Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Want More Time? Lower Your Standards

9/16/2019

3 Comments

 
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​With so many labor-saving devices to help around the house, it’s odd how cleaning and cooking can fill up a day. Blame twentieth-century advertising. New housekeeping technology such as the vacuum cleaner, once invented, needed a market. Rather than showing women freed up for creative arts or other pleasures, advertisers depicted them joyfully using new products to keep ever more sparkling homes.

“Because housewives are engaged in an unsupervised job, which increasingly has produced order and cleanliness rather than useful, material products, their daily compulsion to do the work must be internalized,” sociologist Bonnie Fox concluded from studying ads in the Ladies Home Journal back to 1909-10. The glorification of housework attracted women who in an earlier generation might have contributed to household income by keeping chickens or taking in laundry, sewing, or boarders. Not until the 1970s, when middle-class women took on more paid work outside home, did the hours they spent keeping house begin to decline.

If cleaning and cooking bring you joy, great. If not, a simple way to thumb your nose at corporate advertising is to lower your standards. Your comfort with doing less may increase from knowing that modern expectations of housekeeping arose to boost profits.
3 Comments
Rebecca link
9/17/2019 10:57:39 am

A rumba might take care of the warren of dust bunnies under the bed. Than I’d be on autopilot:)

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Sarah link
9/17/2019 05:39:25 pm

Grin - cool idea. I'm all for tools that do the work for us instead of demanding we accomplish more in the same time. Like housecleaning devices, office computers can work either way - theoretically they help us finish the work sooner, but actually they mostly up our expectations for how much we expect to get done in the same old long hours..

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best resume services reviews link
2/7/2020 02:47:23 am

If you want to be happier in life, then just go and lower your standards. I understand that for a lot of people, this is not the way to go, but believe me, it should be. One you are able to go and lower your standards, then you will be able to think of new avenues to live life. I am hoping to help people understand just how true it is. If you are not happy with what you got, then you either work harder or you lower your standards.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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