Loads of change: washing machines, female liberation and work
“A woman’s work is never done” — so the saying goes.
By one 2015 estimate, women in Mexico did nearly six and a half hours’ unpaid work — housework, shopping, caring responsibilities and similar jobs — a day. At the time, this was the highest in the world.
It’s not that long since most women’s lives were dominated by tasks involved in household reproduction; cooking, cleaning and childrearing. In the developed world, the advent of electricity paved the way for a consumer revolution in the twentieth century, and labour-saving electricals like fridges, vacuum cleaners and washing machines flooded the market. These devices brought with them a much larger revolution: a social change which liberated women from the home.
At the turn of the twentieth century, most married women were homemakers, their time bound up in repetitive and laborious tasks. In the UK, just 38% of women participated in formal work, and about a third of these were employed in domestic service. Technologies like washing machines played no small part in reducing the amount of time spent on housework, which declined steeply 1965-1985. Today, around 71% of working age women in the UK are employed.
How much of female labour force participation do we owe to seemingly inconspicuous, time-saving technologies like the washing machine?
All in a spin
Laundry in the twenty-first century is quick and delightfully straightforward. It takes around 40 minutes to do a load of laundry using electrical appliances, and just under two hours to iron it. Step back fewer than a hundred years and it would take a lone washerwoman about four hours to do a 17kg load of laundry by hand and about four and a half hours to iron it using an old-fashioned iron.
Laundry in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was a backbreaking chore that in almost all cases fell to women. The copper (or boiler) and the mangle (or wringer) were the most important pieces of washday technology used in households of all classes right up until the 1940s. Piped hot water was a relative luxury: a 1947 survey found that 44% of UK households did not have a piped hot water supply. Indeed, there are documented cases well into the twentieth century of laundresses washing clothes in local streams.
By 1981, 80% of British households had a washing machine and about 40% of these were automatic. The mass adoption of electric washing machines was confounded by deficiencies in electricity supply, and low take-up meant they were not imported in any significant number. When technological advancements made them more affordable, more households began to reap their benefits.
Women in work
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the working day was long, most women in employment were in their teens (sometimes younger) and early twenties. After they got married, however, a substantial part of their time was consumed by childcare and homemaking, and female labour force participation nosedived — just a tenth of married women were employed.
With an increase in domestic time-saving technologies, there was a clear trend showing the decline in time spent on housework, and a corresponding increase in female labour force participation. A model developed to try and unravel the causes behind this found that technological progress in the household sector alone can account for 28 percentage points of the 51 percentage point rise in female labour force participation.
There were certainly other drivers in the increase of female labour force participation, including economic development and creation of jobs that were not heavily manual and favoured females. As more women began to work, so the social norm shifted. In 1981, 58% of working age women participated in the labour market, a 22% increase from three decades previous.
A developing future
Patterns observed in developed societies, including the UK and USA, strongly suggest that domestic technologies liberate women from housework and enable their greater workforce participation. This is interesting to consider in the context of developing countries, which may be acquiring these technologies more widely.
The negative correlation between fertility and economic growth is well-established, i.e. as fertility decreases, so economic growth increases. Female labour force participation is shown to significantly decrease fertility, especially for women in their twenties. It also leads to an increase in the average age of mothers, particularly of first-time mothers.
A study in Mexico considered a period where trade reforms meant domestic products like washing machines dropped in price. Researchers found that an estimated 42–61% of the observed decrease in fertility during the measurement period could be attributed to the increase in female labour force participation.
Fertility rate and timing of children are important indicators not just of female health — early pregnancy can have lasting effects on female educational attainment — but also have important consequences for child health and wellbeing of the whole household. Intuitively, having fewer children means parents can invest more in their offspring.
Watching the future unfold
It’s not yet known what impact domestic technologies will have in developing countries, and whether they will follow western models, propelling women into the workforce, or lead them to a greater preference for leisure.
And while technology cannot take all the credit — social change is certainly a significant driver — it is a contributor to moving the role of women away from that of the traditional homemaker. More than this, though, the impact on female workforce participation means these technologies have the potential to influence when and how women have children, and all the things bound up in this that encompass mother and child outcomes.
Something as humble and as everyday as the washing machine, which today many of us take for granted, has the power to shape behaviours and society — and has done so in living memory. Speak to your mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, it’s likely they’ll have some stories to tell about the toil of washday…
