Authors: Peter M. Scott and Karina Pavlisa
The “industrialisation of the home” is one of the most important economic and social revolutions in the 20thcentury, reducing the time (and especially the effort) of housework and enabling married women to plan for long-term careers. However, it is difficult to disentangle their impacts from other factors – particularly equal pay legislation and the falling real costs of labor-saving durables – in terms of their growing efficiency and real price declines. We address this problem by looking at the UK – the only major western nation that did not introduce equal pay legislation until the 1970s. From the 1940s to 1973 successive UK governments constrained the sales of consumer durables, as part of “stop-go” aggregate demand management policy, imposing punitive sales taxes on them and tight controls on the consumer credit on which they were typically purchased. Thus, potential trade-offs between labor-saving durables adoption and women’s labor force participation were weakened by negative policy interventions on both the demand and supply sides.
We then examine the shift to more rapid adoption for labor-saving durables in Britain during the 1970s, owing to equal pay legislation and much lower sales taxes on consumer durables. We find that substantially lower prices (largely due to lower sales taxes) had considerable impacts on accelerating major appliance ownership. At the micro-level, we model households’ ownership of refrigerators and washing machines over 1969-81 and identify working wives’ earnings potential as a key intra-household determinant of labor-saving durables’ ownership. Women’s rising absolute and relative (to men’s) incomes became key factors in durables’ accelerated diffusion.
Wife’s every “extra pound” earned matters
For the early 1950s we used data from the National Survey of Personal Incomes and Savings (NSPIS). In absolute terms a wife earns less, but every pound earned is a measure of time and effort redeployed from housework. Comparing spouses’ independent income effects and partialling out other characteristics shows that a wife’s earned pound is about twice more valuable “currency” in decision-making regarding time-saving appliances than the husband’s. Every £10 earned by the wife is associated with 0.13 and 0.19 percentage points higher probability of owning a refrigerator and a washing machine respectively, while a husband’s extra £10 earnings is associated with 0.06 and 0.08 percentage points higher probability of ownership respectively. This implies that it is not the absolute importance of a wife’s earned income, but rather her sacrifice of time otherwise used on housework, which increases the probability of owning labor-saving durables. While working wives’ income contributions were relatively small, we find a significant marginal effect of wives’ earned income, implying that every “extra pound” earned by the wife matters.
Diffusion of durables in the UK and other countries
By the late 1950s it was clear that Britain’s diffusion of major household labor-saving appliances lagged far behind other nations with similar per capita incomes, as shown in Table 4 of the article (below), for 1959. Yet Britain had high diffusion for the cheapest durable enumerated, the vacuum cleaner, indicating that British households had no innate aversion to electrical labor-saving appliances.
By the late 1950s labor-saving durables had substantially better performance and features. However, British households still struggled to purchase refrigerators and washers, owing to their higher prices (considerably raised by unusually high sales taxes). In 1959 representative prices for washing machines in the UK ranged from £120-£174, while refrigerator prices ranged from £95-151, while average weekly wages for full-time male manual workers averaged £13.20, with a minimum 50 percent deposit. Therefore, diffusion of refrigerators was only 14.6 percent, slightly higher than for Finland and Italy, that had substantially lower per capita incomes. Critically, the U.S. investigators who collected the data below highlighted the impact of unusually high sales taxes and credit restrictions as the main causes of low UK sales of these durables.
Table: Diffusion of refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners for 10 nations in 1959
Notes: * UK data is based on England & Wales, while GDP per capita figure is for UK. ** In Denmark urban apartment buildings were usually provided with communal clothes washing facilities. *** GDP per capita is in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars: source, Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy 1830-1992 (France: OECD, 1995), pp. 195-197.
1970s: Rapid adoption of labour-savings durables
Britain’s accession to the EEC in 1973 replaced purchase tax (at 25 percent for most durables’ wholesale price) to10 percent of the retail price. Meanwhile Britain finally accepted equal pay legislation (again partly due to compliance with the EEC). These initiatives led to rapid diffusion of labour-savings durables during the 1970s. Women’s career prospects also improved substantially, This was fortunate, given a long-term trend of families becoming increasingly dependent on women earners. We model these trends. Our findings, from FES data, suggest that households with working wives were more likely to own time-saving durables. Apart from income, homeownership, household size, and wife’s employment, the important condition for adoption of both durables is a working wife’s relatively high hourly earnings, as they represent the wife’s long-term earning potential.
In summary, Britain’s exceptionalism in supressing the diffusion of consumer durables and rejecting equal pay legislation until the 1970s shows the importance of the postwar industrialization of the home in other industrialised nations. These policies weakened incentives for married women to increase their formal workforce participation and particularly working hours, which only rose significantly in the 1970s alongside the adoption of durables. Our research – at the intersection of technology, policy and wider societal impacts – is a story of how household technologies could serve a diverse national workforce, or can be negatively impacted by institutional influences. Women’s careers go hand-in-hand with adoption of automatic (or semi-automatic) “helpers” – household labour-saving appliances, married woman’s earning potential and independent incomes are key contributors for the adoption of labour-saving household durables. Yet policy interference may supress their diffusion.
