Engines of Liberation

摘要

Electricity was born at the dawn of the last century.Households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables.What was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution? It is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home.To analyse this hypothesis,a Beckerian model of household production is developed.Households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies,and whether a married woman should work.Can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour-force participation that occurred in the last century?Yes.The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge.She will give less attention to the home,because the home will need less;she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer,with the greatest of all handmaidens,electricity,at her service.This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman's world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman's energy will be conserved for use in broader,more constructive fields.