Week 2: The totem of modernity: advertising, gender and the second shift

Module 1 — Disenchantment.

The mid-century refrigerator was not sold as a cooling device. It was sold as modernity itself, in white enamel, standing in the corner of a kitchen that the advertisement had also redesigned. Buy the box and you buy the life around it: hygiene, abundance, a certain kind of family, and a woman who is smiling because she has been liberated from work.

Cowan’s argument is the one that reorganises the field, and it is empirical rather than polemical. Household mechanisation did not produce leisure. Standards rose to consume the savings — food had to be fresher, kitchens cleaner, meals more varied, waste more carefully managed — and the newly raised standard was enforced on the same person who had been promised freedom from it.

The refrigerator’s specific contribution was to convert provisioning into management. Planning, rotation, inventory, and the continuous judgement of what is still good became an unpaid, invisible, never-finished managerial job performed inside the home. The appliance did not take the work. It took the work’s visibility, which is worse, because unseen work cannot be shared or refused.

Inherits from week 1: manufactured cold made storage skill unnecessary. This week asks what replaced that skill, and on whose time.

Outline#

• the advertisement as a promise about a life, not a product
• what the time-use studies actually found about labour-saving appliances
• rising standards as the mechanism that eats the saving
• provisioning as management: planning, rotation, and the mental load
• why the second shift survived every appliance sold to end it

Reading#

• Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983) — excerpts

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial is a visual semiotics workshop on advertising. Bring the poster you have been assigned in your group.