The introduction and chapter three of "More Work for Mother" helped me better understand how many gender inequalities within social expectations and role of women arose through the creation of technology. Although the societal roles of women and men have shifted slightly in today's time, this reading still proved that women have always been unacknowledged for their abilities and influences on technological progression. In the introduction, Schwartz-Cowan stated that women's work had been differentiated from men's by being incompletely industrialized or by being industrialized in a somewhat different manner (7). I found this interesting because to me it meant that industrialization may have created new tools within the domestic setting, but
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This makes it seem as if women only held the ability to be housewives and were not capable of doing anything similar to the work of men. In the introduction, Schwartz-Cowan said that many believed that the housewife was the last jane-of-all trades in a world from which the jacks-of-all trades have more or less disappeared (5). She then went on to say that there were actually few differences between the market and housework. Both the market and household were similar in how they utilized non-human or non-animal energy sources. They also helped create dependency on a network of social and economic institutions and was accompanied by alienation from the tools that made both types of labor even possible. Although this obviously was not the case, I think that women and men deserved the same level of respect and recognition for influencing technological advancement. The only differences between the two were based on housework being a type of unpaid labor done in isolation from the rest of the community and involving unspecialized workers. In my opinion, housewives were the most diverse type of laborers and deserved to be deemed as “specialized” because they acquired the skills of both an experienced chef and housekeeper. Nevertheless, the slight differences between the two types of work continued to
This makes it seem as if women only held the ability to be housewives and were not capable of doing anything similar to the work of men. In the introduction, Schwartz-Cowan said that many believed that the housewife was the last jane-of-all trades in a world from which the jacks-of-all trades have more or less disappeared (5). She then went on to say that there were actually few differences between the market and housework. Both the market and household were similar in how they utilized non-human or non-animal energy sources. They also helped create dependency on a network of social and economic institutions and was accompanied by alienation from the tools that made both types of labor even possible. Although this obviously was not the case, I think that women and men deserved the same level of respect and recognition for influencing technological advancement. The only differences between the two were based on housework being a type of unpaid labor done in isolation from the rest of the community and involving unspecialized workers. In my opinion, housewives were the most diverse type of laborers and deserved to be deemed as “specialized” because they acquired the skills of both an experienced chef and housekeeper. Nevertheless, the slight differences between the two types of work continued to