Industrializing the Household: Ruth Schwartz Cowan's "More Work for Mother" More Work for Mother by Ruth

Schwartz Cowan Review by: Joy Parr Technology and Culture, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 604-612 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the History of Technology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40060907 . Accessed: 09/11/2013 02:53
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Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother

JOY

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Ruth SchwartzCowan'sMore Work for Mother:The Ironiesof Household was and remainsa rare Technology from the OpenHearthto the Microwave and welcome hybrid,valuedby both academicand nonacademicreaders.It was awardedSHOT'sDexter Prizefor its high level of scholarshipin 1984, - had the Sally Hacker the year after its publication, and might equally Prizebeen in place at the time have been honored for its reachtowarda broad audience of students and the general public. It is a rare reviewer, from the grumpiestscholarto the most avid young blogger,who does not remarkon the pace and elegantvitality of Cowan'sprose, or acknowledge personalepiphaniesarisingfrom both the historicaland personalinstances she so compellingly narrates.For myself, I watched sidewalkprocessions and my own mirrored reflection differently for days after rereading,at more than a decade'sremove,her pages about the class and gender privilege that body-hugginggarmentsonce bespoke. Cowan'sscholarlyfinding, that during the last three centuriestechnological change shifted the burden of domestic labor from adult men and - just as Cowan as femichildrento mothers and wives, has been distilled nist popularintervenerin the early 1980shoped into a cautionarytale on which to ground a different household ethic. More Work for Motherwas an article in the excerpted in Reader's Digest and provided the hook for in books NationalInquirer}It was featured guides to great by women and
Joy Parr is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Risk in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Her current research project, "Sensing Changes: Bodies, Technologies, Livelihoods, Landscapes,"considers how the presence of large-scale technologies and new technological knowledge systems (hydroelectric dams, shipping canals, nuclear generating stations, heavy-water plants, military training and testing bases, water-quality regulatory regimes) reveal and alter the historically specific bodies of local inhabitants. She thanks Aki Beam of the University of Western Ontario for bibliographical assistance. 2005 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/05/4603-0007$8.00 1. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "This Is the History People Often Care about Most,"inter-

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PARRI Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother

in National Public Radio commentaries;one Internetreviewerarguesthat the book should be "assignedreadingfor every women'sstudies course for a bit of reality mixed in with the theory"and "included in every bride's to dim the glimmerof such starry-eyed moments.2Museweddingshower" um curatorshave used Cowan'stheme as the organizingprinciplefor exhibitions of domestic technologies,and young scholarscite Cowan'shomily as a correctiveto the domestic perfectionismof MarthaStewart.3 Initially,the scholarlyreception of MWFMwas more critical. Cowan was trained as a historian of science in the decade before the insights of social constructionopened up the blackbox.4By her own recollection,she "knewalmost no economics"when she startedthe projectand proceeded ratherfrom the understanding, basedon personalexperience,that production and consumptionwereboth economic activities,and probablyless categoricallydistinguishablethan the Americanpublic then recognized.5 Although she introducedthe terms "workprocess"and "technological system"early in the text, she employed them as "organizing concepts" {MWFM,11) ratherthan as the proteandeeplytheorizedtools for thinking that feminist and Marxistscholarshiphad made them by the early 1980s. One particularly A leadtesty reviewerfound her graspof theory "shaky."6
view by Robert C. Post, American Heritage of Invention and Technology 19 (summer 2003): 59-62. 2. Erica Bauermeister et al., Five Hundred GreatBooks by Women (New York, 1994); Irene Stuber,"Women Used to Help in the Fields and Men Used to Help in the House," Women of Achievement and Herstory, http://www.undelete.org/woa/woa08-16.html, accessed June 2005. 3. Elizabeth M'Ule, "Women's Work Still Never Done," Portland Oregonian, 1 November 1989, review of an exhibition at the Washington County Museum; JaniceGaston, "Still Chasing that Dust," Winston-Salem Journal 21 June 1999, review of the Museum of the New South in Charlotte; and Carolyn C. Cooper, "The Ghost in the Kitchen: Household Technology at the Brattleboro Museum, Vermont,"Technologyand Culture28 (1987): 328-32. The domestic technology hall that opened in the mid-1990s at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology, Ottawa, is also organized within Cowan's narrative frame. 4. Eugene S. Ferguson, "Toward a Discipline of the History of Technology,"Technology and Culture 15 (1974): 13-30; R. D. Whitely, "Black Boxism and the Sociology of Science: A Discussion of Major Developments in the Field,"in The Sociology of Science, ed. Paul Halmos (Keele, U.K., 1972), 62-92. In the years immediately after the publication of MWFM, Cowan was a central participant in this reconstruction of the field. See Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology,"in The Social Constructionof Technological Systems:New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology,ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). 5. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Is Women's Liberation a Myth?" interview by Rebecca Coulter, Aurora Online, July 2001, http://aurora.icaap.org/archive/cowan.html,accessed June 2005. 6. Review by Joseph F.Coates, Technological Forecastingand Social Change 28 ( 1985): 371-72.

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ing student of domestic material culture, KathrynGrover of the Strong Museumin Rochester, New York, concludedthat MWFMdid "notallowthe readerto appreciatethe richnessand complexityof the social and cultural environmentin which technology emerges."7 Louise Tilly,whose Women, Work and Family(1978), writtenwith JoanW. Scott,had by 1984become a foundationaltext for theoreticallyinformed scholarshipin the social history of Europeanwomen's industrialand domestic labor,praisedCowan's contribution as "interesting" (alwaysa worrying sign) as well as "briskly writtenand tightlyargued." But she also averredthat "surelymore complex processes lay behind the shift from subsistence or market agricultureto wage labor than the developmentof iron casting"and faultedCowan for a technologicaldeterminismthat failed to examine the influencesof "strucIn a spirited tural change,household decisions and commercialresponse." response,Cowan conceded that in order to position technology as a more forceful explanator in women's history she had overstatedher case, and queried in rebuttalwhy social scientists generallywere so loath to admit technology"asa determining(and also determined)variable."8 Afterresearching what becameMWFMfor thirteenyearswithin the lit- which in the eratures and practices of the historyof scienceand technology United Statesthen were more isolatedfrom the main currentsof social and - Cowanhad stumbledlargely culturaltheory than they have since become unawaresonto an edificebuilt in fractiousdebateamong socialist,Marxist, and materialfeminists.By the early1980sthis explanatory framewas threatas ening momentarilyto crackunder the weight of its own contradictions, studentsof women'swork,with deep loyaltiesto both capitalismand patriarchyas explanators, struggledto reconcilethe orneryand divergentpriorities and to accommodate the absences in these contending theoretical frameworks. Scholarsunder threatoften strayfrom the paths of good grace and civility.Cowan recallsonly one of these (dare we call them?) deconis perhaps structionsof MWFM, whichin retrospect just as well.9Plauditsfor the the prose and the artfulphoto essaysaside, onslaughtwas thorough. Cowan straightforwardly dismissed the Marxian interpretiveproject then consuming her feminist colleagues:"Capitalism and patriarchyexist, of our behavior" but they arenot the sole determinants (MWFM,147, 150). But her alternative, as her critics invariablynoted, held its own contradictions. To assert that, given choices, "most Americansact so as to preserve
7. Review by Kathryn Grover, ChicagoHistory 15 (spring 1986): 70-71. On Grover's themes, see also an earlier review by Gail Pool, "Machines Haven't Really Lessened Women's Work, New Book Says,"Christian ScienceMonitor, 20 October 1983. 8. Review by Louise Tilly,Journalof the History of the BehavioralSciences22 (1986): 81-83, and the accompanying response by Cowan, 84. 9. Conversation between the author and Ruth Schwartz Cowan at the meeting of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, London, Ontario, 4 June 2005. Nona Review of Books 1 (December 1983): 12-15. Glazer,"MoreWork for Historians,"Women's

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PARRI Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother

family life and family autonomy"and "opt for privacyand autonomy over technical efficiencyand community interest"made tastes and preferences key- and then, following the assumptions of neoclassicaleconomics, set them aside as exogenous, taken to be constants rather than forceful elements within a dynamic analysis. Equally,Cowan strayed from her own commitment to personalchoice between marketoptions offered in a perfectly competitive economy to explain the failureof alternativetechnologies, notablyin her wonderfulparableabout the failureon the U.S. market of absorptionrefrigeration, which hinged on the abilityof oligopolist market power to constrainconsumer decisions.10 Feministswerefocusedon the searchto comprehendrace,class,and sexual orientationas differences. Cowan'sunevenattemptsin Notwithstanding later chaptersto addressthe separatecircumstancesof "the 'rich* and the 'poor'"(MWFM,153;SallyHackerin this journalwent so faras to call them her technologicalteleologies amounted to the dismissal of "redundant"), This was, one Canadian "classand ethnicity as producers of inequality." reviewerconcluded,because"she is committed to the premise that American capitalismreallydoes representthe best chancesociety has to produce the maximum amount possible for freedom of choice and well-being."11 Most reviewers,while pleasuringin the form of the book, found Cowan's centralargument,by its relianceon culturalpreferences whose origins and alterations were invoked rather than examined, "unconvincing."12 Sally Hackerremarkedon the contrastit made with "Cowan's earlierrighteous swipesat Marxistmasculinism." Yet Hackercaught in Cowan'swork the intimation, if not the accomplishment, of something new: "the powerful integrationof materialfrom family history,gender stratificationand household technology within the history of technology"and an explorationof "changingstructuresof social and otherswithin these relationrelations and how we feel about ourselves And Deborah the Canadian reviewercited above, found Gorham, ships!'13 Cowan'spouring of "some needed cold water on the strain of romantic feminist socialism"an important correctivethat set experimentalschemes to rationalize housework on the margins of daily domestic culture and practice,where they properlybelonged.14
10. Glazer, 13; review by Judith A. McGaw, Isis 75 (1984): 775-77; Michael S. Kimmel, "Housework: Is Less More?"Nation, 4 February 1984, 138-39; Deborah Gorham, "Three Books on the History of Housework"Atlantis 10 (spring 1985): 142-43. 11. Gorham, 144; review by Linda Kealey,Labour/LeTravail 17 (1986): 358-60; review by Faye Dudden, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 235; review by Beverly Goss, Women'sStudies 10 (1983-84): 354-58; Aihwa Ong, "Disassembling Gender in the Electronics Age,"Feminist Studies 13 (1987): 612; review by Sally Hacker, Technology and Culture26 (1985): 291-92. 12. Dudden, 235. 13. Hacker, 292. 14. Hacker,292; Gorham, 143.

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Two challenges followed from this fray, challenges that were being playedout during the mid-1980s aroundMWFMbut not there alone:how to break down the study of the capitalistcontext of technologicalchange into an examination of diverse capitalisms (for Cowan'swork depended in the spatial,theological,and corporate upon unexaminedparticularities structuresof the Americanpolitical economy as these were honored and elaboratedduring the decades after WorldWar II); and how to bring the dynamic culturalforces of tastes and preferences,and the representations which conveyedand remadethem, back in from their decided or inadvertent exiled positions in neoclassicaleconomic, and much social,theory.Did the later-twentieth-century increasein Americanmother-workresult significantlyfrom wives'duties as chauffeursin a nation of dispersedpopulation and limited public transportationinfrastructure?15 Wererisinghouseof corporate keepingstandardsin the United Stateslinked to the "marriage capital and advertising"and an ideology of American citizenship which of home and person contributestowardthe growth taughtthat "cleanliness of democracy"? If so, then a more generalizable history of the production and use of domestic technology would requireboth more attentiveanalyses of capitalistformationsand more direct interrogationof the information systems that gave collectivityand privacydifferentcontextualsignificance in householders'appraisals of new technologies.16 It is thus unsurprisingthat Europeanreviewers, while praisingMWFM as "anauthenticgem as faras the styleand articulationof argumentsis conas "a feat of scholarship," and as a "well-digested" modern rarity, cerned," were impatient with the short shrift that Cowan gave to working-class household technologies,to the systematicoperationsof the gendereddivision of work,to the "influenceof ethnic traditionsof the qualitativedefiniand to the diverse relationtion of standardsof civility and conviviality," which led women to define between housework and child ships rearing Nor is it surprising, "houseworkas an achievementratherthan a chore."17
15. Review by Jane Lewis, Women, Workand Society:Journalof the British Sociological Association 4 (June 1990): 308; R. Law, "Beyond 'Women and Transport':Towards New Geographies of Gender and Daily Mobility," Progress in Human Geography 23 (1999): 567-88; C. Sanger,"Girlsand the Getaway:Cars, Culture and the Predicament of Gendered Space," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144 (1995): 705-56; Adam Rome, "Building the Land: Toward an Environmental History of Residential Development in American Cities and Suburbs, 1870-1990 ? Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 407-34; R. Miller, "Selling Mrs. Consumer: Advertising and the Creation of Suburban Sociospatial Relations, 1910-1930," Antipode 23 (July 1991): 263-301. 16. Kimmel (n. 10 above), 138; Rose Laub Coser,"Women in American Society,"Dissent 31 ( 1984): 499-500; review by Guy Alchon, BusinessHistory Review 62 (1988): 17172; review by Mary-Lou Schultz, WisconsinMagazine of History 69 (1985-86): 151. 17. Reviews by Remi Clignet (of Agence de cooperation culturelle et technique), AmericanJournalof Sociology91 (1985-86): 215-17; JamesWoudhuysen, Design (U.K.), no. 432 (1984): 13; Lewis (of the London School of Economics); Alun Davies (of Queen's University Belfast), EconomicHistory Review 39 (1986): 320-21. 608

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PARRI Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother

given the quality of her mind and her historical practice, that Cowan turned her attention immediately to a more complex and theoretically informed analysisof "the consumptionjunction"that underlaythe operations she had first surveyedin MWFM. Cowan's book was cited Duringthe firsttwo decadesafterits publication, - eighteenof these,appropriately, in 319 scholarlyarticles in Technology and Culture, includingone specialissue on genderand technologyand another MWFMhas stimulatedscholarsto explorespecificsettingsin on kitchens.18 the United States,19 influencedstudies of domesticwork in diversenational and of a wide rangeof new technologies,21 and been a significant settings20 reference and key contripoint in theorizationsof genderand technology22 butions to economic history.23 Some of this work directlyengagesthe calls
18. Technology and Culture38 (January 1997) and 43 (October 2002). 19. K. C. Barton, '"Good Cooks and Washers':Slave Hiring, Domestic Labor,and the Market in Bourbon County, Kentucky,"Journal of American History 84 (September 1997): 436-60; Ronald R. Kline and Trevor Pinch, "Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,"Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 763-95; Wendy Gamber, "'Reduced to Science': Gender, and Technology, and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860-1910," Technology Culture 36 (1995): 455-82; Deborah Fitzgerald, "Farmers Deskilled: Hybrid Corn and Farmers'Work,"Technologyand Culture 34 (1993): 324-43; K. Ray, "Meals, Migration and Modernity: Domestic Cooking and Bengali Ethnicity in the United States," Amerasia Journal 24 (1998): 105-27. 20. J. Lloyd and L. Johnson, "Dream Stuff: The Postwar Home and the Australian Housewife, 1940-60," Environmentand Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 2 (2004): 251-72; H. Meintjes, "'WashingMachines Make LazyWomen': Domestic Appliances and the Negotiations of Women's Propriety in Soweto,"Journal of Material Culture 6 (November 2001): 345-63; M. S. Haugen and B. Brandth, "Gender Differences in Modern Agriculture:The Case of Female Farmers in Norway,"Genderand Society 8 (June 1994): 206-29; G. N. Ramu, "Indian Husbands: Their Role Perceptions and Performance in Single-Earner and Dual-Earner Families,"Journal of Marriage and the Family 49 (1987): 903-15. 21. Jonathan Coopersmith, "Pornography,Videotape and the Internet,"IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 19 (spring 2000): 27-34; David Morley, "Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes from the Sitting Room and the Place of Ethnographic Studies of Media Consumption in Contemporary Cultural Studies,"Screen32 (spring 1991): 1-15; A. Venkateshand N. P.Vitalari,"Computing Technology for the Home: Product Strategies for the Next Generation," Journalof ProductInnovationManagement3 (September 1986): 171-86; Keir Keightly,"LowTelevision, High Fidelity:Tasteand Gendering of Household Journalof Broadcastand ElectronicMedia 47 (June 2003): 236-59. Technologies," 22. Cynthia Cockburn, "Domestic Technologies: Cinderella and the Engineers," Womens Studies International Forum 20 (May-June 1997): 361-71; K. Grint and S. Woolgar,"On Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology," Science, Technology and Human Values 20 (1995): 286-310; L. L. Cornell, "Constructing a Theory of the Family: From Malinowski through the Modern Nuclear Family to Production and Reproduction,"InternationalJournalof ComparativeSociology 31 (1990): 67-78; J. M. Wise, "Intelligent Agency,"Cultural Studies 12 (1998): 410-28; Nancy Folbre, "The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought," Signs 16 (1991): 463-84. 23. JanDe Vries,"The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,"Journal 609

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for elaborationthat were central to reviews of Cowan'sbook in the mid1980s.ArwenMohun'sSteamLaundries paintsa complexand nuancedportrait of both the culturaland technologicalreasonswhy wives and mothers PriscillaBrewer's preferredhome washing machines to steam laundries.24 FromFireplace to Cookstove, of the costs of througha carefulreconstruction stoves and fuel over a period of three centuries,shows how class difference informed decisions to buy and use stoves and also how these choices were influencedby the changing symbolic valences of tradition,propriety,and autonomy variouslyassociatedwith efficient closed boxes and welcoming open hearths.25 By singular contrast, Joel Mokyr's"Why'More Work for Mother'?Knowledgeand Household Behavior,1870-1945"endorsesCowin her an'smuch malignedneoclassicalperspective, renamingthe "ironies" subtitle"the Cowan Paradox."26 Throughwhat he describesas "a relatively minor extensionof standardconsumertheory," most notablyGaryBecker's 1981book A Treatise on theFamily,Mokyrposits a rationality for the intensification of housework and increased attention to domestic hygiene as means to limit the transmissionof infectiousdiseases. More significantin the long run may be Cowan'sparticipationin the formativeprojectof bringing the social and culturalback into the history of technology by her contribution to the 1987 collection The Social ConIn her contribution to that path-makstructionof Technological Systems.27 ing volume, "The Consumption Junction:A Proposalfor ResearchStrateCowan compellinglyaddressedand gies in the Sociology of Technology," accommodatedmanycritiquesof MWFM.Her essayassureda centralplace for gender,consumption, and households in this radicalrearticulationof technology studies,as her fellow contributorMichel Callon acknowledged in his discussion of actor-networktheory.28 Takingup Hacker'semphasis MWFM on the interpretiveopening that allowed, Cowan offered a frame with which to explore"theplaceand the time at which the consumermakes choices between competing technologies," emphasizing"how the network out" ("TCJ," have looked when viewed from the inside 263). This new may formulationmade room for a more heterogeneous"prospective purchaser"
of EconomicHistory 54 (June 1994): 249-70; S. Bowden and A. Offer,"Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain since the 1920s,"EconomicHistory Review 47 (1994): 725-48; Robert L. Frost, "Machine Liberation: Inventing Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France,"French Historical Studies 18 (spring 1993): 109-30. 24. Arwen Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology,and Work in the United States and GreatBritain, 1880-1940 (Baltimore, 1999). 25. Priscilla Brewer,From Fireplaceto Cookstove:Technologyand the Domestic Ideal in America (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000). 26. Journal of EconomicHistory 60 (2000): 1-40. 27. Bijker,Hughes, and Pinch (n. 4 above). 28. Callon, "Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis" in Bijker,Hughes, and Pinch, 93, 99, 101.

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distinguishable by "appropriatesocioeconomic variables (for example 'middle class' and 'rural')"("TCJ," 263-64), and could comprehend demand influencesexertedby governments,such as the directorof the Ordnance Departmentof the United StatesArmy,as well as "a homeowner in need of a new basementfurnace"("TCJ," 263, 274). But two characteristics of the neoclassicaltheory that had organizedMWFMlingered:the assumptions that purchasingdecisionswould takeplacewithin the relationsof the market,whethercompetitiveor oligopolistic,and that these choices would be betweenlike goods and commodities,whetherthey be stoves or satellite surveillance systems,designedto achievesimilartechnicalpurposes("TCJ," 276, 279). Only one of Cowan'snetworksketches,her figure6 on page 277, includes "governmentaldomain,"to cover the exceptions in the United Statesof WorldWarII and public housing. For the long twentiethcentury,and especiallyfor the cold war period, these legacies from MWFMlimit the applicabilityof "The Consumption Junction" beyondthe politicaleconomyof the UnitedStates.Sincethe 1920s, in many North Atlanticsocial and liberaldemocracies,nonmarketresolutions for the distributionof income and the provisionof goods and services had been moving from the romanticmarginsto become commonsenseand As severalrecentcontributions to thisjournalhaveshown,for commonplace. the particularpostwar instances of the Netherlands, East Germany,and - and, as Ruth Oldenziel, Adri de la Bruheze, and Onno de Wit Canada - a more broadlyspecified"mediation for argue, Europegenerally junction" is necessary for the initiativeCowanbeganin MWFMand extendedin "TCJ" to offer convincing explanationsfor the relationshipsbetween technology and consumptionbeyondthe UnitedStates.29 Forthe UnitedStates,Lizabeth Cohen'sbook A Consumers' Republic analyzesAmericanprivilegingof priwithin vacy historicallyspecificideologiesof citizenship,and in Pocketbook PoliticsMeg Jacobsstudies the form and reception of rationing for both domestic and capitalgoods duringWorldWarII, both interventionswhich maketastesand preferences consubjectsfor studyratherthanthe ahistorical stantsthey,despitethe linguisticand culturalturn,too long haveremained.30
29. Wiebe E. Bijker and Karin Bijsterveld,"Women Walking through Plans: Technology, Democracy, and Gender Identity,"Technologyand Culture 40 (2000): 485-515; Karin Zachmann, "A Socialist Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956-1957," Technology and Culture43 (2002): 73-99; Joy Parr,"What Makes Washday Less Blue? Gender, Nation, and Technology Choice in Postwar Canada," Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 153-86; and, more generally, Parr, Domestic Goods:TheMaterial, the Moral, and the Economicin the PostwarYears(Toronto, 1999). The reference to "for Europe generally" is to Ruth Oldenziel, Adri Albert de la Bruheze, and Onno de Wit, "Europe'sMediation Junction: Technology and Consumer 21 (March 2005): 107-39. Society in the Twentieth Century,"History and Technology 30. Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York,2003); Jacobs,Pocketbook Politics:EconomicCitizenshipin TwentiethCenturyAmerica (Princeton, N.J., 2005).

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Butfor politicaleconomiesbeyondthe UnitedStates,the mediationjunction must decenter"thedominanceof corporatecontrol" and considerthe beliefs and practices of mass,collective, and bourgeoisconsumptionin the stateand civil societyas well as the market. Twentyyearson, MWFMis more frequentlyadoptedas a text in courses on the sociology of work than in courses on women'shistory,and it is regardedas an authoritativesource more by popular than scholarlyreaders. Insofaras this is the case, one valuablelegacyof the work is being lost, for Cowan is exceptionallyadept at situatingher sources and drawingout the meanings that come from their provenance as opposed to their explicit content. The text of MWFM is replete with teachablemoments in those mundane and indispensable elements of the historian'scraft, reflexes it takes years adequately to embody yet which when merely described in words seem to many students too trivial to merit concentratedattention. These craft lessons are not as precedentas they need to be in the teaching tools of the historyof technology,wheretheory and the sweepof the longue dureehave nudged aside fastidiousnessabout the content of the form and the qualificationsof the observing,listening,or hypothecatingrecorder. Yet the popular legacy Cowan intended for her work, a morale boost for the distaff side in the battles over the division of domestic work, remains, which is no small contributionto the health of the AmericanRepublic.For readersbeyond the United States,MWFMmakesbest sense when readcritically,on one level as a narrativeabout changingmother-work in the geonation, and on graphical,religious,and politicalspaceof one extraordinary anotheras a cautionarytale about the ideologicalprocessesby which all our sense-makingis constrained.

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