B-List Holy Grail: Laundry Machines

Tuesday March 23, 2010 by Tim Maly

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

Blue Monday, Abolished
In the late 19th century, laundry remained the most backbreaking household chore. Utopian feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisioned and established cooperative households where communal kitchens, daycares and laundries would free women from drudgery, leading to economic equality and the Seneca Falls goal of “true and substantial happiness.” But laundry mechanization participated in the more-work-for-mother paradox: new cheap clothes needed more and more frequent washing. Unlike cooking and childcare, which have mostly left the home, laundry remains a laborious individual responsibility. We’ve ditched the mangle and invented the self-service laundromat, but we are not liberated from laundry.

Written by: Suzanne Fischer

Poster Child:
I really like this one, as we forget how onerous a chore laundry was until rather recently- but while automated laundry hasn’t lead to the sweeping social change people from the past predicted, it’s still completely awesome. Bring someone from the past forward to today and they might not be so impressed with some of the things on this list (buggy-assed voice recognition? laser pointers?) but show them laundry machines and they’ll say “Two please!”

Ryan:
The only issue with this one is that if you showed someone 200 years ago a laundry machine from today, they’d still say “Forsooth, verily, that be rad” and want one – they’re not perfect, but they’re still a huge improvement over washboards. But yeah, laundry sucks!

Tim:
Here’s why this entry is so great: like videoconferencing, the technology is here and it operates pretty much exactly as promised. And like videoconferencing, it failed to substantially transform the society around in the way we expected. The machines didn’t make our lives easier, they made the lives of the people selling clothes easier.

What’s this all about?

In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

B-List Holy Grails (and a Contest!)
B-List Holy Grail Contest Winners
B-List Holy Grail: Wristphones
B-List Holy Grail: Email
B-List Holy Grail: Monorails
B-List Holy Grail: Lasers
B-List Holy Grail: MiniDiscs
B-List Holy Grail: Push-button Jobs
B-List Holy Grail: Laundry Machines ((YOU ARE HERE))

Venkat

The evolution of laundry is a bit more complex than you are suggesting, and I believe it DID lead to sweeping social change, except that it went the other way.

Here is my rough theory (supported by some evidence). Washing machines, invented at the turn of the 20th century and broadly adopted by around 1920-30 (along with a phalanx of related devices) reduced labor just enough to make live-in servants an uneconomical luxury. Those servants then had to serve multiple households to make up their income. This led to separation of residential neighborhoods for the domestic servant and middle class, with the latter moving to suburbia thanks to automobiles. This made commuting to domestic work more expensive, and more domestics chose to become lower middle class social climbers. The resulting scarcity in domestic labor caused more women to actually have to take over the semi-automated laundry process as opposed to having a domestic run the fully-human-powered version.

This, paradoxically, set the women's emancipation movement BACK in the early decades of the century, until, by the 50s, with Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique" we had a female counterpart to William Whyte's "Organization Man" who was less free than her turn of the century grandmother. In other words home automation, by separating out the domestic class and moving a lot of them into the lower-middle class, caused a temporary reversal in women's emancipation, one that has still not been corrected. Women are still more likely to do run the washing today...(though the reasons today are more complex).

The same trajectory, compressed and accelerated and time-shifted forward a few decades, is repeating itself in other parts of the world.

I don't have a complete proof of this conjectured theory (that would take a Master's Thesis level of research), but I think the evidence is highly suggestive.
Aviatrix

On the evil side, all that washing machine wonderfulness contributes to water use, water pollution, energy use, and wear and tear on clothes.

I like that this item on the list isn't something out of the Jetsons, just something that someone my age takes for granted. I really like the box in my kitchen that can be used to keep meat edible for months, without having to salt or smoke it.
EmilyCook

Also it has made us significantly less smelly because we wash our clothes more. People from the past would come forward and remark how we all smell like soap and not like people. Also it has transformed some things. Little girls had to do a lot of the laundry and sewing in household and so they didn't like to get dirty of have rough play that would rip their clothes because they knew how much work that would cause them later. Not doing our own repair work and having faster washing possibilities has freed up little girls everywhere to get muddy and rip their tights.