Made In America - Bill Bryson [151]
Three years after the window air-conditioner made its début, another durable household appliance entered the world: the microwave oven. The first was called the Radarange. It was large and bulky – it weighed over 700 lb. – required a lot of complicated cooling apparatus and didn’t cook food very well. Renamed the microwave oven, the first consumer unit was produced in 1955 by Tappan, but the product and word didn’t become familiar to most Americans until the late 1960s when further improvements and advanced miniaturization of components – not to mention the increasing busyness of American women – made it at last a realistic proposition for home use.40
Such was the proliferation of gadgets and appliances that by the 1960s it was possible to perform almost any daily household task while scarcely rippling a muscle – from opening cans to brushing one’s teeth to juicing an orange to carving a turkey. Instead of becoming more versatile and innovative, household appliances mostly just became more complex. Blenders accumulated a dazzling array of buttons. One had no fewer than sixteen buttons that the user could activate in an almost infinite selection of permutations, though, in the candid words of one executive, it still ‘couldn’t do much more than whip cream’. Labelling the buttons presented a linguistic as well as marketing challenge. A manufacturer, quoted in Susan Strasser’s history of domesticity, Never Done, recalled that ‘eight of us sat up two nights straight, trying to get words with five letters, each one sounding a bit higher than the other’.41
Perversely, this plethora of labour-saving devices didn’t translate into greater leisure. The average ‘non-working mother’, as they are so inaccurately called, spends as much time doing housework now as fifty years ago – about fifty-two hours a week.42 Although she has the benefits of countless appliances, the increased productivity they have brought her has been effectively offset by the larger size of modern houses, more wide-ranging lifestyles (her great-grandmother didn’t run children everywhere in the family station wagon and her groceries were probably delivered) and more scrupulous standards of household cleanliness.
Leisure in any meaningful sense is actually quite a modern concept. Sightseeing didn’t enter the language until 1847 and vacation not until 1878, and even then both were diversions for the well-off few. For millions of people a vacation was a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence that they experienced only on their honeymoon, or bridal tour, as it was often called until about 1900. Honeymoon has existed in English since 1546, but originally signified only the first month of marriage. It didn’t become associated with a trip away from home until about the middle of the nineteenth century.
Weekend is an even more recent concept. The word was coined in 1879 in England, but didn’t become part of the average American’s vocabulary until as recently as the 1930s. Well into the 1900s most people worked a sixty-hour, six-day week and thus terms like Monday-to-Friday and weekend had no particular significance for them. The five-day, forty-hour week is often attributed to Henry Ford, but in fact it was introduced by the steel industry in 1923. Ford followed in 1926. Most of the rest of the nation didn’t catch up until the Great Depression, when a shorter working week became a convenient way of dealing with falling demand.43 Though nine-to-five had become the standard working day for most Americans by the early 1940s, the term nine-to-fiver isn’t recorded before 1959.
Today, according to some studies, Americans work harder – or at least longer – than at any time since the forty-hour week became standard. According to Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked American, the amount