Washing machines took decades to catch on

My grandmother had a washing machine with a manually fed electric wringer until she moved into assisted living. It would've likely been no newer than the immediate postwar era, as that's when she moved into the house she lived in. I doubt she would've owned it earlier (steel being needed for the war).

It was a bit of a production to do laundry with it. I can buy the argument that it was tough to sell machines that weren't fully automated. It looked fun as a kid, but I can't imagine it's fun for more than a load or two!

Edited to add: they lived north of the Mason-Dixon in an area with very few Black residents.

In the era I grew up (early 70s), stay-at-home moms were not uncommon. I knew several families that either did not have washing machines, or had them but did not use them, because a lot of the women enjoyed the communal aspect of socializing at the town’s laundromat. I’m sure the rise of 2 income households also drove the adoption of in-home washing machines.

I read Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. The first volume talks about conditions in rural Texas. He describes the nonstop, grueling labor for women supporting a farm family. One of the chores was washing clothes. In Caro's view, rural electrification changed womens' lives dramatically, and the electric washing machine was a nontrivial factor.

Now, that happened starting in the late 1930s, so there wouldn't have been any use for electric washing machines before that.

Maybe urban women had easier lives. That wouldn't shock me. My grandparents in Europe had servants. When I lived in a house with no wash machine, while in grad school, I took my wash to the nearby laundromat, and picked it up the next day, folded, ironed, the works. It cost me just a few bucks.

> Second, the semiautomatic washing machines themselves may have taken some of the drudgery out of clothes washing, but they did not really save time. Scott explains that the person washing “had to manually feed each item of clothing through the powered wringers between each part of the cycle.” You could not just close the door and turn the machine on and leave.

Second? Why not first? This could be the entire article. Why would I buy a machine that doesn't actually provide meaningful value? Everything else in this article is ragebait for HN.

From observation there is definitly a difference in attitude regarding automation between the sexes on average. Men seem much more eager to automate chores than woman.

Clothes were more expensive (relatively to income), while manual labor offer was in excess, and washing machines were big, not particularly good at their job, and needed constant supervision. So, all in all, there's no hard questions here. Meanwhile, authors made an impressive work trying to spice up otherwise bland text with as much "social and racial dynamics" ritualistic mentions as possible.

This is a Jeff Bezos lecture on electricity, please watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKNUylmanQ

We should have put more research into clothes fabric technology so that clothes never get dirty, no washing machines needed.

I imagine there was also the ethical concern of putting all those people out of work...

[delayed]

(In the US.)

If electricity gets any more expensive in the UK (it will), I might have to start hand washing clothes!

My friend (a highly paid tech-bro) wouldn't pay cash money for a cordless Dyson vacuum when I could clearly see it being much more pleasant to use and saving much a lot of time and hassle. It was a matter of $200.

The issue is that people are really conservative spending money on things that are not the status quo. They don't do a first principles analysis using ROI - that's what nerds do.

Its also the same with agentic commerce or agentic anything. Its obvious that's where things are headed. But you will get the same greybeard response "but you don't need it, just use your brain" etc etc.

Ruh roh. AI bros and their hundreds of billions of dollars in loans don't have decades.

It just takes 5 seconds to think about the treatment of white workers in coal mine to debunk this entire article. My grandmother was a middle class family in mid 20th century and still preferred to hand wash the families cloths until arthritis took over.