The brand-new modern homes of the mid-century were built for the standard nuclear family: one bread-winning father, one stay-at-home mother, and two children (one of each sex, of course). In their dream house, they would enjoy the boundaryless open plan, where mom could prepare dinner with a clear view to her children in the family room. Everyone would then share their meal in the eat-in kitchen—a feature that purported to be the answer to the modern mother’s challenges. The whole kitchen, in fact, was designed to be as labor-saving as a factory, with the housewife positioned as the professional forewoman. High-tech machinery was built in—dishwashers and, later, microwaves sped up operations, and imbued the kitchens with a semi-industrial gleam. It was all part of the new aesthetic. Surveys of home buyers from that time, including one published in 1954 under the title What People Want When They Buy a House, reflected people’s reverence for efficiency:

The busy mother who has to serve, administer, and police three meals a day for a family of children needs to be able to prepare and serve with least lost motion and to be able…to clean up with minimum effort, hence she wants a practical informal eating place in or off the kitchen.

It all sounded very good—her work could be completed more quickly, she’d gain leisure time—but it was complicated. While there were benefits to having domestic work perceived more like a professional occupation, with its attendant needs for tools of efficiency and worker satisfaction, the housewife was not exactly a corner-suite executive. “There were some serious problems with trying to uphold the analogy between the housewife and the factory worker,” says Victoria Rosner, an English professor at Columbia University and the author of the book Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life.

“First, factory work is productive (you make widgets) while domestic work is repetitive and periodic (you clean the floor and there is no work product…and the floor has to be cleaned again tomorrow). So what is efficiency in the home? Not baking more cakes in the same period of time if the family can only eat one. Another problem was the continual raising of standards. If labor-saving devices like the mechanical washer made it possible to do some jobs more quickly, the standards for what it meant to be ‘clean’ were continually raised so that working smarter did not mean working less.” And of course, the biggest problem with this new frame: “The professionalized housewife is stuck living in her workplace.”

And while the mother may have been the chief officer in the kitchen, she was not, ultimately, head of household, and her work was often critiqued by her husband, her children, and especially consumer culture. The solution to keeping up with the work and keeping family members satisfied, said every advertisement, was to buy more stuff. In Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life, urban historian Dolores Hayden notes, “The classic ‘ring around the collar’ commercials of the 1960s dramatized the issue. A husband and his five-year-old son jeered at a woman for using a detergent that could not remove the stains on their shirt collars. Her response—to buy a new product—exemplified the ways that conflict within a family was exploited.”