23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Now, whatever the movements in the relative prices of ‘people’ and ‘things’, the fall in the share of people working as domestic servants would not have been as dramatic as it has been in the rich countries over the last century, had there not been the supply of a host of household technologies, which I have represented by the washing machine. However expensive (in relative terms) it may be to hire people who can wash clothes, clean the house, heat the house, cook and do the dishes, they would still have to be hired, if these things could not be done by machines. Or you would have to spend hours doing these things yourselves.

Washing machines have saved mountains of time. The data are not easy to come by, but a mid 1940s study by the US Rural Electrification Authority reports that, with the introduction of the electric washing machine and electric iron, the time required for washing a 38 lb load of laundry was reduced by a factor of nearly 6 (from 4 hours to 41 minutes) and the time taken to iron it by a factor of more than 2.5 (from 4.5 hours to 1.75 hours).[2] Piped water has meant that women do not have to spend hours fetching water (for which, according to the United Nations Development Program, up to two hours per day are spent in some developing countries). Vacuum cleaners have enabled us to clean our houses more thoroughly in a fraction of the time that was needed in the old days, when we had to do it with broom and rags. Gas/electric kitchen stoves and central heating have vastly reduced the time needed for collecting firewood, making fires, keeping the fires alive, and cleaning after them for heating and cooking purposes. Today many people in rich countries even have the dishwasher, whose (future) inventor a certain Mr I. M. Rubinow, an employee of the US Department of Agriculture, said would be ‘a true benefactor of mankind’ in his article in the Journal of Political Economyin 1906.

The emergence of household appliances, as well as electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally transformed the way women, and consequently men, live. They have made it possible for far more women to join the labour market. For example, in the US, the proportion of married white women in prime working ages (35–44 years) who work outside the home rose from a few per cent in the late 1890s to nearly 80 per cent today.[3] It has also changed the female occupational structure dramatically by allowing society to get by with far fewer people working as domestic servants, as we have seen above – for example, in the 1870s, nearly 50 per cent of women employed in the US were employed as ‘servants and waitresses’ (most of whom we can take to have been servants rather than waitresses, given that eating out was not yet big business).[4] Increased labour market participation has definitely raised the status of women at home and in society, thus also reducing preference for male children and increasing investment in female education, which then further increases female labour market participation. Even those educated women who in the end choose to stay at home with their children have higher status at home, as they can make credible threats that they can support themselves should they decide to leave their partners. With outside employment opportunities, the opportunity costs of children have risen, making families have fewer children. All of these have changed the traditional family dynamics. Taken together, they constitute really powerful changes.

Of course, I am not saying that these changes have happened only – or even predominantly – because of changes in household technologies. The ‘pill’ and other contraceptives have had a powerful impact on female education and labour market participation by allowing women to control the timing and the frequency of their childbirths. And there are non-technological causes. Even with the same household technologies, countries can have quite different female labour market participation ratios and different occupation structures, depending on things like social conventions regarding the acceptability of middle-class women working (poor women have always worked), tax incentives for paid work and child rearing, and the affordability of childcare. Having said all this, however, it is still true that, without the washing machine (and other labour-saving household technologies), the scale of change in the role of women in society and in family dynamics would not have been nearly as dramatic.

The washing machine beats the internet