Books That Inspire 2005
 
More Work for Mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave
Ruth Schwartz Cowan


On the second day of the Spring semester of my first year in college, I read this book from cover to cover. Cowan’s exhaustive analysis of women’s housework from the colonial period to the present, particularly her conclusion that despite generations of technological progress and myriad labor-saving devices women today spend as much time doing housework as their predecessors in previous centuries did, made me realize that the supposedly insignificant aspects of women’s lives actually teach us the most about gender relations and gender inequality in society. This book is the reason I became a Women’s Studies professor.
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Julia C. Ehrhardt
Associate Professor
Joe C. and Carole Kerr McClendon Honors College