alt Hacker NewsI 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. And installing a wash machine in a city probably required being able to afford a detached house. Maybe the people who could afford that could also afford to have their wash done for them.
Maybe urban women had easier lives. That wouldn't shock me. My middle class 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.
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Yes! People should be reading those books in school to understand the transition of society in the 20th century. The Power Broker is of course Caro’s most famous book but the LBJ series are incredible and underrated.
Something that many people don’t appreciate is that plumbing wasn’t necessarily universal.
People with disposable income in NYC and other places would just go to a Chinese laundry. Folks without alot of money were in a variety of living arrangements that weren’t standardized in the same way things are today. It was very common into the 1970s for rural homes in upstate NY where I spent half my childhood to have outhouses and manual pumps.
Urban women definitely had easier lives. In a certain class, of course, you had a servant, but even below that professional laundresses existed. Only the poorest did all of their own laundry.
This extends to a whole lot of things. Rural life historically meant having to do much of what you need yourself.