“Wash without work.” “Lighten your labors.” “Roll dishpan drudgery out of her life!” “Your wife’s hands need never touch dishwater again!”
These are among the finest headlines that graced advertisements for early washing machines and dishwashers. While the fine print focused on money saved or technological frontiers traversed, the biggest font often called directly to the beleaguered housewife, holding out the promise of new tools that would reduce her time and effort.
But did those tools deliver? This may seem an inane question. No one is boiling water and pulling out that scrubber thingy (a washboard; I had to look it up) on laundry day. No one washes each individual fork, knife, and plate by hand.1 Modern household appliances are, in this sense, quite obviously time-saving.
And yet (as is often true of common-sense ideas regular people take for granted) academics can’t seem to agree on whether modern appliances (the microwave, dishwasher, washing machine, etc.) save time. I jumped down this particular research rabbit hole in response to some of the recent speculation sparked by A.I. tools like ChatGPT. They’ve been elevated to this-changes-everything status in pretty much every domain you can think of, household labor—and especially cognitive household labor—included. It’s probably a matter of time before we see slogans like, “Women rescued from calendar management hell!” and “Plan without pain.”
My thoughts on the specific promise of A.I. tools are coming up in the next Dispatch. Today, though, I want to set the stage by looking at promised revolutions past. The debate over modern appliances started back in 1974, when Joann Vanek dropped a bombshell in the pages of Scientific American. After combing through time diaries from the past fifty years, Vanek concluded that contemporary “working women” spent less time on housework than their predecessors. But unemployed women (the very “housewives” these tools were supposed to help most!) spent just as much time as they always had.
Vanek’s counterintuitive claim has been proved and disproved many times over in the ensuing decades. There are plenty of methodological nuances and data source debates, but I’ll spare you the back-and-forth over the Lebergott estimates.
Long story short, the answer to the question seems to hinge on one’s definition of “housework.” Look narrowly at the kinds of tasks made easier by modern appliances—namely, cooking, dishwashing, laundry—and we see clear declines over the 1900s in the amount of time women were spending. Look at the much broader array of tasks involved in maintaining a household, however, and the narrative changes.
The most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen comes from economist Valerie Ramey, who used that broader definition (cooking and cleaning, but also shopping, managing the family finances, caring for children and the elderly, and so on) to conclude that per capita household labor time (i.e., labor hours per person) actually increased by two hours over the course of the twentieth century.2 Why?
Economist John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 prediction that people of the future would work about three hours per day is regularly trotted out for a laugh. A 15-hour workweek? Lol. Keynes correctly predicted massive productivity and standard of living gains over the ensuing century, but he really botched the consequences part. When humans (living in a capitalist society, anyway) can do more in less time, it turns out they (or rather, their bosses) often opt to do more, period.
Something similar is true for unpaid housework. The wave of new household technologies debuting over the course of the 20th century increased household productivity but failed to radically change the time footprint of domestic labor. That’s because the time freed up by dishwashers and microwaves wasn’t, for the most part, redirected toward leisure. While cooking and cleaning time dropped, time spent on other housework categories like shopping and especially childcare rose. Instead of going to the local butcher or grocer or general store a few blocks away, urbanization meant many people had to drive further away to big-box stores. As home production declined, market consumption—and preferably enough consumption to keep pace with the neighbors—expanded. Expectations for parents intensified, too, for a host of reasons connected to declining family sizes and rising inequality (a topic for another post).
In parallel, standards for familiar household tasks shifted. The diffusion of those newfangled appliances coincided with growing public awareness of cleanliness.3 Re-wearing shirts for days on end? Out. Satisfied with the work of a broom or a mop? Think of the grime a vacuum could uncover! To be considered “good” housekeepers, women in the 1950s had to meet a much higher bar than their mothers aimed for.
And finally, these new tools reduced (human) outsourcing. In her history of housework, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan notes that “modern technology enabled the American housewife of 1950 to produce singlehandedly what her counterpart of 1850 needed a staff of three or four to produce.” As tasks like laundry and cooking got easier, it became more difficult to justify hiring a maid or a cook. If you can drop the laundry and some detergent in the washer and press a button, do you really need to send the wash out to a local laundry service? Women got more technological assistance, but as a consequence they lost other forms of support.
None of these unintended consequences negates the good parts of these new technologies. (Please don’t make me live without a dishwasher!) As Cowan admits, there’s far less drudgery in housework these days. Feeding and clothing a family requires less manual labor than it used to. Time with children is, in many people’s eyes, a more worthwhile investment than time in cleaning. And middle-class women relying on the labor of poor women is not exactly optimal.
Nevertheless, these tools didn’t quite achieve the game-changer status those optimistic ad-writers promised. Will A.I. be different?
P.S. A plug from my friend Rachel, who runs a very cool company called Fairshare: “Chore check-in quiz! Fairshare is helping households split chores. Take our 1 min quiz to see if you and your partner are on the same page about how much you currently do around the house.”
No one under 65 anyway – I know a few holdouts who seem to distrust dishwashers on principle.
Importantly, she based her estimate on everyone’s time, not just unemployed women’s. By the early 2000s, women’s household labor time had declined pretty significantly, but others’ time (most notably men’s) went up.
To my knowledge, no one has proved these were causally connected.