Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

curbed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#71

Post by vectorEQ »

anm89 wrote: post #2

"Over the decades, as versions of this housewife’s setup have eliminated dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen, centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor-saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform." I gave up here. This is so stupid that I'm not sure what is the premise that I should critique. Also Im a guy who cooks in…

i'm with you, despite that fact i've never in my life seen a kitchen island. i was opening the article to find an actual island :< got greeted to this dribble. :'D

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#72

Post by [deleted] »

anm89 wrote: post #7
kop316 wrote: post #4

I read through this a couple of times, and I still can't figure out its point beyond the idea that the author doesn't like kitchen islands/open floor plans, and even that I'm not sure of? I've found to really like open floor plans and an open kitchen. When I visit my family, we tend to congregate in the kitchen as someone is cooking (or several of us are cooking) and we don't want them to feel left out. An open floor…

This article is a preference about interior design masquerading as a social critique.

[deleted]

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#73

Post by wingerlang »

JasonFruit wrote: post #11
anm89 wrote: post #2

"Over the decades, as versions of this housewife’s setup have eliminated dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen, centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor-saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform." I gave up here. This is so stupid that I'm not sure what is the premise that I should critique. Also Im a guy who cooks in…

This was exactly my reaction: I love my island, and I think the kids would eat there every meal if I didn't like to make a sit-down meal now and then. I've never found that the island acted as a stage, or that it interfered with my convenient triangle of sink-counter-stove. I don't know what kind of poppycock this is trying to be, but there is no excuse for it.

I don't own a house, but I keep notes for what I will eventually (hopefully) look for and this kind of island is quite high on my wants-list.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#75

Post by wang_li »

jraines wrote: post #44
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty senior and I barely think about work outside my forty hours a week of in-office time. An hour or two a week, most weeks, I'd guess. Maybe your experience is just different from other people? I find the 8 1/2 hours a day statistic to be perhaps true, since some types of work expand to fill the time allotted. I don't believe the 5.7 hrs a day statistic for working moms, though. That would imply that a workin…

40 vs 60 hours isn't really the issue. It's: what counts as "work" to be included in the total, and more narrowly, what counts as "housework"? My whole argument is that just as cooking, cleaning, and laundry shouldn't be all that's considered "housework"; coding, deploying, etc aren't all there is to "work" as a programmer. I think "homemaking" makes the distinction clearer in the narrow case. In the larger sense, I'…

At a certain point people are voluntarily choosing to take on certain responsibilities and workloads. Why is society supposed to care that people are choosing a particular labor intensive standard of living?

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#76

Post by the_seraphim »

JasonFruit wrote: post #11
anm89 wrote: post #2

"Over the decades, as versions of this housewife’s setup have eliminated dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen, centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor-saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform." I gave up here. This is so stupid that I'm not sure what is the premise that I should critique. Also Im a guy who cooks in…

This was exactly my reaction: I love my island, and I think the kids would eat there every meal if I didn't like to make a sit-down meal now and then. I've never found that the island acted as a stage, or that it interfered with my convenient triangle of sink-counter-stove. I don't know what kind of poppycock this is trying to be, but there is no excuse for it.

I don't have an island, but man would I enjoy performing the dance of the steak...

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#77

Post by Spooky23 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #38
bsder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. This is a woeful underestimate before labor saving machinery. Here is a talk about the $3500 Shirt and the fact that women spun thread in any idle time: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... Here is a Hans Rosling visualization of wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo I remember a story about histo…

The book is called "More work for mother" because a lot of labor saving devices saved male labor by making the work physically less demanding and allowing it to thus be shifted to the wife. Three hundred or so years ago, most couples were literally working to put food on the table and keep people clothed. They did so by raising their own food and sewing their own clothes, etc. Standards of living were generally lower…

Definitely agree with most of the key points, but I do question the notion that men did all of the heavy labor.

Maybe in upper-class homes, but in the poorer families (which were most people), "women's work" was physically demanding... laundry was outright dangerous, for example.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#78

Post by [deleted] »

onion2k wrote: post #62
Merrill wrote: post #58

A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. The housewife on a pre-electric, pre-running water farm could not have spent 60 hours/week on what is now "housework", since considerable time had to be devoted to caring for the chickens; collecting and packing eggs; planting, weeding, harvesting the garden; canning vegetables and fruits; helping with the milking; helping with butchering chickens, pigs, and steers;…

A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. You believe that in 1919, at the end of the first world war, and just 10 years before the Wall Street crash, most housewives lived on farms that didn't have electricity or running water? The population of New York city in 1919 was a little over 5.5 million people .

[deleted]

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#79

Post by Merrill »

onion2k wrote: post #62
Merrill wrote: post #58

A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. The housewife on a pre-electric, pre-running water farm could not have spent 60 hours/week on what is now "housework", since considerable time had to be devoted to caring for the chickens; collecting and packing eggs; planting, weeding, harvesting the garden; canning vegetables and fruits; helping with the milking; helping with butchering chickens, pigs, and steers;…

A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. You believe that in 1919, at the end of the first world war, and just 10 years before the Wall Street crash, most housewives lived on farms that didn't have electricity or running water? The population of New York city in 1919 was a little over 5.5 million people .

I stand corrected. The percentage in 1920 was about 30%. However, another large slice, probably over 20%, lived in rural small towns and villages where life wasn't much different.

The Rural Electrification Act was signed in 1936. Before then, in 1930, only 3% of farms had electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

Electric motors are needed for inexpensive running water systems in order to drive pumps able to pressurize the system. There were gas engines used to drive pump jacks a couple decades before. There were also "Delco Plants" and batteries for local generation and DC electricity distribution on farms, but I don't think they were widespread. Mom's Maytag washing machine originally had a Briggs & Stratton gas engine that was replaced by an electric motor after REA was implemented.

https://www.farmcollector.com/farm-shows/delco-light-plant-z...

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#80

Post by logfromblammo »

bsder wrote: post #37
DoreenMichele wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called "More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and standards were raised Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of housework. In most…

> Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. This is a woeful underestimate before labor saving machinery. Here is a talk about the $3500 Shirt and the fact that women spun thread in any idle time: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... Here is a Hans Rosling visualization of wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo I remember a story about histo…

I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can clean up their own messes now, and have been trained to poop, pee, and vomit into the approved receptacles.

A lot of the stuff people do as routine housework simply doesn't need to be done more often than quarterly.

Perhaps those people doing 60 hours/week in 2019 don't have the temperament to just sit on ass and enjoy all the machine-assisted, low-maintenance living?

Throw the clothes in the washing machine, and push the start button. Push the start button on the carpet-cleaning robot. Push the start button on the floor-mopping robot. Move clothes from washer to dryer and push start button. Put ingredients in bread machine and press start. Put entire meal in microwave and push start button. Put dishes in dishwasher and push start button. Hop on motorized treadmill and push start. Flop in massage chair and push start. Have problem; push button; no problem.

People have more time now, and they invent new things to do to fill it. If you only want to do 10 hours a week in housework, all you need do is lower your standards to whatever the machines do for you without supervision. Toss out some ant/roach bait and buy some spray-can air freshener. Avoid filth-producing pets or babies in your home. Substitute chemical engineering or electrical engineering for elbow grease. If you do almost any revenue-producing activity in lieu of housework, you will be able to pay for a pill-swallow, spray-on, or button-press solution to any routine housework problem.

Post reply on HN