Good morning everyone,

I'm reading a great book right now, Helen Damon-Moore's Magazines for the Millions, about the development of "women" as a market segment in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. That seems highly specific now that I write it down. One reason why I find it so charming is that when it writes about Louisa Knapp, co-founder and editor of the Ladies Home Journal, it's very clear that she treated the whole enterprise sort of like I treat Fem Fri:

The underlining is not mine. You know that if I had been underlining this paragraph I would have gone nuts on "bee-keepers". 🐝

Anyway, because it's about women in that era, it's really a lot about housework and about how editors and advertisers spoke to women about their work in the home. The author makes the point (with which I agree) that women don't just do what they are told in adverts, but the effect of reading so much about housework is that I just… constantly… feel like I should be doing housework when I read it. So here are some links about the history of housework to make up for the fact that I have not unstacked the dishwasher yet.

On the topic of dishwashers, this article is about the history of advertising labour saving devices. Turns out it's all still work:

The idea that household technology would liberate women from work was never a predominant theme in the ads. Some ads did promise a vacuum that “does all my work” or a sewing machine that relieves “weariness and exhaustion.” But this theme was present in only 13 to 21 percent of the ads in each of the periods Fox studied from 1909 through 1950. In the later periods, between 1969 and 1980, it figured in only 5 to 6 percent.

https://daily.jstor.org/advertisers-sold-housework-housewives/

This feels like a lot of passive consumption, how about developing products for the home! Here's Lucy Maltby, innovator in that space, who made a new department in a glass works and designed a load of products we probably still use today. And she got a PhD for it:

That same year, a young home economics teacher from Mansfield State College approached Corning Glass Works with a proposal to provide an X-ray of the Pyrex customer. Lucy Maltby, a Corning native, was also convinced that companies were ignoring customer needs. She had ideas about how Corning Glass Works could improve its sales by making better Pyrex products and marketing the features that were of most value to customers. Corning executives listened to Maltby’s ideas and soon after, Maltby became Corning’s first director of home economics.

https://pyrex.cmog.org/content/dr-maltby%E2%80%99s-pyrex-perspective

Thank you for being with me as I work through my feelings about the tidiness of my home. The next book I read will be about the invention of adolescence so I guess it's going to be looking a lot less tidy for the next 450 pages.

Love,

Alex.