How Did The Washing Machine Change Women's Lives

This is an edited excerpt from Jeremy Greenwood 'southward new book "Evolving Households: The Imprint of Technology on Life" published in Jan 2019 by The MIT Printing.

In the 1800s, the mother in virtually American households worked at home surrounded by an average of half-dozen children. In a world without running water, central heating, and electricity, housework was laborious. Simply and so, the Second Industrial Revolution introduced electricity and labor-saving household appliances. Additionally, the value of concrete strength declined as machinery took over strenuous tasks.

It's non a stretch to say that these developments changed the division of labor in the home, liberating married women from household tasks and leading to a dramatic increment in their labor-force participation.

Economic models tin shed lite on this change and others, similar the drop in fertility and baby smash, decline in spousal relationship, women's liberation, increase in premarital sexual practice, upswing in life expectancy and health care expenditures, and move toward longer retirement. All of these trends characterize a dramatic transformation of daily life made possible by technology.

'Abode as a small manufactory'
Household product didn't become function of economic theory until the 1930s, when Margaret Reid introduced the notion in her Academy of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation. Household production theory treats the habitation as a small factory. Reid writes:

The household is our most important economic institution. Yet economics of household production is a neglected subject area. With few exceptions the involvement of economists has been concentrated on that role of our economic system…organized on a price basis. The productive piece of work of the household has been disregarded, even though more workers are engaged in it than any other single industry.

Reid reported that housewives' services generated $15.3 billion in 1918—25 per centum of a national $61 billion income. Even notwithstanding, not until 1965 did economist Gary Becker used modern microeconomic theory to formalize the notion of household production.

In 1900, only 5 percent of married women worked; by 2000, this had risen to 61 percent. What can explicate this leap? As female labor supply rose, time spent on housework declined. In 1900, the average household spent 58 hours a week on housework, including repast preparation, laundry, and cleaning—a figure that dropped to 18 hours in 1975. At the same fourth dimension, the number of paid domestic workers declined, presumably due, in function, to the labor-saving nature of household appliances. Hence, the time spent on the more onerous household chores declined considerably.

Other factors besides changed, including a four-fold rise in general wage levels. Existent wages rose due to technological progress in the market place sector that increased the marginal production of labor. That is, for any given level of employment in the market sector, an extra unit of labor could produce more over time. This made labor more valuable. And the gender wage gap besides shrunk. In 1900, a working woman earned about 50 percent of what a man did, and past 2000 this number had risen to 72 percentage.

The appliance smash
The beginning of the 20th century saw the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution, an era connected with the introduction of electricity, the automobile, and the petrochemical manufacture. Information technology besides witnessed the advent of new household technologies now fixtures of everyday life: central heating, dryers, electrical irons, frozen foods, refrigerators, sewing machines, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners.

To sympathise the bear on this had on the home, endeavor to imagine the tyranny of household chores in 1890, when only 24 percentage of houses had running h2o and none had central heating. Each twelvemonth, the boilerplate household lugged around seven tons of coal and nine,000 gallons of water.

An old-fashioned washing machine, which looks like two wooden barrels on legs, next to each other and connected by large wiring. — Before running water and electricity, a single load of laundry could take four hours to wash. Only with the appearance of mechanical appliances, like the washing motorcar to a higher place, that dropped to 41 minutes.

Laundry was a major functioning. Though mechanical washing machines were available as early every bit 1869, this invention actually took off just with the development of the electric motor. In 1900, 98 pct of households still used a 12-cent scrub lath to launder their clothes. Water had to be transported to the stove to be heated by burning wood or coal. Clean clothes were rinsed and wrung out past mitt or using a mechanical wringer, hung to dry out, and so ironed using heavy flatirons heated continuously on the stove.

The actual amount of fourth dimension freed by modern appliances is somewhat speculative. Controlled engineering studies documenting time saved on a specific task past use of a particular car would exist ideal. Unfortunately, these studies are hard to come by—although at that place was one such report in 1945-1946 of 12 subcontract wives comparing fourth dimension spent doing laundry past mitt versus using electrical equipment. The women also wore pedometers.

The researchers reported on one subject, Mrs. Verett, in detail. Without electricity, she did her laundry in the manner described higher up, though using a gas-powered washing machine instead of a scrub board. A 38-pound load of laundry took her about four hours to launder and another iv.5 to iron. Later on electrification, Mrs. Verett had an electrical washer, dryer, and fe, equally well as a water arrangement with a heater; it took 41 minutes to do a similar load and ane.75 hours to fe it. The woman walked 3,181 feet to practice the laundry past hand, and only 332 feet with electrical equipment. She walked 3,122 feet when ironing the erstwhile way, and 333 the new way.

At the start of the Second Industrial Revolution, women's magazines were filled with articles extolling the virtues of these appliances, the new domestic servants. For example, in 1920, an article in the Ladies' Home Journal entitled "Making Housekeeping Automatic" claimed that appliances could salvage a four-person family unit xviii.v hours a calendar week in housework.

Greenwood is professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Applying scientific principles to the home
While the development of new consumer durables was important in liberating women from the shackles of housework, so besides was applying the principles of scientific management to the home. Researchers began studying domestic tasks with the aim of improving their efficiency, and Christine Frederick was an early on advocate.

She was absorbed by the fact that a human named Frank Gilbreth had increased the output of bricklayers from 120 to 350 bricks per 60 minutes by applying the principles of scientific management. He placed an adjustable tabular array by the bricklayer's side to prevent stooping down to have to selection upwards a brick. He had the bricks delivered in the right position on the tabular array, to avoid the workers needing to plough each one right-side up, and he taught bricklayers to pick up bricks with their left hands and simultaneously take trowelfuls of mortar with their correct.

Following Gilbreth, Frederick applied the idea to dishwashing, breaking it down into three tasks: scraping and stacking; washing; and drying and putting abroad. She then computed the right height for sinks. She discovered that dishwashing could be accomplished more efficiently by placing drainboards on the left, using deeper sinks, and connecting a rinsing hose to the hot water outlet. In her gauge, this saved xv minutes per dinner.

Frederick and others in the abode economics movement had a tremendous bear on on appliance and house design. Take the kitchen, for example. An 1800s kitchen was characterized by a large table and isolated closet. An organized kitchen with continuous working surfaces and congenital-in cabinets began to appear in the 1930s. The kitchen became connected with the dining room and other living areas in the 1940s, catastrophe the housewife's isolation.

In 1924 a pair of famous sociologists studied a minor town in Indiana chosen Middletown. They found that 87 pct of married women spent four or more hours doing housework each day. Zero percent spent less than i 60 minutes a day. The town was re-studied by sociologists at two later dates. By 1999 merely fourteen percentage of married women spent more than 4 hours a day on housework, and 33 percent spent less than 1 hour a twenty-four hours. But exercise people really piece of work more today than in the past? Exercise women work harder than men?

Old black and white photograph of washing machine display — Maytag washing machines, circa 1926. (Source: Library of Congress)

Measuring the use of fourth dimension
For many years now, social scientists have surveyed Americans' use of time. In an effort to answer such questions, economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst patched together various surveys to obtain a picture of what has happened to time allocations during the past 5 decades.

The get-go survey, done in 1965-1966, focused on 2,001 individuals; the last, performed in 2003, questioned 20,720 people. In 2007, Aguiar and Hurst concluded that during this fourth dimension period, hours men worked in the labor marketplace decreased by 17 percentage, from 42 to 35.five hours per calendar week, and women's workforce hours increased 21 percent, from nearly xix to virtually 23 hours per week. Their worked at abode decreased by more 50 per centum.

Aguiar and Hurst also found that leisure time increased for both. Precisely defining "leisure" is problematic, so they attempt to address this problem by presenting several measures. The narrowest combines time spent on "entertainment/social activities/relaxing" and "active recreation" and includes activities such every bit reading for enjoyment, relaxing, socializing with friends, watching television, and the similar. Past this measure, men enjoy more leisure than women.

When the notion of leisure expands to include "fourth dimension spent sleeping, eating, and on personal care," men and women spend about the same time. When it broadens further to include time spent on child care—since parents rank time spent with their children playing or reading as among the virtually enjoyable things they do—and even more broadly as just time not spent working, women have even more than leisure than men.

The average fourth dimension spent working by an adult in the market declines with economic evolution. Thus, it appears that leisure is a luxury skillful. In other words, in richer countries, people spend more time on leisure.

Jeremy Greenwood is professor of economics at the Academy of Pennsylvania. The text higher up is excerpted from "Evolving Households: The Imprint of Technology on Life" (The MIT Press, 2019). ©Jeremy Greenwood. Reprinted with permission from MIT.