From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Donna Harsch

From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany. By Jennifer A. Loehlin (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2000. ix plus 250pp. $68.00).

In this is succinct monograph, Jennifer Loehlin assesses the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the modernization of unpaid domestic labor. Using statistics on income, women's work, and distribution of big-ticket household commodities, she considers the potential for and extent of the mechanization of housework in postwar West Germany. To understand the reception of this modernization, she interprets interviews she conducted with twelve women who were adolescents or adults at the time. Above all, she analyzes discourse about modern housework by reviewing articles, advertisements, editorials, and readers' letters that appeared in five popular women's magazines. Loehlin draws on several theoretical paradigms, including gender analysis, media studies, theories of consumerism, and hypotheses about the development of West German society. She deploys their concepts flexibly and insightfully to enrich the book's content without encumbering its style with jargon.

Loehlin is interested, first, in the tripartite interaction of housework, the economy, and everyday life. She agrees with scholars who argue that the breakthrough to consumer society occurred in West Germany before 1970, though she maintains that this transition was completed only in the mid-1960s, later than often assumed. If she accepts that the Wirtschaftswunder transformed the levels and patterns of popular consumption, she disagrees with a tendency to attribute these changes solely to industrial production and macroeconomic factors and to construe the modernization of the home as a sign of the economic boom. Researchers have, she writes, neglected the home as a site of labor that also caused the transition to consumer society. Housewives had to work hard to stretch husbands' (and their own) paychecks to pay for the television sets, labor-saving appliances, sleek furniture, and cleaning products that were deemed essential to a modern way of life. They scrimped, made choices, and restricted the immediate consumption of their family and, especially, themselves in order to invest family resources in a domestic infrastructure whose construction helped to feed the boom.

Loehlin asks, second, how modernization of the household became a central element of German consumer society. As early as the 1920s, she points out, advocates asserted that the rationalization of housework was as crucial to economic efficiency as were Fordist production techniques. The spread of affordable household machines would, they argued, alleviate social inequalities and antagonisms as, gradually, a society of individual consumers replaced one of producers divided along class lines. Many commentators challenged this rosy scenario. Others accepted the premise but noted that, outside the United States, mass affordability of the mechanized kitchen and laundry room was a fantasy. Yet even and, indeed, especially the Nazis hoped to realize the dream of mass access to cars, refrigerators and the like. Only, however, when their availability did become a reality during the Wirtschaftswunder, Loehlin explains, were the wonders of household mechanization truly trumpeted--and its association with the "modern" ce lebrated. The plugged-in home became the sine qua non of a "modern" style of life which, in turn, was synonymous with the good, happy, and free life. Women's magazines used a modernity-standard to sell everything from airy, light living rooms with thin, angular furniture to amazing devices such as the Bosch Schallwascher that applied modern science to housework by washing clothes with ultrasound waves! Ads and articles about the attainability of modern commodities made implicit, and sometimes explicit, propaganda for "social market capitalism," touted by the Christian Democratic regime as the perfect mix of free markets and social protection that would bring prosperity to every German family.

Loehlin considers, third, how the mechanization of the household affected gender relations. If conservative modernity was not an oxymoron in consumer society, neither, she concludes, was "emancipated housewife." Although the rate of married women's employment, especially part-time work, was rising, women's magazines did not champion labor-saving devices as tools to ease the double burden of waged and domestic labor. The magazines directed themselves mainly to housewife-mothers and communicated a non-polemical version of the popular belief that, as one of Loehlin's interviewees put it, "the child needs the mother" (p. 80). Yet the magazines did portray women who did "high-status, professional work ... generally positively" (p. 82) and toyed with the notion that the husbands of working women could and should pitch in, especially where there was a machine to operate. Ads suggested that power appliances were tools that any self-respecting man could use comfortably. Yet the magazines approached the prospect of sh ared housework with ambivalence. They pointed to an ostensible tendency of American couples to divide housework equally as evidence that women's liberation in the U.S. threatened to erode the male self-esteem that an occasional session with a vacuum cleaner might bolster.