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The work that moved

A reconstruction of unpaid work shows changing hours for women and men. Whose time is counted matters as much as the direction of the lines.

Docent's interpretation. The numbers are the record's; the through-line is the docent's. Every room this tour passes is a statistical composite — no single family described in it ever existed. Every figure links to its exhibit, where the source card and confidence tier are on display.

The reconstruction estimates average weekly home-production time for prime-age women at 46.8C hours in 1900 and 41.5C in 1950. It combines historical studies with later time-use surveys. These are population averages across employed and nonemployed women, not the diary of a woman in a median-income household.

Unpaid home production, women and men · hours per week, prime-age adults (Ramey series)

⚠ From 2010s onward the source is ATUS (all adults 15+, hrs/day, narrower 'household activities'), not Ramey (prime-age women 18-64, hrs/week, broader 'home production') — a concept splice. ATUS facts remain available in their rooms, but render as linked gaps on this weekly axis rather than as a false decline.

The equipment exhibits offer a separate view: in 1950, 94.0%A of households had electric light and 80.0%A had mechanical refrigeration. These household adoption figures are not linked to the people in the time-use reconstruction. Putting them alongside the hours does not measure how much work an appliance saved.

By 1975 the women's estimate was 32.1C hours per week. Read it beside the men's series, including the Men's weekly unpaid home-production hours, 1950 exhibit, on the same scale. The reconstruction describes a changing division of unpaid work. These averages do not show hours being transferred between the same spouses, or establish whether time went into paid work, leisure, or other activities.

After the two-thousands this chart stops. The later room exhibits use a narrower activity category and a different age population (see the Home-production hours: Ramey endpoint vs ATUS (concept splice) exhibit). Those observations remain available in the rooms, but they cannot continue this line unchanged. Its ending records a measurement boundary, not the disappearance of unpaid work.

Rooms cited in this tour: 1900s · 1910s · 1920s · 1930s · 1940s · 1950s · 1960s · 1970s · 1980s · 1990s · 2000s · 2010s · 2020s