“History Lives in Us Whether We Learn it or Not,” Part 2: Meanwhile, at The Birthing Lodge . . .

 So much “productivity hack” advice involves making the bodies of labourers – or “human resources” – streamlined for efficiency. Women’s bodies, of course, are notoriously difficult to control, as well as essential to reproducing the labour pool.[And I write this in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision to open the nation’s wombs for business.] Despite his relatively progressive ideals, Twain –like so many 19th century writers –depicts female sexuality in The Gilded Age as naturally suited to support patrilineage; any feminine unchastity threatening this organizational system is eliminated (at least in fiction) with the erring female's suicide. 

Margaret Atwood famously claimed that she hadn’t put anything into The Handmaid's Tale that couldn’t be found in history, and the writers of Severance could easily say the same, especially when it comes to its depiction of reproductive issues. After all, wealthy women in the not-so-distance past would be willingly drugged for the duration of their labour, remembering nothing of the process (although often with increased risk to themselves). Wealthy women today use surrogates to escape childbirth, at great risk to the surrogate and some cost to the consumer. So, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine wealthy women in an alternative history using a memory-wiping device to make surrogates of themselves.

Once again, this trend (of offloading women’s labour onto women of lower rank) does not begin at this time, but rather accelerates and becomes increasingly impersonal. There is also another type of image that begins to show up in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, as live-in domestic service declines: that of displaced female labour. As women enter the industrialized work force, their domestic labour becomes increasingly mechanized and de-humanized. It’s fitting then that the only female character in Fritz Lang’s dystopian futuristic film, Metropolis, is a robot. A two-way process of streamlining and modernizing women, while also feminizing the workplace was by then well underway.

(Metropolis [1927]: Paramount Pictures via Den of Geek)

The Gilded Age, an increasingly mechanized society, turns women into machines as factory workers and typists. The typewriter could refer to the machine or the woman. One of the first commercially available washing machines was called “the hired girl.” The implication, of course, is that while you would normally lighten your load by hiring a girl to do your laundry, you could replace that youngster with a machine. While corporate history tends to give women working outside the home the gloss of liberal feminism, women at this time were leaving one type of work for another: domestic service for more well-paid places in factories and offices.

(image from Timetoast)

The mass exodus from service at the turn of the century also gave us the phrase “help is hard to find.” This was the refrain of upper-class women as they aimed to break into the professions and pursue more intellectually satisfying occupations, both paid and volunteer. One woman (Lucy Salmon) even completed a PhD on the subject of why it was so difficult to find adequate domestic help – a lament which seems to find a parallel in today’s clamoring for “childcare” (a service which must come from other women, for little expense).

(Image from The Gallery of Graphic Design)

The exodus from live-in service included African American women, although, without the same level of mobility to migrate into other occupations as whites, many of them remained as domestic workers. Returning to their own homes in the evening meant more time for their own families, although less responsibility on the part of the employer. Early ads for Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix illustrate this gradual removal of help from the home. The breakfast product promises to “be like [Aunt Jemima] is there in person.” Aunt Jemima agrees: if “you” make pancakes from the mix, “it’s like me doin’ it meself!” The expert cook is replaced with a cheaper, more convenient, mass-produced replica of her work bearing a caricature of her presence. Despite her absence, the domestic worker the logo is meant to represent continues to be possessed by the consumer. Even now that the symbol has been removed, someone still prepares the pancake mix . . . someone . . . somewhere. No longer do we have a personal relationship with our help: they have been rendered invisible and elsewhere (severed) . . . to the prepackaged food factory, perhaps?