This is a short, and roughly edited passage from some work I'm going for a new book I'm working on: Unsung Heroes. Technological Changes That You Don't Think About, But You Really Should.
We
hear a lot about how cultural and legal changes moved women’s rights forward. But there’s something a lot of people don’t
hear about. And that is how changes in technology helped move the needle on
women’s rights.
So
let’s look at the humble washing
machine.
When
my mother grew up in the 1920s in Virginia, the family was poor. And part of
being poor was everything was done by hand. Including washing. And clothes were
expensive for most families. So they were washed. By hand. And put up on
clotheslines, and then dried it in the wind and sun (unless it rained). But
that process, washing, rinsing, wringing them out, and then drying them? Took
hours.
Combined
with cooking (with wood stoves) and washing dishes (by hand), keeping up a
house was, even with the help of family members, a full-time job for a
housewife. Not raising children or doing anything special, just the everyday
work of keeping the house running could keep a wife occupied from before the
sun rose until after it set.
Now,
back in the day, of course, you could hire servants to do that work for you.
Maids, butlers, cooks…
If you were wealthy.
So
women were confronted with a stark choice. Job or home. Trying to do both, well
some people could, but that would be literally working two full-time jobs. And
remember, that’s before we even add in kids. Some
were able, many weren’t, and culturally, those who tried were attacked as “bad
homemakers” because it was assumed they might be neglecting the duties society
had chosen for them.
Culturally
and technologically, women in the United States* found themselves facing a trap
that was not simply encouraged by the cultural restrictions of the day, but
enforced by the technology, or rather, lack thereof, in the average home. If
you didn’t have a servant, you worked at home.
A
lot.
But
then… Then the washing machine shows up.
And the gas stove. And the clothes dryer. How big a change was this? Well,
according to Jeremy Greenwood’s work “Evolving Households: The Imprint of
Technology on Life” one experiment showed that it took about four hours to wash
a load of laundry, and four and half hours to iron it. But with electric appliances?
Forty-one
minutes to wash, and less than two hours to finish ironing it.
Suddenly,
home was no longer a full-time occupation. Vacuums, washing machines, gas
stoves… They all resulted in a quantum
leap in how much leisure time was available to women.
And
that meant that the old choice, “work
or home” increasingly no longer was an either/or decision.
Women could be members of the
workforce, and also maintain the home, without having to choose between the
two. There was still sexist cultural pressure, of course, and those who would
use any excuse to keep women out of the workforce, but the trend was
irreversible. The choice could now be: Work and home.
And
this had a role in perhaps one of the greatest transformations in American
history, where the number of women in the labor force went from 18.3 percent in
1900, to 57.0 percent in 2014, with a vastly increased number of women working
in full-time professional occupations.
Was
the washing machine responsible for all of this? Far from it. The road from
voiceless homemaker to powerful political and economic force was one that was
fought every step of the way. It was one that was impacted, for good or ill, by
a hundred social, economic, and technological changes. But by reducing the
amount of time spent in the home, and changing the facts on the ground, the
growth of home appliances in America helped provide a foundation to many of the
later economic changes that transformed the place of women America.*
*note,
this also changed the place of women, well, everywhere, but I’m most qualified
to talk about the United States.
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