This book recaptures the buried history of the household science movement, including domestic science teaching, public health, higher education for women and the scientific content and aims of domestic science courses.

This book recaptures the buried history of the household science movement, including domestic science teaching, public health, higher education for women and the scientific content and aims of domestic science courses.

A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food.” —USA TODAY Home Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management.

In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed sociologist Ann Oakley undertook one of the first serious sociological studies to examine women’s work in the home. She interviewed 40 urban housewives and analysed their perceptions of housework, their feelings of monotony and fragmentation, the length of their working week, the importance of standards and routines, and their attitudes to different household tasks. Most women, irrespective of social class, were dissatisfied with housework – an important finding which contrasted with prevailing views. Importantly, too, she showed how the neglect of research on domestic work was linked to the inbuilt sexism of sociology. This classic book challenged the hitherto neglect of housework as a topic worthy of study and paved the way for the sociological study of many more aspects of women’s lives.

Life "admin" are the administrative tasks that have exploded in our busy lives. Scheduling. Planning. Paying. The busier our lives are, the more the invisible "admin" piles up on top of us. A working mother, Emens realized that mental labor was consuming her. To survive-- and to help others along the way-- she gathered favorite tips and tricks, admin confessions, and the secrets of admin-happy households. Get past the invisible quicksand that is holding you back and learn how to do less "admin"--And do it better. -- adapted from publisher info

An updated edition of a standard in its field that remains relevant more than thirty years after its original publication. Over thirty years ago, sociologist and University of California, Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild set off a tidal wave of conversation and controversy with her bestselling book, The Second Shift. Hochschild's examination of life in dual-career housholds finds that, factoring in paid work, child care, and housework, working mothers put in one month of labor more than their spouses do every year. Updated for a workforce that is now half female, this edition cites a range of updated studies and statistics, with an afterword from Hochschild that addresses how far working mothers have come since the book's first publication, and how much farther we all still must go.

Finally back in print, with a new Preface by the author, this lively, authoritative, and pathbreaking study considers the history of material advances and domestic service, the "women's separate sphere," and the respective influences of advertising, home economics, and women's entry into the workforce. Never Done begins by describing the household chores of nineteenth-century America: cooking at fireplaces and on cast-iron stoves, laundry done with boilers and flatirons, endless water-hauling and fire-tending, and so on. Strasser goes on to explain and explore how industrialization transformed the nature of women's work. Easing some tasks and eliminating others, new commercial processes inexorably altered women's daily lives and relationships—with each other and with those they served.

Democratizing Luxury explores the interplay between advertising and consumption in modern Japan by investigating how Japanese companies at key historical moments assigned value, or "luxury," to mass-produced products as an important business model. Japanese name-brand luxury evolved alongside a consumer society emerging in the late nineteenth century, with iconic companies whose names became associated with quality and style. At the same time, Western ideas of modernity merged with earlier artisanal ideals to create Japanese connotations of luxury for readily accessible products. Businesses manufactured items at all price points to increase consumer attainability, while starkly curtailing production for limited editions to augment desirability. Between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, control over family disposable income transformed Japanese middle-class women into an important market. Growth of purchasing power among women corresponded with Japanese goods diffusing throughout the empire, and globally after the Asia-Pacific war (1931–1945). This book offers case studies that examine affordable luxury consumer items often advertised to women, including drinks, beauty products, fashion, and timepieces. Japanese companies have capitalized on affordable luxury since a flourishing domestic mercantile economy began in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), showcasing brand-name shops, renowned artisans, and mass-produced woodblock prints by famous artists. In the late nineteenth century, personalized service expanded within department stores like Mitsukoshi, Shiseidō cosmetic counters, and designer boutiques. Shiseidō now globally markets invented traditions of omotenashi, Japanese ”values” of hospitality expressed in purchasing and consuming its products. In postwar times, when a thriving democracy and middle-class were tied to greater disposable income and consumerism, companies rebuilt a growing consumer base among cautious shoppers: democratizing luxury at reasonable prices and maintaining business patterns of accessibility, high quality, and exemplary service. Nationalism amid economic success soon blended with myths of unique Japanese identity in a mass consumer society, suffused by commodity fetishism with widely available brand names. As the first comprehensive history of iconic Japanese name brands and their unique connotations of luxury and accessibility in modern Japan and elsewhere, Democratizing Luxury explores company histories and reveals strategies that lead customers to consume these alluring commodities.

The Emerald Guide to Ann Oakley is a comprehensive guide to reading and understanding the development of Oakley's sociological ideas, placing them in the context of her life and her ground-breaking research into domestic and gender sociology.