Blog 2...How Women Use and Feel about the Washing Machine in their home

Certain work in the household has come to be known a women’s job. Ellen Lupton, author of Mechanical Brides: women and machines from home to office, offers insight into the washing machine as the mechanical device that is holding them in slavery to their own homes. Lupton describes the home as a place for men to escape and relax from work. On the contrary, women see the house as a feeding ground for labor. The very idea of the washing machine stipulates that laundry must be done. In modern times because the machines have become sleek and more efficient there was the belief that women were being rescued from the task of cleaning. However, Lupton’s approach reputes that the modern day washing machines are in fact making household duties an even heavier assignment.






“Rather than sell a few larger machines to centralized businesses, manufactures sought to sell many smaller units to private households. The return of laundry to the home affirmed women’s role as consumers of individual products instead of shared central services.” Because this was the proposal of the manufactures, women became the target consumer for the washing machine. Thus, when the machine was brought into the home the women were the expected user of the machine.
In the 1830’s commercial laundries were used to serve seaports and gold miners. The commercial laundry services accommodates mostly men when they were first developed and later became a place where one would drop off their entire family wash that was required for the week. These services reached its height in the 1920s and then met its match with coin laundry mats and the newly discovered home laundry system. Later, when the machines reached the home, women were taught by to operate the machines on their own without any assistance from their laundry service or washerwomen. The control was now shifted into the hands of the consumer and no longer a profession commercial service.
In the text Culture and Technology, the authors discuss convenience in the form of wants and needs of a culture. Many times, convenience does not necessarily make life better for a culture. In some cases making things more convenient can cause the reverse effect and make life harder for people. The authors explain that our bodies do have basic needs that have to be met such as clothing, water, food and shelter, however, as time goes on we have expanded our needs and organized our world around our wants. This perception rationalizes that because we have altered our world around us to such links we have accepted necessities that technologies that are not biological. We have inherited these technologies because they have become cultural necessities. (Wise and Slack 2005, 32-33) The washing machine is a technology that our culture has acquired out of the necessity for clean clothes and has morphed into a technology that demands surplus and extensive effort on the consumer.
Victoria Leto, in the article, Washing, It Seems Like All We Do, explores not only the idea of how women are using the washing machine more than men in the household and that the machine has certainly caused more labor than convenience, but also how the idea of doing laundry inside the household has privatized the lives of many domestic women at home. It is a task that takes up much of the time spent doing chores and shuts women off from others while inside. Leto looks at how many women used to stand outside and place clothes on the line giving them a chance to feel the sense of community among their friends while doing their chores.
In this research, women were asked questions about their time doing laundry. The women interviewed revealed that washing machine is clearly a one person chore. Long gone are the days where women are crowded around the boiling water to wash their clothes together. The women viewed the washing machine as not only just a single person job but a controlling chore as well. The washing machine size determines the amount of laundry that one can do in each load, therefore, enslaving the consumer to repeat the task over and over. Essentially, women feel as though they are the consumer solely being targeted for the washing machine and are exclusively responsible for the operations of it in their home.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=XyIYOz1Y0pgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=the+washing+machine+and+its+effects+on+women&ots=LesdMN9B1f&sig=H6eNMPvJ93EnxDk0OQz7T-GWfX8#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=i9k8oapdbl4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA136&dq=has+the+washing+machine+affected+women%3F&ots=PuWPHIUele&sig=1vBuoCdUZBGG9vTfL7bsRqgQSes#v=onepage&q&f=false