After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek review – domestic bliss deferred | Society books

Does your home never feel clean enough? Is it full of half-finished DIY and maintenance projects? Is your domestic life mainly about chores rather than rest or pleasure? If the answer to some or all of these questions is yes, you may be interested in the Cowan paradox.

Forty years ago an American historian, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, revealed that the time spent on domestic labour by a typical household had not fallen since the 1870s, despite liberating new technologies such as washing machines and microwaves. This unexpected lack of progress – which in many countries continues to this day – is the huge social conundrum that Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s busy book explores and aims to help solve. “The reduction of unwaged [house]work is necessary,” they write, “not … simply because much of it is drudgery. Rather, this reduction is essential because it expands the availability of free time that is the prerequisite for any meaningful … freedom.”

Hester and Srnicek are a couple with three young children, and part of a loose global network of thinkers and researchers interested in the successes, failures and potential of technology to change how we live. Some of their previous writing has been about “post-work”, the increasingly influential idea that automation and other trends require society to rethink paid work. Here, they turn their critical gaze on to often revered domestic tasks, including childcare. Anyone seeking cosy thoughts about the joys of spring cleaning should look elsewhere.

One of After Work’s many provocative arguments is that, in the home, “notions of what is clean and what is dirty are socially constructed.” Knowledge about hygiene, personal habits, social expectations, gender roles and the affordability of paid domestic help or household gadgets – these all combine to produce widely understood but constantly shifting standards of cleanliness. The authors argue that improvements in domestic appliances have led to these standards “escalating” – the more powerful your vacuum cleaner, the more spotless you expect carpets to be – and thus the time potentially saved by such machines is sucked away. Their manufacturers have a vested interest in housework remaining a job that never feels finished.

With thought-provoking thoroughness, After Work examines other contributors to the domestic burden: ever more intensive parenting, the earlier discharge of patients from hospital, the competitive kitchen labour of foodie culture and the explosion of online form-filling. The book avoids becoming just a compendium of complaints about modern life from a couple of tired parents because Hester and Srnicek are always curious about the questions their inquiry opens up, and about the sometimes contradictory evidence they discover. For example, despite their frequent scepticism about new domestic technology, they concede that in “our own discussions with waged care workers” who help families look after elderly people at home, “many freely point to elements of their jobs that could usefully be automated away … to allow them more time to perform the more explicitly human-centred aspects”.

Here as throughout, the writing style is semi-academic, a little stern, but clear and concise, with a lot of learning worn lightly – a bibliography and footnotes take up almost a third of the book. And occasionally the tone is softened by glimpses of the authors’ imperfect family life, where healthy new recipes are “rejected by children who would prefer chicken nuggets”.

The book’s second half considers how domesticity could be done differently. There is a section on the communal kitchens and childcare facilities of early revolutionary Russia, which in the 1920s were part of a state-backed attempt to free women from household labour and to replace the traditional family. The experiment failed after a few years, undermined by a lack of resources, a turn towards social conservatism under Stalin, and the difficulty of changing ingrained habits. But the logic of sharing expensive appliances and laborious housework through communal living also appealed to people in less radical societies, such as the United States, Finland and Austria. In Vienna, a pioneering centre-left city government built innovative, still admired public housing estates with facilities from workshops to laundries, believing that tenants should enjoy “private sufficiency” but “public luxury”, as the authors put it.

The authors argue that these early 20th-century experiments still “offer tantalising resources” for rethinking domestic life in the 21st. They also suggest innovations of their own: local rental services for baby clothes; groups of households jointly keeping techies on contract to help with everyday computer problems; and sharing guest bedrooms, to reduce the individual burden of furnishing, cleaning and heating little-used rooms.

However, even such modest changes would require the lessening of powerful and entrenched impulses that favour individualism and the nuclear family, and also a different approach to the use and design of domestic space. In their usual frank way, the authors do not play down such obstacles to reducing housework for good. Nor do they pretend that such an outcome would not produce its own challenges. With more spare time at home, “we would be faced with the immense question of our own desires”. No wonder some people prefer to do more dusting.