The Easier Things Get, The Harder We Work

A few weeks ago I posted about those early homeschooling mothers in Charlotte Mason's time trying to figure out how to get it all done with no help other than a maid and a cook. The Nerdmom reponded on her own blog with some thoughts of her own. I posted to the commetns there, and I'm reposting it below.

I thought of all that tonight while reading Carmon's blog, a great place for making you think. She says:

Every technology, even the sewing machine, has an impact on people’s lives by causing them to change their priorities to accomodate the newest labor-saving device and to change their schedules to accomodate the shift in time use. There are many good inventions which have alleviated suffering and freed men for other pursuits, but it’s also good to question what the trade-offs are before we embrace the newest thing, being careful not to accede real freedom of working for ourselves for the convenience of industrial hegemony.

She specifically mentions sewing machines in her post (and I did not know that about Mr. Singer. Ew), which was interesting to me because my commenton Nerdmom's blog referred to washing machines, which is just the other end of the same business.

Sewing machines and washing machines radically reduced the workload of the average mother of children, and at the same time, they radically increased it in different ways and the more complicated we made the rest.

I've read (in that ubiquitously sourced 'somewhere') that automatic washing machines made our physical labor easier while complicating our day-to-day lives.

When most clothes were hand-made (and mended by hand instead of by machine) and everybody had to wash by hand or hire a laundry-person, most middle-class people owned and wore one or two outfits all week long, with one for Sunday Best.

Have you ever noticed that in older books when children are naughty and spoil their clothes they are sent to bed for the rest of the day? This wasn't simply a punishment, it was a necessity- they had to wait until their soiled clothes were cleaned up and dried, and in the meanwhile, they had nothing else suitable to wear. All other household work had to stop while the clothes were washed by hand, rinsed by hand, wrung dry by hand, and hung out to dry and then ironed, by hand.

That was hard physical labor. I have two or three of the old sad-irons, the kind you set on the stove top (which was heated with wood which somebody had to chop, carry, and kindle), and then lifted to iron the clothes. These things are heavy. They weigh several pounds. Ironing clothes with one of those all day long would be hot, back breaking, shoulder wrenching work.

I really appreciate my lightweight iron, my wrinkle free fabrics, my front loading automatic washing machine, my ability to buy clothes ready made off the rack, and my sewing machine on which JennyAnyDots whips up a skirt in a day.

But.... and there is a but.... I don't know about you, but I own far more than one or two changes of clothes, and so do all my children. It still takes us all day to do the week's washing (if we leave it for a week) because there's just so much of it.

And this is pretty typical. While washing clothes got easier, so did buying more clothes. So washing clothes is physically easier, but we own about ten times more clothing to organized, clean, fold, hang up, sort, and mend.

Convenience foods have done the same thing to us- made our physical labor lighter, but in many ways increased our number of tasks and the number of accessories to mess with. In the days of no refrigeration to speak of and no instant meals, baking happened once a week. Meals were soups of scraps on the back of the stove,, and most people ate two meals a day. A great snack would be a piece of bread and cheese, an apple or a raw turnip (and notice how few dishes fruit and a chunk of cheese make).

Making gelatin required boiling bones over the hot stove for hours, and the resulting product was a health food, not a sweet, sugary dessert. Today we have products like instant gelatin and breakfast drink mixes but really, our 'instant' products require more dishes, more time, and more storage space than an apple and water from the well in days of yore.

We have higher expectations now, both of cleanliness, convenience, and variety and our expectations are higher because things got easier, so they aren't necessarily easier anymore.