Women, Housing Standards and Human Progress
When our society was less affluent, women migrated to cities because it was important to be close to workplace. They migrate to metropolises today, too, but now it also has to do with their choice to live life the way they want. Cities are increasingly becoming areas where women are free to live as they want. The lifestyle and amenities that cities offer matter to women as much as they do to men.
This, of course, deeply influences how houses are built and designed. For example, when women value lifestyle and consumption more, the demand for housing and amenities is likely to become more refined. Building houses with all necessary amenities in the neighborhood, where such diverse amenities exist, will become more of a challenge.
To draw an analogy, finding employees for jobs in a more advanced economy is very challenging. It is difficult to match the demands of employers with the skills that potential employees have. When this happens, potential employees are likely to acquire skills that probably no one had before. For the same reason, when consumption is valued more, real estate developers are likely to build houses in ways they never did before. Housing standards and amenities preferred by women, for example, are likely to be somewhat different from that men like.
For the same reason, mobility of women has improved housing standards; and improvement in housing standards and technology has, in turn, improved the life of women.
“The housewife of the future... will give less attention to the home because the house will need less. She will be a domestic engineer rather than a domestic labourer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionise the woman's world that a large portion of (the) woman's energy will be conserved for use in broader, more constructive fields,” scientist Thomas Alva Edison had once said in an interview.
In the past, when housing standards and technology improved, life often became much easier for men. For example, when people found better ways to chop wood or organise labour in the granite quarry, men's labour became much easier. It is true that women reaped benefits, too. Before the society became reasonably prosperous, men and women worked in the fields, and children helped them out. It was the relative prosperity in the industrial age that allowed women to stay at home. But, as Bill Bryson points out, when houses became larger, meals became complicated and people started wearing more clothes, women had more work to do. Solutions did not seem forthcoming. This changed only when housing standards, and the appliances used within homes, improved.
What effect did such a progress have on women? Women, for example, were frequently ill in the past, and ancient manners in some countries did not allow a visit to the doctor. It was better water supply, sanitation, electricity, and other modern advancements that lowered death rates among women.
There are many reasons. In the 19th century, even in relatively prosperous Vienna, women who gave birth to children in hospitals were more likely to die than women who gave birth to children in their own homes. The reason was that doctors did not wash their hands. Running water in homes, for instance, is a modern invention. So are flush toilets. Even today, in India, women are fewer than men, not because the male-female ratio is skewed at birth but because more women die at later ages, often because of diseases.
Improvement in housing played a role, too. People lived in mud-paved houses, and used firewood for cooking and heating. This was a major cause of death and illnesses, more often among women. Better sanitation, water supply, flush toilet and other advancements would not have been possible if people still lived in mud-paved houses.
Dish washers, washing machines, refrigerators and other appliances were instrumental, too. Without them, people would have had no option other than to hire external help or do the work themselves.
Deaths became rarer among children, too, and this allowed women to decide not to have many children. For example, if your child is not likely to die very soon, there is less incentive to give birth to many children. As child care is the third-biggest cost, next only to housing and food, even in the United States, it is easy to see how difficult it would have been in the past for women to pursue other careers.