Difference between revisions of "325--2011--Week 12 Questions/Comments"
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The advertising campaign that Bruce Barton developed for GE that compared a woman's (and eventually, a man's, an industrial worker's, etc) time and work with the low-cost, high-efficiency machines shows the way in which society had moved from one that valued "'task-oriented concern for a flow of time in life events'...[to one that valued] 'the economic, time-oriented perception of efficiency." (Nye 256) The advent of a Tayloristic, efficiency-motivated home system, particularly as shown in these advertisements, shows the way in which women were suddenly prime targets of advertising. This particular set of advertisements was engineered to make women feel as though working those hours themselves, wasting precious hours of their lives, was an exercise in futility and inefficiency. Women were led to believe that it was for the moral good to buy these products and appliances that would allow them to devote more time to child-rearing; the ideal woman would "not give to sweeping the time that belong[ed] to her children."(Nye 272) In tying an appliance-based household not only to convenience and luxury but to a woman's morality and success as a mother likely created a great deal of revenue for GE and other commercial electric companies. -- Nicole S. | The advertising campaign that Bruce Barton developed for GE that compared a woman's (and eventually, a man's, an industrial worker's, etc) time and work with the low-cost, high-efficiency machines shows the way in which society had moved from one that valued "'task-oriented concern for a flow of time in life events'...[to one that valued] 'the economic, time-oriented perception of efficiency." (Nye 256) The advent of a Tayloristic, efficiency-motivated home system, particularly as shown in these advertisements, shows the way in which women were suddenly prime targets of advertising. This particular set of advertisements was engineered to make women feel as though working those hours themselves, wasting precious hours of their lives, was an exercise in futility and inefficiency. Women were led to believe that it was for the moral good to buy these products and appliances that would allow them to devote more time to child-rearing; the ideal woman would "not give to sweeping the time that belong[ed] to her children."(Nye 272) In tying an appliance-based household not only to convenience and luxury but to a woman's morality and success as a mother likely created a great deal of revenue for GE and other commercial electric companies. -- Nicole S. | ||
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| + | I thought it was very interesting to learn how when electrical appliances were first introduced into American homes, it was believed that the roles of women were also going to drastically change. At first, men like Thomas Edison raved about the positives of electrical appliances. Edison believed that the appliances would train a woman’s mind to be more like that of an engineer, and not of a housewife, stating “the woman of the future would become rather a domestic engineer than domestic laborer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service” (Nye, Page 242). Men like Edison believed that with the help of new electrical appliances, women would no longer have to spend the majority of their days performing labor-filled tasks around the house. While certain electrical appliances definitely did make back-breaking labor easier, they in no way decreased the amount of work that a woman had to do within the confines of her own home. Because the electrical appliances enabled tasks around the house to be done so much more efficiently and quickly, women were then expected to do more around the house each day. While an appliance like the electric washing machine was originally intended to help shorten the amount of time a woman spent washing and drying clothes, it actually did the opposite. Husbands thought, “Well if you can do one day’s laundry so quickly, why don’t you two more days of laundry as well?” It seems to me that these appliances intended for home use were very deceiving in terms of how they were supposed to make the lives of housewives easier; yes, they made the actual physical labor more manageable, but they failed to decrease the amount of time a woman had to spend each day performing tasks around the house. So at the end of the day, as women spent just as much time on housework as they had in the past (if not more), did electrical appliances really make their lives any easier? ~Kevin Gottschalk | ||
== Pursell reading == | == Pursell reading == | ||
