Household Technology: Was it the Engine of Liberation?}

Home production has dramatically changed during the course of the 20th century and labor saving technologies, from running water to modern appliances, have freed considerable amount of time from home production. In an influential paper Greenwood, Seshadri and Yorukoglu (2005) examine the role of the household technology revolution in liberating women from household's chores by simulating a general equilibrium model with home production and show that productivity growth in the durable sector alone can explain a large part of the increase in married women's labor participation in the US. This paper uses 1940 and 1950 US Census data to assess the impact of plumbing facilities and modern refrigeration (which presence nearly doubled during the decade) on female labor force. It finds that increased female labor force participation rates are correlated with the increased adoption of indoor plumbing facilities but not with the increased adoption of modern refrigeration. For US counties in the south\ however there is a strong positive correlation between increases in female labor force rates and the adoption of modern refrigeration. One interpretation is that in these counties the benefits of modern refrigeration were higher because of the weather. The female occupation that was affected the most from the dramatic improvements in home productions was the one of domestics, which ratio to total employment halved. The implications of these results are important to modelling technological changes to the household production function and imply giving less weight to durables - or formal inclusion of substitutes - and more weight to improvements to the structure of the house.