WORK
More Work for Mother
Cowan's 1983 landmark documenting that household labor-saving devices—washing machines, vacuum cleaners, gas ranges—consistently increased rather than decreased women's total domestic labor hours across the twentieth century.
Published by Basic Books in 1983, More Work for Mother presented the meticulously documented paradox that household technology's promise of liberation delivered intensification instead. Cowan traced the trajectory of American domestic labor from 1860 to 1960, demonstrating that full-time homemakers in the 1960s spent approximately the same total hours on housework as their grandmothers—roughly fifty-five hours per week—despite revolutionary technological advancement. The book identified the mechanism: technologies reduced effort per task while simultaneously raising standards of performance (daily laundering replaced weekly, fresh meals replaced preserved food), eliminating collaborative structures (hired laundresses, communal facilities, shared neighborhood labor), and generating invisible 'shadow labor' of managing increasingly complex households. The work won widespread acclaim, influenced feminist scholarship and technology studies, and introduced the consumption junction concept that reframed how scholars understood technology's social consequences.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Cowan's decade-long research into household technology patents, advertising, women's magazines, domestic science literature, and time-use studies. She synthesized sources ranging