because my previous post made me think of some of these things

[fidelioscabinet]

There will probably be more than one of these posts, since there are a variety of different topics which all end up tied in together. The original post of twitter which started all this off was hawkwing_lb's: I'm beginning to think that writers of epic fantasy and SF should be required to learn about the anthropology of material culture.This started quite a

Comments

[neddy_s]

One thing that strikes me about what you wrote is the involvement of men in 'domestic' tasks--not just the farming, but the actual preparation, preservation and storage of food. It particularly struck me because I was just explaining to someone that she, Stephen King, James Howard Kunstler, and many other (male?) authors are wrong--technology in general, and 20th century domestic 'labour-saving' technology in particular, tends to reinforce rather than challenge existing societal inequalities, gender or otherwise; have a look at this if you need some convincing:

http://labyrinthine.wikia.com/wiki/More_Work_for_Mother

Off to Leeds in the snow to talk about 18th century cheese routes at the Social History Society!

[fidelioscabinet]

My grandfather helped with things that required substantial strength--like the kraut. Butchering was another joint venture--except for poultry! Dairy work was mostly women's work, as was canning. His parents were, for the late 19th C farm family, on the feminist side. His mother told a friend, comparing my great-grandfather to her first husband: Since I married John Fogleman, I've never cut stove wood.
Cheese routes? Is this like the hegglers? Or, indeed, the higglers?

[neddy_s]

One of the things Cowan talks about is that the 'labour' saved in 'labour saving' machines was that of men, who did a lot of the heavy stuff like chopping wood, carrying water, stirring laundry, etc. So the (possibly) unintended consequence of 'labour saving' machines was that domestic chores became much more distinctly women's work.

I use the cheese routes and the Berwick higglers, as well as a few other interesting examples like a guy who regularly shipped tobacco from Liverpool to Hull overland and over water, to point out that goods carriage was very often multimodal as well as involving many pairs of hands; it's misleading for scholars to identify 'a' preferred mode, or claim that modes 'competed' with each other, when one single standard freight route often involved road, river, canal, coastal vessel, or some or all of the above.

[fidelioscabinet]

That sounds like a very interesting book over all. Some labor-saving machinery doesn't have that effect, but it come along later on--once washing machines and dryers as well appear in numbers, laundry is no longer going to have to be an all-day affair--which means anyone can do it, although you see that rarely until more women have entered the paid work force.

[neddy_s]

Definitely worth reading, one of the classics of the social history of technology (I'll be assigning her in my CLASS in October!). Her basic point is that the mid-20th century technologies developed for domestic use had the effect of making running the house a job for a single person, and that single person was the female head of household--so men, children, and servants were no longer responsible for doing any housework. It's true that these technologies and later ones have made it easier for other people to do bits of it, but we still think of any housework as 'the woman's job', even if she 'delegates' it to kids or men. Kinda like how men 'babysit' their own kids.

[fidelioscabinet]

Also I can see how your combined modes would work--in the 1830s & 1840s goods might travel by wagon or pack animal to water transport, and thence down to New Orleans by steam boat or flatboat, and then be transferred to ships, You might then see rail entering the picture at some point but as rail lines were short at first, they might take over part of the land route but not the water routes--those came later.

Even now--goods come in container ships, the containers are transferred to railcars, and then to trucks.

[neddy_s]

Exactly. Weird as it may sound to both of us, I appear to have been the only historian to have noticed this.