Freedom From Laundry Slavery

The electric washing machine is the most important innovation for emancipating women.

According to a 2005 study the average household in 1900 spent 58 hours a week on housework—meal preparation, laundry and cleaning. This compares with just 13.44 hours of housework for the average household in 2023.

Doing laundry was a particular drudgery. A study by Jeremy Greenwood et. al. reported:

The Rural Electrification Authority supervised one such study based on 12 farm wives during 1945–1946. They compared the time spent doing laundry by hand to that spent using electrical equipment. The women also wore a pedometer. One subject, Mrs. Verett, was reported on in detail… After electrification Mrs. Verett had an electric washer, dryer and iron. A water system was also installed with a water heater. They estimated that it took her about 4 hours to do a 38 lb load of laundry by hand, and then about 4.5 hours to iron it using old-fashioned irons. By comparison it took 41 min to do a load of the laundry using electrical appliances and 1.75 hours to iron it. The woman walked 3,181 feet to do the laundry by hand, and only 332 feet with electrical equipment. She walked 3,122 feet when ironing the old way, and 333 the new way.

Laundry went from consuming 9.5 hours to only 2.43 hours, a 74.4 percent drop. Women gained over seven hours a week to do something else. The number of steps walked decreased by almost 90 percent. No wonder grandma was always so tired. When wrinkle-resistant fabrics and fabric softeners came along the gains were even greater. The Science History Institute notes that “It has been said that Ruth Benerito (1916–2013) saved the cotton industry with her discovery of a method for creating wrinkle-resistant cotton. By attaching organic chemicals to cotton fibers, Benerito and her team made cotton fabric not just wrinkle resistant but also stain and flame resistant.” This decrease in hours spent in housework is almost entirely due to the introduction of electricity in homes.

Clothes washing is so labor intensive, that even among the Amish almost all communities allow the use of washing machines.

Once we had electricity innovators began developing new devices and entrepreneurs learned how to manufacture at scale. Every time innovators and entrepreneurs made one of these devices, they learned how to make them faster. As costs fell so did prices. With lower prices more were sold. The process created a virtuous spiral of liberation.

These data are based on a series contained in Robert Gordon’s 1990 book, The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices. Gordon converted the prices and prevailing wages into time prices. The chart also shows a quality-adjusted price index (green line) for eight appliances: refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, clothes dryers, TV sets, dishwashers, microwaves, and VCRs. This series drops at 10 percent a year.

In the YouTube video Hans Rosling tells a beautiful story about how the washing machine changed his life:

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Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.