Easy Does It

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Moving Image:Easy Does It
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Easy Does It is a short film from 1940 released on 35mm. It is held in the Prelinger Archives collection.

Easy Does It argues that housework is really too difficult for men; it takes women's singular energy and endurance, aided by labor-saving devices, to get the job done. True to form, this Jam Handy production penetrates machines to show how they work, comparing the energy expended in ironing, say, with a bricklayer's efforts. "Here's to the ladies," the narrator drones, "the fair and the weak. Fair they are, we'll all admit. But who dares call them weak?" The narrator is really saying that housework is too taxing for men: "Women's work is not for sissies," he insists. "Most men would have a hard time of it if they were to change jobs with wife, mother, or girlfriend."

To support its claims, the film enlists the authority of science and engineering: little "ergometers" compute the energy necessary to perform certain motions. But the science is pseudo, invoked with a male smirk. Easy Does It also promotes feminized technologies for women's "special needs." The ultimate expression of this, and the justification for the film, is the vacuum gearshift, a "muscle-saving" device targeted at women. There's also a brief, semiconsensual "cross-dressing" scene, which interestingly enough was recalled twenty years later in American Maker, a spectacular institutional film made by Jam Handy for Chevrolet. Easy Does It belongs to a long tradition of gender-based humor and, as might be expected, does not contribute anything new to the genre. (See The Best Made Plans for another example.) The film's attempts to debunk myths about woman's weakness and frailty quickly reveal themselves -- through patronizing language and goofy, demeaning imagery -- to be disingenuous and hollow. Although women's work is energy-equal to men's, it is trivial in social terms: compare sewing, cooking, and setting tables (acting within and upon the home) with pile driving, steam shoveling, and bricklaying (acting upon the landscape). The film's interest in energy and force is really a way of expressing concern with power relations between men and women; it quickly acknowledges woman's power while attempting to relocate it where it will have the least effect.

Easy Does It was a late entry in Jam Handy's popular series of "Direct Mass Selling" motion pictures, all produced for sponsor Chevrolet. One hundred and eighteen films were made for theatrical release with the intention of promoting the Chevrolet brand name directly to members of the public. They achieved wide circulation: in the first three years of their release, eighty-nine films were shown in 169,603 showings to 132,278,912 people. The films combined popularizations of science, engineering, and technology with a soft sell for Chevrolet, nowhere mentioning the sponsor's name. Still, every car is a Chevrolet.

Easy Does It
Produced byHandy (Jam) Organization
Production
company
Handy (Jam) Organization
Distributed byHandy (Jam) Organization
Release date
1940
Running time
8:49
LanguageEnglish
Thumbnail
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