the 1920s the Soviets had become attracted to the concept of Scientific Management, pioneered in the US and elsewhere by F.W. Taylor. He called his technique, using stop-watches to rationalize the process of production, 'time studies'. The fact that the industrial revolution relied upon wage labour, bought and sold by units of time, underpinned any practices aimed at increasing productivity (greater output in a shorter time). State socialist societies expected increase production to expand human freedom, resulting a 'leisure revolution', an idea also popular in the West during the 1960s \[[@CR11]\].

Time use research developed in the late 1920s in the US coincident with a larger narrative about the position of women in the early twentieth century and the influence of the Domestic Science movement. 'Homemaking', was gradually influencedby advances in hygiene and nutrition, which greatly increased life expectancy. With farm consolidation, the balance of women's employment changed from live-in domestic service (wealthier households complained of a 'servant crisis') towards factory or office employment. In the mid-twentieth Century, US homes experienced a technological revolution, with electrification, washing machines and fridges, alongside upgraded plumbing (hot and cold running water and indoor bathrooms). The rise in domestic productivity changed 'time use' in unexpected ways. Clothes became 'dirty' after a single wearing, shopping volume increasing, and combined with increasingly elaborate child-raising practices, some US households experienced unexpected increases in unpaid domestic work time, a paradoxical consequence of 'labour-saving' devices. In the 1920s, an American economist (Hildegard Kneeland) extended the USDA time use research programme to include samples of "town