The Evolution of Household Technology and Consumer Behavior, 1800-2000

Julia Sophie Woersdorfer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351789080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Comportement du consommateur

The increasing division and specialization of labor between the market and the nonmarket sector is a central stylized fact of long-run economic development. Over time, a large share of activities which had formerly been carried out by the private household itself has become replaced by market alternatives, raising at the same time the demand for consumer goods.

The neoclassical economic framework of household production theory relates the increasing demand for household technology to rising wages and opportunity costs of time: the higher the wage rate, the more costly it is to spend time in unpaid housework activities. Consumer products are thus purchased to make household production processes more efficient and to substitute capital goods for the household's time (time substitution hypothesis). Although this hypothesis sounds plausible at first sight, it cannot capture the essential phenomena underlying the complex process of the mechanization of the home over the past 200 years. Its major weakness lies in the treatment of consumer preferences, whose explanatory potential is explicitly factored out.

Using the washing of clothes as a microcosm of household economics, this book examines long-term changes in cleanliness consumption patterns from the perspective of an evolutionary economic, psychologically informed consumer theory. Woersdorfer shows how the historical evolution of cleanliness consumption over the past 200 years is the result of the interplay of supply and demand side factors, namely, technical change in washing technology on one side and motivational driving forces and consumer learning capabilities on the other. Hence, not changing relative prices but innate consumer needs and consumer learning processes, leading to a growing understanding of how to satisfy those needs, are the essential driving forces behind the rising technological endowment of the home and the corresponding demand for household appliances.

The Evolution of Household Technology and Consumer Behavior, 1800–2000 will be of interest to researchers in the field of evolutionary economics, history of technology, economic history, innovation economics and sociology.

1 Beyond Time Substitution

An Evolutionary Economic Analysis into the Patterns of Cleanliness Consumption

1.1 Patterns of Cleanliness Consumption

In our everyday lives, we are surrounded by a multitude of electrical devices, which we are used to employing without much careful thought. We switch on the electric light when getting up, then start the coffee machine and listen to the news on the radio. Coming home from work, dinner will be prepared at the range or in the microwave and dishes put in the dishwasher before finding recreation in front of the television while the washing machine is running in the background. The existence of these devices has become so much taken for granted that the majority of U.S. consumers views these items as ‘necessities’, i.e. things that ‘cannot be lived without’ (Taylor et al., 2009).1 In fact, nine out of ten consumers rate washing machines as an item of ‘necessity’; similarly, seven out of ten consumers assess home air conditioning and microwaves as truly necessary products.

The taken-for-granted technological endowment of modern homes has developed only gradually during the twentieth century and has been accompanied by a substantial increase in consumer spending. Particularly remarkable is the trend in the United States, where consumer expenditure on household appliances has grown by more than 2,000 per cent from 1900 to 1990 (Lebergott, 1993, p. 76). To give an example, today, nearly every U.S. household is equipped with a refrigerator, every second household owns a dishwasher and about four out of five U.S. households are owners of an automatic, electric washing machine (EIA, 2011). In contrast to that, around 1920, only about 8 per cent of U.S. families possessed a washing machine, while the conventional scrub board represented the prevailing equipment (Lebergott, 1993, p. 113).

The mechanization of the home is embedded into the larger historical context of industrial development during the past 200 years, being characterized by an increasing division and specialization of labor, the outsourcing of home production activities to the market and the substantial growth of personal income – the condition sine qua non for this growth in consumer expenditures to occur (cf. Cowan, 1983; Matthews, 1987; Strasser, 2000 [1982]; Mokyr, 2002; de Vries, 2008). Over the course of time, a large share of activities which had been carried out by the private household itself have become replaced by market alternatives. The production of foodstuff and the manufacture of pieces of clothing are a case in point. At the same time, many housework activities have not been completely outsourced to the market. For example, most people today still clean their dishes, their houses and their clothes by themselves. The existing market alternatives, such as commercial laundries or cleaning personnel, are utilized by only a fraction of consumers and are not provided on a large-scale industrial basis. These housework activities have ‘remained’ in the home, yet they are now carried out with the help of much more sophisticated – and usually electric – devices. What characterizes these devices is that they complement rather than substitute human labor. In fact, they modify the way in which certain housework activities are carried out and the kind of results yielded from a qualitative perspective. The transformation process described here, by which the material conditions of doing housework have been significantly altered, is not confined to the United States; it has taken place in a similar form in other industrialized countries as well.

This monograph aims at identifying the driving forces behind the mechanization of the private household and the corresponding changes in consumption behavior over the past 200 years. Taking the activity of clothes washing as a concrete object of inquiry, we shall examine the driving forces behind both the adoption and the utilization patterns of laundry technology, particularly washing machines – referred to here as the ‘case study’. The stylized facts that we pay particular attention to are technological progress in washing machines from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, the widespread diffusion of these devices in the twentieth century, the contemporaneous increase in laundry amounts and the growth in residential electricity consumption. These phenomena are subsumed here under the label of ‘cleanliness consumption patterns’. They have occurred in similar ways in several Western countries, which is why some generalization is possible and is also intended here. Yet, we focus most strongly on the development that has taken place in the United States.

The case study chosen here, the activity of clothes washing, is an extremely rich case to analyze, which does not only attract scholarly attention at present (cf. Hartmann, 1974; Cowan, 1983; Matthews, 1987; Mohun, 1999; Strasser, 2000[1982]; Hessler, 2001) but has already been the subject of debate in the nineteenth century. Back then, laundry washing was the most detested household chore, when only the simplest tools for achieving cleanliness were available, namely a simple washboard and homemade soap (Giedion, 1948; Cohen, 1982; Hardyment, 1988). Moreover, in the absence of electricity and plumbing, all water had to be carried into and out of the house. Laundry washing apparently earned more complaints than any other household task in the nineteenth century (Strasser, 2000[1982], p. 104). At that time, leading intellectuals even considered laundry washing as the homemaker’s biggest problem and sought ways to relieve women from this burden (e.g. Cowan, 1983; Matthews, 1987). In recent writings by historians of technology, doing the laundry is referred to as ‘backbreaking’ labor (Buehr, 1965, p. 61), a ‘horrible task’ (Cohen, 1982, p. 4) and ‘the most toilsome of the housewife’s tasks’ (Giedion, 1948, p. 550). Consider the following description of a typical washday in nineteenth-century America (Strasser, 2000[1982], p. 105):

One wash, one boiling, and one rinse used about fifty gallons of water – or four hundred pounds – which had to be moved from pump or well or faucet to stove and tub, in buckets and wash boilers that might weigh as much as forty or fifty pounds. Rubbing, wringing and lifting water-laden clothes and linens, including large articles like sheets, tablecloths, and men’s heavy work-clothes, wearied women’s arms and wrists and exposed them to caustic substances. They lugged weighty tubs and baskets full of wet laundry outside, picked up each article, hung it on the line, and returned to take it all down.

Given that hardly any tools were available for doing laundry back then, it is no surprise to hear that clean clothes were not given much attention by the majority of consumers. In fact, consumers possessed few clothes and changed them only rarely. At the same time, there was the wealthy middle class who outperformed the majority of consumers in terms of financial resources and cleanliness of appearance (Ashenburg, 2007, p. 169). These levels of cleanliness, however, were not the result of their own labor; instead, the richer consumers usually delegated laundry washing to servants or made use of laundresses (Cohen, 1982, p. 91). Thus, depending on status and residence, households differed strongly in the nineteenth century concerning the material conditions of doing housework – a difference that lasted until the middle of the twentieth century, when household appliances like washing machines reached high ownership rates (Matthews, 1987; Hardyment, 1988) and consumers came to display similar levels of cleanliness (Hartmann, 1974, p. 279; Vanek, 1978).

In fact, with the diffusion of technically advanced tools during the twentieth century, consumers have increased the amount of clothes washed (e.g. Cowan, 1983; Silberzahn-Jandt, 1991; Strasser, 2000[1982]; Shove, 2003b). Already with the advent of the electricity-driven washing machine in the 1920s, clothes were changed more often (Wilson, 1929; Hewes, 1930; Strasser, 2000[1982], p. 268). This trend continued throughout the twentieth century. Nowadays, U.S. consumers wash about three times the amount that was common in the 1950s (Shove, 2003a). In view of the rise in laundry quantities, the consumption act of clothes washing is an example of technological progress having coincided with a growth in technology utilization. It is part of a larger phenomenon, referred to as the ‘Cowan paradox’ of rising household standards (Mokyr, 2000), named after the influential contribution of Ruth Schwartz Cowan on housework practices (Cowan, 1983, p. 100):

Our commonly received notions about the impact of the twentieth-century household technology have thus deceived us on two crucial grounds. They had led us to believe that households no longer produce anything particularly important, and that, consequently, housewives no longer have anything particularly time-consuming to do. Both notions are false, deriving from an incomplete understanding of the nature of these particular technological changes. […] The nature of the work has changed, but the goal is still there and so is the necessity for time-consuming labor.

In fact, despite the development of superior household technology, the time devoted to housework was constant over the first decades of the twentieth century (Vanek, 1974) and declined remarkably only in its second half (Aguiar and Hurst, 2007). Naturally, this development is not self-evident. The literature identifies several driving forces which have also been related to the case study of cleanliness consumption: shifts in the labor division between the market and the home, growth in personal income during industrial development, technical progress in household technology that reduced the inputs of human labor and time, reduced availability of domestic servants, social emulation, changing ideologies of housework and of the status of being a housewife, knowledge progress as to the understanding of infectious diseases and changing perceptions of cleanliness (cf. e.g. Cowan, 1983; Matthews, 1987; Mokyr, 2000; Strasser, 2000 [1982]; Shove, 2003b).

The rich collection of stylized facts gathered by sociologists and economic historians has not yet given rise to an overarching theoretical account analyzing the transformation in domestic production activities (cf., however, the contribution of Reid, 1934). In the economics discipline, such an overarching framework has been developed by Gary Becker, who put forth the ‘household production function approach’ (Becker, 1965; Michael and Becker, 1973; cf. Chapter 2 for a detailed description). The household production theory is rooted in the neoclassical economic tradition and thus based on the assumptions of perfect information, maximizing behavior and nonsatiation. In addition, consumer preferences remain a ‘black box’. Changes in behavior are thus exclusively explained with regard to changing relative prices. More in detail, the household production function approach relates the increasing demand for household technology to rising wages and opportunity costs of time: the higher the wage rate, the more costly it is to spend time in unpaid housework activities. Market goods are thus purchased in order to make feasible the expansion of market work by substituting these goods for the household’s time. This line of reasoning is referred to as the ‘time substitution hypothesis’. Naturally, the point of departure of Becker’s account, that housework is a time-intensive, unpaid form of work which women might reduce once they enter the labor force, has also attracted much attention in the sociological literature (e.g. Nickols and Fox, 1983; Bellante and Foster, 1984; Weagley and Norum, 1989). In addition, Becker’s theory has been drawn upon by economic historians for studying the phenomena we address here (Mokyr, 2000; de Vries, 1994; de Vries, 2008).

Certainly, the household production function approach has great heuristic potential for economic research by pointing to the interrelatedness of such diverse phenomena as the household’s labor supply decision, the demand for durable goods and services, time allocation patterns and the organization of nonmarket production activities. Moreover, in view of the increased female labor force participation in the second half of the twentieth century (Goldin, 1986; Costa, 2000), the adoption of washing machines for their time saving nature is a plausible explanation. Still, with reference to the Cowan paradox, one might ask: Why did consumers also increase the utilization of washing machines by washing more clothes than before? Why have higher laundry amounts been preferred over the alternative of saving even more housework time by keeping a given cleanliness level? Furthermore, the fact that the market for washing machines is saturated nowadays, with these goods being present in nearly every U.S. household, sheds some doubt on the opportunity cost explanation. Apparently, working women and full-time housewives are equally equipped with these devices. What is the housewife’s incentive to purchase this device when she does not have a reservation wage in mind? Put differently, if wages had not risen during the twentieth century – increasing the opportunity costs of housework as opposed to market work – would we still have observed the given diffusion process of washing machines?

Although the time substitution hypothesis sounds plausible at first sight, the opportunity cost argument might be insufficient in that it does not capture the essential phenomena underlying the complex process of the mechanization of the home over the past 200 years. We argue that additional conjectures – beyond time substitution – are needed in order to understand why, in historical terms, a specific consumption path has been chosen. In this monograph, we tackle the following overarching research questions:

• Which factors have driven the diffusion of washing machines in the twentieth century?
• Why has the proliferation of washing machines throughout the twentieth century coincided with increasing laundry quantities?
• Why do the majority of consumers make use of washing machines instead of laundry services for ensuring cleanliness?
• Why are cleanliness consumption patterns so very similar today?

The aim of this analysis is precisely to explain why specific consumption trends have occurred, while scrutinizing if changes in relative prices are sufficient to explain changes in consumer behavior. We posit that these research questions cannot be answered without substantial hypotheses on the consumer motivations underlying the consumption of cleanliness.

1.2 The Evolutionary Economic Approach

When analyzing long-term changes in consumption patterns, one cannot abstain from putting forth hypotheses about the general causes and directions of preference change (cf. Witt, 2001). A central assumption of our analysis is that consumers share some set of preferences because of their common genetic basis, a set of preferences which can be identified and whose patterns of change show some regularities. In long-run shifts in consumption patterns, we expect to see manifestations of these shared motiv...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Beyond Time Substitution: An Evolutionary Economic Analysis into the Patterns of Cleanliness Consumption
• 2 Consumption Behavior as a Learning Process
• 3 The Origin of the Social Norm of Cleanliness
• 4 Toward the Modern Washday: Major Steps in the Development of Laundry Technology
• 5 Consumer Motivations and Washing Machine Advertisements
• 6 Patterns of Cleanliness Consumption and Time Use
• 7 Cleanliness Consumption and the Rebound Effect of Energy Efficiency
• 8 Explaining the Patterns of Cleanliness Consumption
• Index