Imagine that your cupboard was also a dishwasher — simply pile in dirty dishes, and don't bother taking them out until they are needed again. Imagine a self-cleaning toilet. What about having your clothes washed and dried in the same closet you hang them in, or self-dusting shelves, or a fireplace with a drain which removes excess ash.
Frances Gabe invented all these things when she designed a self-cleaning house more than 40 years ago. Now 87, Gabe still lives in a prototype of her invention, but a flood five years ago and an earthquake last year have damaged many of the mechanisms. Now only the kitchen mechanisms work. The patent for the Self Cleaning Building Construction, which included the patenting of 68 separate components, recently expired.
The self-cleaning house made news over the last 40 years as a quirky, curious invention, and among other things, appeared on Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Feminists campaign for women to be able to have real choices about how they live their lives. Housework, in fact all unpaid work in the home, must become redundant if women are to be liberated from their expected family role as child-carer and housekeeper.
A woman's maternal duties are always taken for granted, her never-ending toil as a housewife rarely gains appreciation from her family. Housework is invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive and uncreative.
Only those with sufficient money can opt out of some of these tasks — buying takeaway meals, employing a cleaner, using childcare, but even these options only replace part of the work women are expected to do.
For women to be liberated from their oppressive and restricting social role as compulsory mother, nurturer and housekeeper; for women to be able to make a full range of choices without the ever-present pressure to return to their "traditional" roles; housework must be replaced. It must become redundant. Neither women nor men should waste precious hours of their lives on work that is neither stimulating, creative or productive.
Gabe's self-cleaning house is one vision of this possibility. Houses could be constructed so that whole elements of housework are no longer necessary. Clothes could be made out of fabrics that make ironing a ghastly relic of the past.
Houses could be constructed more communally, with shared laundries and kitchens for those who want to wash their own clothes and cook their own meals. For those who don't, there could be a daily laundry pick-up service and a network of cheap restaurants.
Workplaces and schools could have free meals provided, so workers and children don't have to take their own lunch. Cooking would be a leisure activity, something people do when people feel like being creative, rather than the dreaded task of every evening.
As society gears itself more towards collective responsibility for the development and well being of children, childcare would become less about minding children until their parents finish work, and become more oriented to providing for the social development and well being of children, helping develop their learning and social skills. As well as suburban-based childcare centres, workplaces and universities could have free childcare.
Dusting, vacuuming, basic house maintenance tasks, could be solved by building houses on the self-cleaning model, or they could be replaced by an army of industrial cleaners who could visit houses, say, once a month. A substantial portion of domestic tasks could be incorporated into the industrial economy.
To take society down this path assumes a huge shift in social consciousness and organisation, but the central point is that all these changes are possible, all are realisable with the social wealth available.
Angela Davis, a black feminist and socialist from the United States, wrote in her 1981 essay: The approaching obsolescence of housework: a working-class perspective: "The socialisation of housework assumes an end to the profit-motive's reign over the economy. The only substantial steps toward ending domestic slavery have been taken in those countries which overthrew capitalism and began the task of building a socialist society. Women, therefore, have a special and vital interest in the struggle for socialism."
Grasp a vision of what might be possible, and join the struggle for a society free from the drudgery of housework.
BY SARAH STEPHEN
[The author is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 30, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.