HILE the labor movement
: fights for a working week
of less than 40 hours, and in
some industries already has
achieved a week of from 30 to
37 hours, a large section of the
Population regularly puts in

100 hours a week or more.

They live in every city and
every rural area. They are the
housewives.

They are not the women who
_ Work outside the home and also
keep house. Their only activity
is housekeeping and the care of
Small children.

And their work week is not
decreasing. Since the end of
the war it has become longer.
This in spite of “labor-saving”
appliances — in some cases be-
Cause of them!

A study by the Graduate De-
Dartment of. Social Economy
and Social Research of Bryn
Mawr College, published in
1945 and accepted as definitive
by the U.S. Bureau of Home
Economics, showed that just
before the end of the Second
World War the average rural
housewife put in more than 60
hours a week on _ household
tasks, and the average city
housewife put in more than 80.

In the February 1956, the
Ladies Home Journal, having
sent out investigators, published
its findings that the average
household week of the urban
housewife with one or two small
Children has increased to more
than 100 hours.

One woman reported “My
Working day starts between 5
and 5:30 in the morning. Lots
Of times I eat my lunch standing
Up,”

Another wrote: “There is no
time during the day that I can
Set apart and call my own.”

A third told investigators:
“The only vacation I have had
from housework in my entire
Married life is when I went to
the hospital.”

*

Psychoanalysis and other re-
actionary theories that spear-
€ad the “back-to-the-home”
Movement for women do so
argely on the excuse that mar-
Tied couples need each other’s
Companionship and that child-
Ten need the constant presence
Of the mother.

Yet one of the bitterest com-
Plaints of the housewives inter-
Viewed by the Ladies Home
Curnal is that they have no
Companionship with their hus-
ands; they simply can’t spare
€ time. i

100-hour work week--and
her work is increasing
By ELIZABETH LAWSON =

They are unhappy because
they are not companions to
their children; they can find no
moment free from household
duties to talk with them, read
to.them, help with their home-
work, take them on walks or
play games with them. These
mothers are physically present

among their children, but their -

attention is on the chores.

The facts are a far cry from
the belief that gadgets have so
simplified? housekeeping that it
practically “does. itself.” a

All studies show that a gadget
produced for the individual
household does not save time.
It is socially inefficient. It is as
wasteful as using a tractor on a
five-acre farm, or producing
textiles on.a handloom after the
age of steam. ae

The fundamental principle of
the labor-saving device is divi-
sion of labor; but the principle
of the individual household ap-
pliance, the sewing machine,
washing machine, electric
range, home freezer, is to put
an end to the division of labor

j

that exists when such tasks are

“attended to commercially,

At most the gadgets save mus-
cular strain.

The U.S. Bureau of Home
Economics has aceepted as de-
finitive the report of social in-
vestigators that “it takes just
as much time to do a job for
laundering at home with a full
equipment of automatic laun-
dering devices as it does to do
it by hand.”

“Urban women with more ap-
pliances,” says the Bryn Mawr
report “spent more time on
household duties than rural wo-
men — the inference being that
women do not call upon appli-

‘ances to save time, but to pro-

vide easier and better methods
of accomplishment. The study
seems to indicate that as more
appliances and services enter
the home, women tend to spend
more time on almost every kind
of home activity.”

*

Partly because of these very
\

-

or ne sae ay

done

* manufacturing

The housewife's work
is never

gadgets, many of the tasks that
began to leave the home around
the beginning of the century
have returned.

The constantly rising prices
of clothing, of restaurant meals,
of factory processed baked and
canned goods, have _ forced
families to resume duties that
were put aside 50 years ago.

Today, according to statistics,
more flour is bought for* home
use than for restaurants and
bakeries.

There has been an attempt
in many quarters to throw a
veil of poetry around ‘this grow-
ing attention to household tasks.
Yet there is no glamor in a 100-
hour week.

The growth of home sewing
reflects one down-to-earth fact:
higher clothing prices.

The new army of home bak-
ers, canners and _preservers

‘ means that for thousands of

families these goods have been
priced right out of the commer-
cial market. :

We hear of women taking on
the job of repairing -shoes, of
painting walls and varnishing
furniture. The do-it-yourself
programs, which add inexcus-
ably to the already long work-
ing hours of a man, add even
more to the longer hours of a
housewife.

Here is a fundamental con-
tradiction: a home economy that
is tending more and more to-
wards the semi-feudal in this
mid-20th century period of vast
establishments
and commercial services.

*

The trend towards urban liv-

ing — in itself a normal and
healthy one in an industrial so-
ciety — means,. under today’s

conditions, less housing space,
less play space for children,
greater use of every available
foot of living quarters, more
crowding, more dirt, more
cleaning. ¢ ‘

Clothing cannot be as casual

‘in the cities as in the rural

areas; members of the family
must be more presentable for
the job or the job-hunt; there
must be more .changes, more
frequent laundering and clean-
ing, more constant repair. ©
Such habits of presentability
and cleanliness are good if the
making, laundering and repair
of clothing are not added to the
burden the housewife already
carries. : i
And here, in large part. is
the answer to the sneer so often
heard: Where are the great wo-

. men writers composers, organ- -

izers, scientist, inventors, en-
gineers, industrial managers,
medical pioneers? Why have
there been no Beethovens, Tol-
stoys, Einsteins among women?
Why? Because we have left -
our unwritten books on count-
less scrubbed and _ polished
floors; our musical compositions
have bubbled away in a million
soup kettles; our genius at or-
ganization has been sluiced
down an endless series of kit-
chen drains; the science we

learned at the university be-

comes vague and forgotten as

we turn hems and weave our
needles in and out of fraying
textiles.

Eve Merriam, in her bitter
poem, “Occupation: House-
wife,” cries out: “The: table is
spread with my skin!”

There are a few wealthy wo-
men who avoid this drudgery
in some degree; none of us can
avoid it wholly.

“Even a Ph. D. can’t escape
the kitchen,” said a headline in
the New York Times of March
20, 1956.

The story concerned a report
from Radcliffe College on a
group of women who possess the
highest of education, but who
since leaving school between
1902 and 1954 have been able to
accomplish little in their chosen
field. The women declared quite
simply that they could not do
the work for which they had
been trained: “they had the
housework to do.”

There are those who would
have us call ourselves. home-
makers rather than housewives,
but the change of name-changes
none of the chores. Z

“Few tasks,” saye Simone de
Beauvoir in her magnificent
book The Second Sex “are more
like the tortures torture of Sisy-
phus than housework, with its
endless repetition; the clean be-
comes soiled, the soiled is made
clean, day after day. The house-
wife wears herself out) in mark-
ing time. Eating, sleeping, clean-
ing — the years no longer rise
up towards heaven, they spread
out ahead, gray and identical.”

.An answer must be found.
The fundamental demand for
the liberation of women is the
right to work. Yet this abstract
right means precious little to
a woman faced with 100 hours
of household tasks — or even 40
hours, or 10. _

A movie of years ago told
us that Clara Schumann, wife
of the composer, raised half a
dozen children, took in board-
ers, cooked, baked, cleaned,
washed and sewed, and yet
found odd moments which she
utilized to become one of the
world’s outstanding pianists.

I don’t believe this is the true
story of Clara Schumann. Even
if it were, such obstacles to ac-
complishment should not be
raised in the path of any human
being.

e Ima second article Elizabeth
Lawson will present her
views on the solution to the
problem. 2

HE WAS THERE — at 20th Congress Soviet Communist Party !

TIM BUCK

HEAR THE LPP NATIONAL LEADER ON TODAY'S VITAL ISSUES

EXHIBITION.
GARDENS

Friday, June 1 -— 8 p.m.

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May 25, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 9