Domesticity and Dirt

Technology and culture Book Reviews 149 how are we to distinguish it from that of the literary Luddites who gave modernism a bad name? That a book on Philadelphia textiles would allow readers to address these questions is evidence of its extraordinary scope and importance. James Livingston Dr. Livingston teaches U.S. history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is completing a book on political economy and cultural revolution, ca. 1850-1920. Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920—1945. By Phyllis Palmer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi + 214; notes, index. $29.95. Phyllis Palmer has written a book about housework—what it is (largely removing dirt), whose job it is (usually women’s), and how housewives and domestics viewed “their” work (generally as drudgery)— during the interwar years in the United States. More specifically, Palmer seeks to explain how and why middle-class housewives (an­ noyingly referred to as MCHs throughout the book) transferred the dirtiest part of their household responsibilities to servants. She is especially interested in how housework divided women along race and class lines. There is a passion in this book that stems from the author’s “personal dilemmas” as recounted in the preface. Reared in Texas during the 1950s, Palmer recalls hot summer days “punctuated with baths and changes of clean, starched clothing” (p. x) that resulted from the labor of a black woman who did the family’s ironing. And now, like many other women professionals living in Washington, D.C., Palmer employs a Guatemalan woman to clean her house one day each week. Influenced by the civil rights and feminist movements, she explains that she is a “good” employer who pays high wages to the immigrant woman who, unfortunately, is not automatically protected by health insurance and Social Security. Palmer also concedes that she, like the wives and mothers in every household she knows, still retains primary responsibility for housework and is often judged by her housewifely skills. All of this prompts her to ask: “Why have some women (op)pressed other women into service instead of protesting our exclusive responsibility and challenging men to work with us to reorganize how, where, and by whom housework is done?” (p. xii). For her answers Palmer calls on the fine work of historians of housework and household technology such as Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Susan Strasser, and Glenna Matthews and historians of domestic work and employer-employee relations such as David Katzman, David Sutherland, Faye Dudden, and Elizabeth Clark-Lewis. Palmer also examines many new sources that include films and fiction of the interwar years, government publications that detailed household 150 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE expenditures, literature of the home economics movement, and correspondence from housewives and domestics to Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt and the Women’s Bureau during the 1930s. In fact, one very real contribution of this study lies in the author’s discussion of how New Deal programs (like home economics training in the 1930s) failed to alter, or even challenge, gender, class, or racial notions about housework. Thus, it is easy to understand why none of the attempts to improve the conditions and status of paid housework succeeded—not federal and state regulation, not voluntary contracts, not labor organization. Although Palmer is admirably sensitive to race and class differences between servants and mistresses and among domestics, she makes few such distinctions among middle-class housewives themselves. She seems to imply that all of them hired other women to do their work. We know that this was hardly so, yet Palmer treats middle-class housewives as a homogeneous group motivated by the same objec­ tives, influenced by the same myths, and driven by the same fears. And while she shows how higher levels of consumption and standards of cleanliness benefited middle-class family life, almost always at the expense of hired help, Palmer does not discuss the effect of house­ hold “conveniences” on the daily lives of these employees. We already know a good deal about how the widespread introduction of appli­ ances in the 1920s changed middle-class homes and perceptions of housework; but we still know too little about how these conveniences affected

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