Below you will find information on the history of domestic technology and its impact on gender relations in the home (ca 1850 - 1990). The Love, Leisure and Laundry exhibit explores some of the reasons why technology has never eliminated housework and probably never will. Chief amongst these are changing standards, the nature of family life, and new roles for women in the home. Instead of removing housework, domestic technology contributed to a re-definition of how that work should be organized and done.
The organization, physical effort and tools used to do housework before modern household equipment became available were the result of a home life based on mutual interdependence. The family in the 19th century was a unit of production. Today the family is mainly a unit of consumption.
Many of the items required for their daily needs were produced at home and purchases were limited to a short list of goods: tea, coffee and sugar were highly prized and sparingly used. Metal items such as stoves, pots, tools and guns were purchased because only skilled artisans were able to make them. Many other tools such as wooden spoons and washboards were made once the family was settled.
In rural areas, services such as heat, water and waste disposal had to be provided and maintained on a daily basis by the family unit whose implements were tools rather than machines. Women were responsible for the growing, buying, preservation and preparation of the family's food.
Particularly in rural areas, tasks were clearly divided between the men and women. For homesteading couples, marriage was a means of survival. It was this mutual interdependence which became lost as the home became modernized. Men cared for the wheat and grew the flax, but women took care of the garden. Men cut and hauled the wood for the fires, women did the cooking. Some tasks such as carrying water, milking cows, peeling apples and weaving were performed by both men and women.
Campbell, Lynn, Children in Nineteenth Century Rural Ontario, Ontario Agricultural Museum, 1983.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, More Work For Mother, New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1983.
Dale, Linda, Home-making, a background paper. National Museum of Science and Technology, 1992.
Denis, Leo G., Water Works and Sewerage Systems of Canada, Ottawa: Mortimer Co., 1916
Klingender, Franz, The mechanization of domestic equipment, 1890-1960: "To lighten the burden of womenkind", National Museum of Science and Technology, 1994.
Rybczynski, Witold, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Viking Press.
Schwartz. More Work For Mother. New York, Basic Books Inc. Publishers, 1983.
By 1890, entrepreneurs had established electrical generating facilities in all of Canada's provinces. Electric technology required the establishment of a method of distribution before it could be used. As a result, the first customers were in or near urban centres. In 1910, Berlin (Kitchener), Ontario became the first municipality to be connected to the provincial public power grid. In Ontario this power grid was funded by the government; in Quebec it was funded privately.
During the 19th century, services such as lighting or running water were confined to the urban middle-upper class. By 1860, seven Canadian cities had public waterworks. During the second half of the century, domestic plumbing and sewage systems became available to a large number of urban, middle class Canadian homes. The poor did not have plumbing until after 1900, although many rural homes had their own well. With mass production, standardization, and the installation of fixtures, indoor plumbing boomed after World War I (1918). By the 1930s, most urban homes had running water.
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