Effect of the Washing Machine on society
This essay will explore the impact of the washing machine on society. In particular it will focus on Women and how the technology influenced them. First world, western cultures where the impact of the washing machine is mature will be focused on.
At the beginning of the 20th century the majority of married women worked at home. At the turn of the 21st century most married woman work full time. This is a significant change in how society functions. Greenwood credits this change to the washing machine. (Greenwood, Seshadri, & Yorukoglu, 2005)
It is reasonably simple to draw positive conclusions on the washing machines impact, and I will explain some of those. There has also been some negative effects and some interesting social change regarding cleanliness standards.
In 2010 the former editor of the Irish Times asked a feminism round table which invention changed their lives the most. Mamo Mcdonald, born in 1929, replied “The washing machine” (Fintan, 2012)
Prior to the introduction of the washing machine it was normal for all the weeks washing to be saved for one day, usually Monday. Rhoda Bickers recalls of her childhood in Taihape “I hated Mondays! That was washing day. After school, I had to come home and do the dishes because Mum had been washing clothes all day long.” (Rasmussen, 1994, p. 8)
These quotes paint an interesting picture of life in the early 20th centery. Washing was clearly a labour intensive full days work. The washing machine clearly had a big impact for Mamo and I am sure Rhoda appreciated it too. It makes clear that most of the housework was considered to be womans work.
The introduction of the washing machine did provide labour savings. Combined with other domestic a...
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...ut of a multitude of devices it is identified as having the largest single effect on society by unlocking the female workforce. Whilst it is difficult to draw direct links between the technology and the change it is strongly suggested that the washing machine was the catalyst enabling the social change to happen.
The washing machine wasn’t a magic box with dirty garments going in one end and ironed folded clothes coming out the other. There was still a large amount of work required to clean clothes and prepare them for next use. All this work fell to women and the washing machine failed to actually meet their needs and requirements. In this case technology contributed to isolation and reduced social involvement.
Society quickly came to expect people to be dressed in clean clothes. This required more washing cycles, reducing the labour saving impact of the machine.
time and effort of taking care of a house. Due to this and multiple feminist movements, women
Another big change during this time was that dress making evolved. Instead of everything being homemade by women for their entire families, families began buying their clothes (Burman 80). This change was seen as being important because it signifies feminism's rise, which meant that more and more individuals were beginning to support the women and their plight (Burman 80). As more jobs for women became available more homemakers were lost, which meant that everything that the wives and mothers used to make and take care of in the home now had to be available from outside sources (Burman 80).
Modernism’s effect on women in society was powerful. Women stepped outside of their homes to be role models for others. Today, there are more women who are in the workforce, than there are in homes. With modernism, we have the power to change anything.
On the family farm, the woman of the house was usually responsible for the care of the small livestock, the poultry, pigs and calves. She would also attend to the vegetable garden and to the growing of fruit. Usually there was no running water or electricity, sanitation was poor and there were few modern conveniences. Few women worked outside of the home and they usually lost their jobs on marriage. For instance, women teachers, who qualified after the 1st January 1933, were obliged to retire when they married. From the early 1940s on, sympathy was growing for the woman in the home and the difficult conditions under which she had to labour. (N.p).
...more money to spend on luxuries. This demand of luxuries resulted in the formulation and development of new industries to meet the demand. “English manufacturers created a new, and more profitable cloth-manufacturing industry based on the power of water mills, rather than cheap labor that was no longer available.”
In the 1800's the construction of cotton mills brought about a new phenomenon in American labor. The owners needed a new source of labor to tend these water powered machines and looked to women. Since these jobs didn't need strength or special skills th...
One of the first and most prominent of these changes was in the textile industry. The textile industry was the staple of the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution, the textile, or more specifically cotton, industry was performed at home. It happened in a few steps. First, cotton was farmed and harvested. Then, the in home process began. Workers called “spinners” would take the cotton and form it into strands. These strands were the ...
Women's roles in society greatly changed after the growth of industry. Women who once were mere housewives and caring mothers now became an active part of the working class. They no longer stayed at home during the day taking care of their husband and children seeing to it that they acted properly and had high moral values instead. Wealthy women were privileged few who were able to stay at home and devote themselves totally to their families.
Due to the idealization of domesticity in media, there was a significantly stagnant period of time for women’s rights between 1945 and 1959. Women took over the roles for men in the workplace who were fighting abroad during the early 1940s, and a strong, feminist movement rose in the 1960s. However, in between these time periods, there was a time in which women returned to the home, focusing their attention to taking care of the children and waiting on their husband’s every need. This was perpetuated due to the increasing popularity of media’s involvement in the lives of housewives, such as the increasing sales of televisions and the increase in the number of sexist toys.
the case in the textile industry, having before created most of the textiles in smaller quantities in the home
In the Article “Sewing Machines Liberation or Drudgery for Women” Joan Perkin wrote about the positive and negative effects that came from the invention of the sewing machine. The sewing machine was invented by Elias Howe and Isaac Merritt Singer in the 1800’s. by 1877 almost half a million sewing machines were being used in the United States, making it the first home appliance in American homes. The author writes that this invention will transform the way clothing would be made from then on. Before the sewing machine women would make their clothes by hand at home, it would take up to twenty hours to produce one shirt. With this new invention the time was cut down to about an hour for the same amount of work.
One of the biggest industries during the Industrial Revolution was textiles. Many women and children made pants, shirts, socks, bedspreads, and other items by their tiny hands and fingers with cloth. With the population growing in England, more people were willing to pay for these items instead of making the items themselves. This started to lead to a new factory system. With “cotton becoming the world’s most imp...
Before the days of washing machines, people got dirt out of their clothes by pounding them on rocks and washing the dirt away in streams. Sand was used as an abrasive to free the dirt. Soap was discovered at Rome's Sapo Hill where ashes containing the fat of sacrificial animals were found to have good cleaning powers. The earliest washing "machine" - the scrub board - was invented in 1797.
A washing machine conjointly referred to as a laundry machine, garments washer, or simply washer could be a machine to scrub laundry, like clothing. The term is generally applied to machines that use water because the primary cleansing resolution critical cleaning. All laundry machines work by using mechanical and thermal energy.
It was only 50 years ago that we began to have wonderful labor-saving devices to help accomplish all the tasks that collectively constituted the perfect home environment. Sometimes it has the effect of removing all the reasons that everything cannot be done all the time and so results in more work rather than less, but few of us can imagine living without washing machines, vacuum cleaners or dishwashers—or electricity, for that matter.