Labor-saving devices are not necessarily what they appear to be. There is a consensus among historians and sociologists who have examined housework that "labor saving" appliances have generally had the effect of increasing, rather than diminishing the amount of time spent on household labor. (See particularly Juliet Schor, "Overwork in the household," in the Overworked American; Ruth Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave; Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework; and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework). "Advances" in the technologies of cleaning and cooking have not contributed to greater productivity, in part, because expectations regarding norms of cleanliness and food preparation have themselves become inflated. And as the products available for the household proliferated and redefined the meaning of well-being, the tasks necessary to maintain and reproduce the household proliferated and expanded.

"Hoover, nobody does it like you, the way that you do, nobody's got the power to please me."

"Who's next?"

Some products represent hitherto unrealized needs or wants and hence require a different way of conceptualizing the activity in the household. Take the example of a Sunbeam commercial that pitches its rotisserie product as enabling "Restaurant style" food at home. In this scenario there is no effort to speak of less work, but rather a presentation of Mom cheerfully turned into a short order cook and fast food counter worker. Talk about unpaid wage labor!

Though the domestic cousins of the industrial revolution entered the home in the form of electrically powered vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines, as well as ready-made processed foods and already-assembled clothing, housework grew to encompass a wider range of activities, many of which revolved around shopping. As consumer capitalism has continued to expand, it has also increased the range of goods and services deemed necessary in the household unit.

Some of these changes are actually reflected in advertising representations of women as mothers and consumption experts for their families. Think of all the ads pitched to middle class women about the ease of minivans for toting and ferrying children from home to school to soccer practice to the ice cream store etc. At the same time, however, advertising -- perhaps more than any other medium, has trumpeted the ideology of 'new' and improved' housework technologies as a source of domestic liberation, even as it constructs an obsessively unrealistic vision of the easily sanitized house. Indeed, the claims of household cleaning products are always weighted in hyperbole: with Lysol, "our house is fresher than clean," while Mr. Clean "leaves nothing behind but the shine."

Now it might be argued that "shine" is an interesting metaphor for the product of housework, for it is the perfect exchange-value -- it must be continuously reproduced for no sooner is it realized than it begins to disappear. It is tangibly intangible. Though in the real world "shine" is a function of applying "elbow grease" -- that is, considerable effort -- in the world of television ads, the labor of shine production is accomplished via the Magic of the commodity itself. Consider the Dow "Scrubbing Bubbles" that seem only to require a consumer who can unleash the magic in the container. This is how it has always been on television. Remember the White Knight unleashed by Ajax, or Mr. Clean who still gets toilets "spotless" so that you don't have to get your hands dirty. In short, housework is routinely mystified in this medium even as it is acknowledged.