We keep records of the grand, if distant, facts of social and economic life: we have data on job creation, levels of production, income differences, changing infrastructure and so on. But what do we know of our daily lives at home? What is most familiar to us goes largely undocumented; it is as a result hidden from future historians.
When Joanne Vanek argued in a famous article in Scientific American in the mid-1970s that the amount of housework done by women had remained constant throughout the period of the maximum advance of labour-saving domestic technology, there was little evidence either to support or contest her claim.
Thanks to "time budget diary" surveys, however, it is now possible to unearth a small amount of systematic data on how we spend our time in our daily lives. By putting together surveys by the BBC, the ESRC and the Office of National Statistics, we can build a picture of how daily life in Britain has evolved over the last three and a half decades.
Consider the evolution of time devoted to that core domestic activity: cooking. According to BBC surveys, overall, in 1961, women (as in all the statistics subsequently cited, adults aged between 20 and 60) spent 117 minutes per day in food preparation. By the mid-1990s, cooking time has come down to just 65 minutes per day. Why?
Much of the explanation lies in the changing public economic role of women. In 1961 barely one quarter of women had jobs; today they form more or less half of the paid workforce. Obviously, this spectacular growth in the number of women who go to work means that there is less time available for women to spend on housework.
Figure 1 shows the evolution of time devoted to the full range of domestic tasks, including housecleaning and clothes-washing. As might be expected, at each point in time, women employed full time do less of these unpaid tasks than non-employed women. So the increase in the numbers of full time working women, particularly during the first half of the period we are considering (most of the more recent growth in women's employment has been in part time jobs), has substantially reduced the overall time spent on housework. But this does not tell the whole story, since domestic work has also fallen substantially for part time and non-employed women. Moreover, the average woman with a full time job has reduced her domestic work (excluding cooking) by around 20 minutes from the total of 110 minutes in 1961-and this despite the fact that in 1995 she was more likely to have a husband and children, and hence more domestic demands, than the equivalent group in the previous generation.
A possible explanation for the reduction in women's housework time (cooking or otherwise) is men's contribution to these activities. Attitudes have changed. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey and the British Household Panel Survey, people no longer see household tasks as "women's work" only. But to what extent are shifts in attitudes translated into actual changes in behaviour?
Although men still make a pitifully small contribution overall, their housework time has increased-from 15 minutes of housework per day in 1961, to 45 minutes in 1995. This partly reflects a growth in unemployment and early retirement. But men in full time employment increased their housework time from around 10 minutes per day on average in 1961 to 33 minutes per day in 1995. We find the same growth in men's domestic work in each of the dozen countries for which this sort of data exist. But the growth is not large enough to ex- plain the scale of the reduction in women's domestic work.
The diffusion of new sorts of domestic equipment, new easy care materials and ready prepared foods into British homes must have played a part in the change in housework patterns over this period. But there is another explanation, too.
Housework time has been displaced by other necessary household activities. Consider the upward trends in time devoted to shopping and domestic travel shown in figure 2. This trend cannot simply be explained by the fact that we buy more things now. The relatively labour intensive organisation of local, fully serviced shops and delivery services that in 1961 survived intact from the Victorian era, has been almost wholly replaced by what we once thought of as the American model of huge self-service stores, located in out of town shopping malls. These involve less cost to retailers but more time from shoppers. The extra time spent acquiring goods and services outside the home is no longer available for core housework tasks.
Even more dramatic trends emerge for that most important of household tasks: childcare (see figure 3). There has been something of a panic, in some quarters, that the changing patterns in women's employment have had deleterious effects on levels of care for children. But the evidence does not support this view.
Despite the very substantial reduction in family size (which perhaps goes some way to explaining the small reduction in time devoted to childcare during the 1960s), it appears that childcare time has pretty much doubled, among men and women in every category. Indeed, full time employed women with children in 1995 appear to devote more time to childcare than even non-employed mothers did in 1961.
No doubt part of the explanation for this growth is analogous to the reasons for the growth of shopping times. Children use all sorts of personal services-educational, medical, recreational-and as the scale of these facilities grows, their location becomes on average more distant from the child's own home. To these increasingly remote facilities must be added another factor: the lapse in children's "licence to roam." In the UK in 1961, children were allowed a considerable degree of freedom to travel about unsupervised. But, as Meyer Hillman has documented, traffic danger and the perceived growth in child assault mean that children are now mostly constrained to travel to these remote facilities in the company of adults.
But some of the growth in childcare time is more positive. New childcare theories from psychologists, sociologists and even economists have transformed what was once a somewhat unbending British child-raising culture. The now orthodox advice to parents from Penelope Leach (out of Dr Spock) is that "quality time" with the child is the touchstone of good parenting practice.
Finally, a substantial part of the reduction in women's domestic work relates to a change in the pattern of household consumption. Figure 4 compares the evolution of time spent eating at home, with out-of-home recreations, of which the most substantial component is time spent in pubs and restaurants. In 1961, both parents and children often sat together for several meals per day. We have seen over a 34 year period the virtual disappearance of the family meal, replaced by irregular and non-familial "grazing" of pre-cooked or fast foods. Time devoted to eating has nearly halved during that period, partly reflecting a retreat from the civilities of the table, but also a "masking" of food consumption which increasingly takes place simultaneously with (and is subsidiary to) some other activity such as watching television.
This undoubtedly constitutes a loss of a private form of sociability. But the loss may be set against another gain. We go out, to pubs and restaurants, spending on average more than twice as much of our day in such activities as we did in 1961, sometimes with those very household members with whom we no longer eat and drink at home.
So paid jobs for women, some (if as yet marginal) adjustment in gender roles, the reorganisation of retail and other services, the extension of childcare roles, and a reversal of the feared "privatisation" of sociabi-lity account for the changing patterns in how we spend our time. Over the next third of a century, increasing job flexibility, the information superhighway, the public policies needed to slow global warming, all these and other factors promise to have at least as great an impact on the conduct of our daily lives.
