you are in a position to do so, that you will head on over to our Patreon and make a monthly pledge to help Lady Science stay afloat and continue to pay our writers for the magazine at a fair rate. We have tiers for five-, 10-, and 20-dollar pledges, though you can pledge whatever amount you'd like. So go to Patreon.com/ladyscience to make a monthly pledge.
Rebecca: Yeah. So as Leila just said, things have been weird out there, and I'm sure that they will continue to be weird by the time you are listening to this. But we have another episode today that we hope will be somewhat of a educational distraction and maybe even get you thinking about the comforts of home and being cozy at home.
Rebecca: So we're gonna be talking about domestic engineering today. This is something we've talked about a little bit before, about home domestic engineering as a scientific and technical discipline in its own right. And so that's how we're gonna start today because it's a great way to expand our definition of science and our definition, therefore, of who counts as a scientist.
Anna: So we'll be talking about 19th- and 20th-century movements that explicitly focused on the benefits of modern science and industrialization for managing domestic life. And so that is the focus in terms of the temporality of this, but I do think it's important to just note here at the top that women have always sought more efficient ways to manage the home. So something like commonplace books, household ledgers that are used to track purchases and inventories. You can find those in a lot of archives.
Anna: Women read up on home medical treatments and recipes. We talked about that before on the podcast. They would attend lectures to learn about the latest and greatest and how they could incorporate that into their daily lives. They trained each other to care for their homes and families. And they have always created and transmitted this systematized knowledge across generations.
Anna: But as science and industrialization began to create profound changes in all aspects of human life, domestic life was altered significantly as well. As the primary agents in homemaking and domestic management, women were responsible for integrating new concepts and methods into their domestic work. And beyond the passive adoption of new technologies or techniques, say, like buying a vacuum cleaner or learning new sanitization methods, women actually took on the creation of new forms of knowledge about domestic life, systematizing and codifying the science of the home.
Leila: One thing that I thought about while you were talking, Anna, was the Caroline Herschel logbook. So last summer before the pandemic or whatever, me and Anna went to the Ransom Center and went to the Herschel archives and looked through Caroline Herschel's things. And she had a daybook. I guess it's not really a daybook. It was a ledger.
Anna: I think it's called a daybook in the finding aid. Yeah.
Leila: Yeah. Yeah. William Herschel's wife, Mary I believe was her name, also had one in there. And they were just really detailed everyday accounting of how much money was being spent, what it was being spent on, and just an inventory of their daily lives of living together and managing this home where great science was happening.
Anna: Yeah. I liked it as an example of Caroline's responsible for all of these really major scientific discoveries, but she also just has to decide how much ham to order because part of her role is managing the household, and so she had a lot on her plate.
Leila: Her books and all that go back a little bit further than where we're gonna start, but the story of domestic engineering is definitely a complex one, and it does touch on issues of class, labor, race, social and political movements, and of course the place of women in modern Western society. And there are many places to begin, like we could begin talking about Caroline Herschel. But we're actually gonna start a little bit later in 1915 with a book published by a woman named Mary Pattison called The Business of Home Management: The Principles of Domestic Engineering. Pattison had undertaken research at the Home Experiment Station in Colonia, New Jersey, and her book was a record of her findings.
Leila: This research was done in collaboration with the Club of Women of New Jersey, and it was intended to, quote, "rouse the thought of women of the state to possibilities of greater housekeeping; returns to purse, personality, and public progress through the introduction into the home of modern machine, modern methods, and modern motives; the elimination of human and material waste through freedom from mere tradition and social custom and the conservation of time, health, money, and beauty in closer domestic cooperation as well as the establishment of home economic course in the state college."
Rebecca: So Pattison goes on to explain that the key issue that domestic engineering addresses is, quote, "what has generally been termed the servant problem." End quote. Which I don't know. I love that. But anyway, that means that domestic labor carried out by women both as homemakers and domestic servants had become unfavorable to both in the wake of industrialization.
Rebecca: She also argues that domestic engineering could help balance out the masculine and feminine in domestic life by, quote, "raising housework on the one side to the plane of scientific engineering and by providing on the other fuller individual returns for every complete and right domestic activity," end quote, and that such a balancing makes the home a, as she put it, "more efficient unit of the state." Which that's a phrase.
Anna: Yeah. This is all from the first two pages of the introduction, where she lays out like, "This is the ur-discipline that will fix all of these problems that we see and will also create a unit of state power that is efficient and of the home as a microcosm of the state and all this other stuff about balancing masculine and feminine and meeting the challenge of industrialization." She talks a lot about young women who would normally work as domestic servants are working in factories now, so it's very hard to find good help. That's basically the servant problem.
Anna: But also that women do a lot of uncompensated labor, and we have to figure out a way to make that labor more efficient so that they have time for other things, namely rearing children into good citizens and things like that. But there's a lot going on with the ideals of domestic engineering and what it's supposed to be useful for as a fulcrum of these really profound changes that are happening. And I just think it's really fascinating, but it's really complex, too.
Leila: I think it's also interesting 'cause in a way she's making the invisible labor of women in the home visible by quantifying it through measurable data. And not saying that things need to be quantified with data to be something legitimate, but that she is doing that for housework that is an unappreciated and invisible thing that women are supposed to be doing.
Anna: Yeah. And saying raising housework on the one side to the plane of scientific engineering. So explicitly saying, "We are making this into a scientific discipline because we have seen in other areas of our modern age that science is the way forward, and if we want that to be the way forward for women in the home, too, this is how it has to be. It has to become systematized, scientific approach to this, and that that is also how we will legitimize this work and make it visible by turning it into scientific labor because everybody loves science here at the turn of the century. We're mad for it."
Rebecca: Yeah, 'cause there's something on the one hand, slightly icky about the whole like, "We are supporting the state through our scientific efficiency."
Leila: Yeah. There's something very fashy about that.
Rebecca: Yeah. Exactly. Either fashy or just late capitalist, which six of one, half-dozen of the other. But, yeah, she's saying, the less cynical take, maybe, is she's going, "Okay, this is the words that people use to legitimize their value in the society that we're living in, so let's at the very least attach those words to something else that is really doing the same thing and seeking to solve issues of keeping our economy going but just is wildly invisible."
Rebecca: Also I wanna do a quick callback to our episode about wives and helpers of scientists and the idea embedded in there that we talk about a lot, of "Oh, right, for most of the Western world, at least the modern Western world, there was another person who was doing stuff at home while one person was a professional." And now today as we're all trying to do everything, it's like, "Right, we can't, 'cause it used to be that the economy—"
Rebecca: Or the economy still is structured around that idea. And I do feel like her highlighting of that and tying together, frankly, what you need servants for and what you need wives for, as weird as that seems, explicitly tying those together is actually a much more honest reckoning with the work of taking care of a house and its necessity to your average middle-class professional.
Anna: Yeah. And I did also wanna point out that sometimes we get a little bit of flak from people for saying things like "Science is masculinized." But Pattison's saying it right here. She's saying that if we want to balance out the masculine and the feminine, we need to masculinize housework by calling it science. That's essentially what she's saying. So just to all the haters. It's not just men who say the quiet part out loud in 19th- and early 20th-century books about science. This is how it was talked about publicly.
Anna: So the book itself gives an account of the modern home as it existed in 1915. It lays out the features of this home that can benefit from scientific methods. So the budget is obviously prime importance. How much money is coming in? How much money's goin' out? How do we make sure we have everything we need? As is the case for eliminating servant labor at home. That's also a budget issue. If there's stuff you can do yourself, then you don't have to pay somebody to do it.
Anna: Indexing and cataloging the home. You wanna have a good idea of all the stuff you have at all times so that you can then do efficient purchasing. There's also a section about you should think about the way that stuff is—how does stuff get to your house? Do you go get it? Does it get delivered? Where are you gonna put it? Certain things need to be stored in different places. This was all laid out in very meticulous detail.
Anna: Maintaining a housekeeping library. You need to have reference works on hand. It's not just cookbooks. You need to have all the recipes that you need for making laundry soap or whatever. Selecting the best household equipment. All of these things each get their own chapter, and then there's much more. Pattison also describes ways to, quote, "eliminate drudgery" and introduces the time motion study as a tool for analyzing labor in the home and making it more efficient, which is a tool that is borrowed from industry.
Anna: And this is followed by more specific chapters about the best way to organize your kitchen and your laundry room, how you should prepare food. There's a whole chapter on how to create an efficiency dinner that she says this is a basic method. You can adapt it for your own home, but here's how to get dinner on the table fast and cheaply and cleanly or whatever. You have to think about how you're going to train your kids in your newfound way of domestic efficiency. How you should dress so that you can move around and do your chores and stuff.
Anna: And then on other stuff, like how to make sure that you have personal time for yourself. You're gonna get rid of all your servants. You still need to preserve some time for yourself for your hobbies or your needlework or whatever it is you're doing. How to train your senses so that you can recognize a bad smell and figure out where it's coming from. Oh, it's rotten potatoes in the cellar. Stuff like that. It's a remarkable tome, and we don't have time to go through the whole thing, but it is available on Google Books, and you can read the whole thing. It's really interesting.
Anna: So and then Pattison talks about the social/cultural/political dimensions of domestic engineering. And we've talked about that just a minute ago, noting that, quote, "Homemaking is no longer a private undertaking but a public function affected by municipal and state conditions." So not only do you have to do this because it's better for you, it's better for your kids, better for your husband, for your house, but you have to do this because it's better for the state and it is how things have to run in our modern world. And you can't just have your own private enclave. It matters. The laws of your town matter to how you can run your house. And so it's a lot.
Leila: Yeah. And if this sounds radical to any of you and perhaps upends what you always thought domestic life was like in ye olden days, I don't think you're the only one. And it will help here to pause and take a step back and look at the broader changes that were going on in modern life that Pattison is responding to here. Domestic engineering, domestic science, and home economics are all part of a larger history of changing social and economic structures at the turn of the 20th century. And these changes brought new science and technology right into the, quote, "separate sphere" of the middle-class home.
Leila: The scientific management of labor and production was revolutionizing industry. Engineers, including Frederick Winslow Taylor, developed and applied scientific theories of efficiency to fields like manufacturing with the goal of increasing economic output. Taylor believed that inefficient work practices could be curtailed by removing the idiosyncrasies individuals brought to their tasks. This could be accomplished in part by assigning planning work to managers who would delegate the task to employees and also standardizing the way those tasks were executed across all workers. The strict division between management and labor combined with scientifically tested methods for completing work tasks would result in increased efficiency and profit for companies.
Rebecca: Just side note. I don't know. It's always interesting learning about 19th and early 20th century because you continually hit upon these things that you assume were just the way things are, and then you learn that basically, oh, right, someone had to invent middle management. And you're like, "Oh, right. That's now how I just assume all jobs work." Anyway. History's fascinating. Everything you think has been around forever has been around for five minutes except for the things that you think have been for five minutes. Those things have been around forever.
Rebecca: As historian Elisa Miller has shown, the introduction of science and technology to the management of the domestic sphere was something of a second wave in history of home economics. An earlier version of this rational management of the home came from religious missionary reform, which emphasized the moral and spiritual benefits of a well-kept home and its role in preserving traditional family structures.
Rebecca: With the introduction of scientific management to the social and cultural landscape of the late 19th century and amid increasing opportunities for women to attend college, home economics became a distinct academic discipline that embraced scientific and technical progress in the realm of homemaking. Students in home economics learned as much biology and chemistry as they did cooking to better embrace innovations in sanitary theory in keeping their homes.
Rebecca: Now that reminds me of COVID. We're all learning a lot about the exact science of what all of our bleach does so that we can correctly kill the virus. I don't know. I feel like we're all super attuned to this right now.
Anna: And how many people learned about the danger of chlorine gas this year?
Rebecca: Yes. Exactly. How many people learned to check the label and make sure that you are an all-bleach household or an all-chlorine household? 'Cause I did. Anyway, everything old is new again. As part of the progressive drive to improve society at every level, people like Pattison were enthusiastic about the possibilities of science to improve the management of the home and the fundamental structures of domestic life.
Anna: So we can see that domestic engineering folds in many scientific and social changes into its remit and that people like Pattison were working to systematize this knowledge and see that it's distributed through books and pamphlets, courses like those in home economic departments in colleges that admitted women, but I do wanna return to the servant problem as well because I think that gets us into some really interesting territory with this history.
Anna: So in 1913, a couple years before Pattison's book came out, the women's magazine Good Housekeeping published an article by Harriet Gillespie, who was a New Jersey woman who claimed to have lived a full year without any servants and encouraged others to consider doing the same.
Leila: Profiles in Courage.
Anna: Well, yeah. It turns out Gillespie was actually a domestic engineer who was doing research at the same experiment station that Pattison's research was done at. It actually was Gillespie's own house that they turned into this experiment station. So she wasn't just some rando being like, "I did it. You can do it, too." She had the data to back it up. They tested all kinds of new technologies and methods for managing the labor of the home, reducing unnecessary motion, all the stuff that Pattison put into the book.
Anna: But Gillespie was also writing articles for women's magazines about this topic. So in this particular article, she's advocating for women to take up these new approaches to standardize housework because they will then be able to reap the benefits of a reduced household budget by letting their servants go. This is the solution to the servant problem, is to figure out a fast way to do it yourself and fire all your servants. They just wanna go work in factories and be factory girls anyway, and we all know what happens to factory girls.
Rebecca: Make money. They can buy ribbons.
Anna: Yeah. There's a lot of overt talk about that in the primary sources for this kind of thing, but there's a lot of just real shady, middle-class gossipy kind of tone to the way that this stuff is described. Anyway, so Gillespie's saying fire your servants because after all, it was apparent to many middle-class women that the young woman servant was, quote, "fast eliminating herself."
Anna: Gillespie says, quote, "She's going into the shop, the factory, or other industry where she can have her Sundays off, her regular hours of work, her time for recreation, and her feeling of independence." Which is a searing indictment of how people were treating their servants.
Rebecca: Yeah. One of the amazing things about this whole servant problem idea, which I feel like they started talking about 100 years before this, factories open, and people are like, "Can't find good help these days because they all wanna work in the factories." We all know how terrible factories of the early Industrial Revolution were and how crappy their wages were, how crappy their hours were, all that stuff. And yet turns out sounded like a better gig to a lot of people than being a servant because being a servant sucked.
Leila: Yeah. And I think there's still a lot of—even though in the 19th century it gradually became more acceptable for women to make their own income, there was still a lot of women who made income but still tryin' to do it in a traditionally domestic way—women writers, sewing, stuff you could still do in the—be a lady in the home and make money while living in your own home. Stuff like that.
Leila: And here it does feel like there is, in the early 20th century, still some resistance to women in general earning their own income. I have the feeling that some of the women that they're talking about here, the servant girls or whatever, are probably young, unmarried, and so there's a lot of assumptions going into these servant girls or the servant problem or whatever that's really coming from a white, middle-class to upper-class perspective.
Anna: Yeah. I think the class thing is so sharp here because she talks about these servant girls like they're a different species. If Gillespie had a daughter, it's clear that she would not become a servant. We're talking about two totally separate classes of people that have totally different trajectories in the world. And this is how Gillespie understands this, is that some people are servant people who have just changed to be factory people, and some people have houses that need to do laundry or whatever.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing that's helpful and clarifying to keep in mind is I think it's easy to think of people who have servants like Downton Abbey. It's like you're absurdly rich and you have 50 servants. But really what's being talked about here is your average middle- to upper-middle-class professional who has one or two people who are live-in and maybe one person who comes in on a couple days a week or whatever.
Rebecca: So there were all these different versions of what it was to have a servant that I think can get lost in the sweeping idea of the servant of the grand house. What she's talking about is more of a widespread phenomenon than I think it might sometimes seem at first.
Leila: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. There is a house that I was renting. It was a three-bedroom bungalow, and it had a servant's entrance. And it was built in 1925 or something like that, so around this time, even for what even then would have been considered a middle-class, single-family home had a servant's entrance, expected that they were gonna have servants even if they weren't live-in.
Leila: And that neighborhood where I was living was a historical neighborhood, and all the houses had something like that. So it was, like you were saying, Rebecca, a widespread thing to have a servant or two, even as not being a super wealthy person.
Anna: I'm going out here on a limb because this is super not my area of expertise, but I think there's also probably if we wanted to go into more detail with this, there's something you could look at about the culture of service in different places. Like I think the culture of service in the United States at this time is a lot different than it is in England, for example, just because there's the different tradition of aristocracy versus the middle class and how being a servant to a house of aristocrats is a lot different than being a servant in a middle-class home. And so there are different expectations there for sure.
Leila: In the book, Gillespie describes how she was able to take on her own housework without her serving girl by utilizing new technologies such as, quote, "pneumatic cleaners for the floors, walls, and furniture" and a washing machine which despite the initial high cost, quote, "returned 80% on the investment in the first year." End quote.
Leila: And if the reader needed any more convincing of the benefits of becoming a domestic engineer, she, quote, "advised every woman to read what those experts Harrington, Emerson, Frederick Taylor, and Frank Gilbreth have to say on the subject of efficiency and then translate those principles into their homes. In that way, each woman can start herself toward an appreciation of the value of domestic engineering." End quote.
Leila: And Frank Gilbreth, that last name might sound familiar. He was married to Lillian, and they were the Cheaper by the Dozen family. And one of our tiers in Patreon is the Domestic Engineer, and the little picture for that is a little portrait of Lillian Gilbreth. Yeah.
Leila: And so immediately following Gillespie's article are letters to the Good Housekeeping Institute which cast the servant problem in a decidedly different light. The initials ABB from Alabama wrote about, quote, "dealing with colored help. I never purchased a new household device without first consulting with my cook, who is also a housemaid. I reason that it would be a waste of money to buy any article that she would stubbornly or ignorantly not make correct use of." End quote.
Rebecca: It's probably worth noting there that this is the other difference between this discussion in America and other parts of the world.
Leila: In the next letter, MEH from New York cautions that, quote, "lacking a scientific mind, comprehending but dimly the revolution that is taking place in the realm of domestic equipment, that servant would be an exceptional girl who would take kindly to the new but misunderstood helps at her disposal." End quote. So basically servants are too stupid to even understand or grasp the significance of modern domestic engineering.
Anna: Basically this whole section of Good Housekeeping is full of stuff like this, and the letter from Alabama begins by saying that here in the South, we exclusively use, quote, "colored help" and goes on to describe some more stuff that I just didn't feel like we should include here 'cause it's gross. This is also available on Google Books if you want to look at it.
Anna: There's a lot of issues of Good Housekeeping from this period that are really fascinating reading and provide some good insights about the way that people thought about the people who labored in their homes and the reasons they thought about them in those certain ways. And so go check that out, but I just don't wanna repeat some of the nasty things that are in there.
Anna: And when I write about domestic engineering or teach it to my students, I do so largely with the aim of I wanna show how science became a part of everyday life in this period and how women who were often unable to access more formal realms of science, they did plenty of experimentation and knowledge creation in their own homes, and that this is a really important sight for thinking about what modern science is, who does it, how it gets used, how it gets translated and transmitted, and that women are a vector for moving knowledge around in this way.
Anna: But I do think it is also really important to recognize that even as something like domestic engineering allows us to do that, to expand our definition of science to think about who can participate in science in new ways, it only does that along certain axes of power and privilege. So white, middle-class women definitely can do domestic engineering. They have money to buy vacuum cleaners. They have servants who they can teach to use them or whatever. But as we saw in the letters from Good Housekeeping, it was widely believed that women of color, lower-class white women, immigrant women were just not intellectually capable of doing any of this.
Anna: And the fact that they talk about it specifically in terms of like, "This is a scientific revolution that these people are not capable of participating in" is something we really need to pay attention to. So access to science expands in one direction, middle-class white women culturing the mold they find on their bread and learning about it or whatever, but as a direct consequence of that, it contracts in the other direction, where we're talking about cutting off all of these people from the scientific and technical revolution of industrialization because of their race, because of their nationality, because of their class.
Anna: So I think it's really important to just think through that when we talk about stuff like this, especially because I think there are ways of when we talk about women in science that end up being just a big celebration. Isn't it so cool that women could do science in their houses? Well, what about women who didn't own their own houses and lived in other people's houses and cooked their food for them?
Leila: And I think could be important to couch this phenomenon in the early 20th century of domestic engineering in with looking at the larger Progressive Era of reforms, which was dominated by middle-class white women in a lot of ways, especially with the elevation of domestic life and trying to open that up and make arguments for saying, "The home isn't just the place in which I live, the actual structure in which I live. It's also my community and my city and my state and my country" in a way to expand the domestic sphere and give it some legitimacy. But how, for all of the progressive reforms that they were pushing for, that a lot of it being led by middle-class white women had a lot of blind spots. And we've talked about some of them here.
Leila: But that was a widespread problem of this era, of trying to make change and make progress, but that it really went in, like you said, Anna, one direction and not the other.
Anna: And I think what you said about this idea of like, "My home is not just the building I live in but also these larger nesting structures of the state," when we talked earlier about the home being a microcosm of the state, it does matter when we look at that as a unit and as a little organism, what it looks like. And who are we talking about when we talk about the family? Talking about a white middle-class family as a unit of the state, the fundamental unit of the state.
Anna: So what does that mean, then, if we talk about that in terms of political and social power that you have if you don't belong to a fundamental unit of the state? Then you are some extra thing that usually has to be managed by voluntary organizations and workhouses and things like that.
Anna: So I think that this is one of the things that I really am fascinated by in researching domestic engineering, is just how these nesting structures fit together and also how wily these women were who are writing this stuff, how plugged in they were to the currents of power in their own world and figuring out ways to exercise that power. It's really interesting.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Your point about voluntary organizations also just made me think. In some ways one of the most progressive, in the lowercase-P way that we use it today, like progressive positions that comes about through voluntary organizations or settlement houses and things like that, believes all of the things we have said but just also happens to believe that it is possible to teach so-called stupid people how to do those things.
Rebecca: That's the kind of more radical leap that you see a lot of truly innovative social reformers but still social reformers saying, is "Well, it's a problem that people look down on these groups of people over here. They would look down on them less and they would be better people if we could just teach them how to clean their houses correctly or we could teach them to live in middle-class-style family units." And, oh, they're teachable, but it's still not acknowledging that they potentially may already have knowledge or structures of living that work for them.
Leila: I think it's also important to show that this is relying on the single-family home, not collaborative housing or tenement housing or anything like that, where poor working-class immigrant families were most likely to be living, that this relies on a very individualistic kind of home life and that does not take into account collaborative living situations, cooperatives, things like that that were a much larger phenomenon in this time period than it is today.
Anna: Yeah. I think that also gets to there's a really fascinating material history of this subject, too, that's not just a history of the individual technologies that are being brought into the home, but architectural history of the middle-class home itself in different regions and how big it is, how many rooms it has, whether it's electrified or not. I just think there's just so many different directions and aspects to the story that are really interesting and really get at really fundamental everyday kinds of histories that I always think are really fascinating.
Leila: This really goes into looking at our history of capitalism in this country and how it's changed because every single-family house having a vacuum cleaner, having a pneumatic washer or whatever the hell she was talking about, having those appliances instead of in a collaborative living situation where people share those, each family needs to have one. That's more demand for these appliances on a much more massive scale.
Anna: It just makes me think. I follow a lot of food writers and food people, and it just makes me think of these people who have countertop grain mills because they buy whole grains and then mill their own flour. And I just catch myself just, I don't know, doing this weird psychedelic time warp where I'm like, "What would a medieval person think of this and this crazy shit right here?" A grain mill that's this big and just sits on your counter
Anna: But that your house can be entirely self-contained and you don't have to talk to any other people or cooperate with them at all, which is a fascinating contrast to Pattison saying that your homemaking is now a public thing that you have to do. But it's not, really. I don't know. It's a weird disconnect there.
Leila: Yeah. It's making it visible and legitimate through scientific means while also cutting it off from a larger current of society and community.
Anna: Yeah. And on that note of being cut off from society and community—
Leila: Goodbye. This episode is over.
Rebecca: Now that we're all stuck at home all the time and our ideas about domestic engineering have once again come under scrutiny or something.
Anna: Yeah. Go through and inventory your entire house. You don't have anything else to do. Start a commonplace book. Do some time motion studies on how you wash the dishes.
Leila: Argue with your housemate over the most efficient way to load the dishwasher.
Rebecca: Yeah. I mean, I have to say I got a robot vacuum for my birthday, and number one, it's great, but number two, it definitely makes me think now that we're talkin' about domestic engineering things because having it then fundamentally changes your structures for how you clean your house. I have to make sure stuff's off the floor. And now we're like, "Oh, we need to put all the computer cords in a little box." Just I don't know. The way technology changes your everyday life because you get a little vacuum that will clean up your cat's hair from it.
Leila: Well, I guess this is a good place to wrap up. If you liked our episode today, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions for us about any of the topics we discuss, you can tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read articles and essays, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
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Image credit: Domestic Science class, 1915 (New York Public Library Digital Collections | Public Domain)
